This article is an on-site version of our Inside Politics newsletter. Subscribers can sign up here to get the newsletter delivered every weekday. If you’re not a subscriber, you can still receive the newsletter free for 30 days
Good morning. Rachel Reeves delivered her big speech on growth. It contained a number of measures: some good (the Oxford/Cambridge arc tops that list), some bad (the third runway at Heathrow) and some added to give the list of growth initiatives the appearance of a more even regional distribution (the regeneration of Old Trafford).
Some thoughts on the political implications and challenges of them below.
Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Read the previous edition of the newsletter here. Please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com
Arc we there yet
Rachel Reeves announced (or in some cases re-announced) a swath of measures as part of her drive to fix the most alarming chart in British politics.
This is the biggest subplot to essentially everything else in British politics. Our economic model took a huge hit in the global financial crisis, it hasn’t recovered since, and everything that successive governments have tried to fix the problem hasn’t worked. (And some of the things they have done, Brexit most of all, have actively made the problem worse.)
Our lack of growth makes everything harder, politically speaking. (To make matters worse, despite being an ageing island nation with sluggish economic growth, we completely failed to learn or even show much interest in Japan, a country that managed those challenges rather better than we did.) Because of that, we have seen both main parties electing leaders from their outer flanks — Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and Liz Truss in 2022. It is also why no UK prime minister since David Cameron has been re-elected to a second term and why no prime minister since Tony Blair has served two full terms.
The best and most exciting measure that Rachel Reeves outlined was the government’s revived backing for the Oxford-Cambridge arc, a strategic plan to build transport links and housing between the two science-rich hubs.
This was not strictly speaking “new” as Peter Kyle had announced it at the start of the week. The arc has a lot of cross-party support, but it was shelved by Boris Johnson. While his electoral coalition had relatively few voters who would benefit most from the arc, it had an awful lot of people who would have objected to the required extra building.
Labour’s backing for the arc, and the accompanying approval for much-needed infrastructure improvements such as reservoirs, is another signal that the government essentially regards the very rural seats it won for the first time in 2024 as “one-and-done” victories. That approach has some real negative consequences (the cocktail of changes to inheritance tax and other reliefs for agriculture will, I think, have some unwanted consequences and Labour will end up U-turning on them sooner or later). But it also has some great upsides, of which backing the Oxford-Cambridge arc is right at the top.
You can see the dividing line that Reeves wants here, politically: the Conservatives will be pushed into opposing the development and disruption that investing in the arc involves because of their imperative to compete with the Liberal Democrats in those seats where voters might be resistant to building. And then Labour, Reeves hopes, will be able to say “well, what you would do differently?”
The chancellor has also urged Heathrow to fast-track proposals to build a third runway: I am frankly unconvinced by this as, indeed, are much of the cabinet. (Do read this excellent piece on the legal and political hurdles that still remain to its construction here.) In the short term, it feels like a good way for the government to lose friends and alienate people among environmentally-inclined voters. It also sets up a fun game that interviewers will be able to play whenever speaking to anyone in the cabinet or front bench who voted against expansion in 2018, asking what, exactly, in their view has changed. (I really don’t think some overly optimistic wishful thinking about “sustainable aviation fuels” is going to cut it on this one.)
More importantly, given that the government is only going to be able to get away with antagonising its base on so many issues, in terms of its impact on growth and investment, watering down the government’s plans on employment rights gets you far more in terms of business investment and happiness than the third runway.
Now try this
I saw The Brutalist last night. Personally, I would say: don’t bother. Danny Leigh’s review is exactly right, down to the most damning observation of all, that the film loses its brilliance with the arrival of “a large, dark plot point that, in common with the whole movie, I’ve liked less the more I’ve thought about it”. Marvellous soundtrack, though.
