Britain’s first female finance minister, Rachel Reeves, a former child chess champion and Bank of England economist, has pledged to bolster the country’s economy by showing strong fiscal discipline.
Reeves, 45, becomes chancellor of the exchequer after her left-wing Labour Party won a landslide victory in Britain’s general election on Thursday, ending 14 years of rule by the right-wing Conservatives.
Following his appointment by new Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Reeves wrote on the social media platform X: “It is the honour of my life to be appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
“To every young girl and woman reading this article, today is to show that there should be no limits to your ambitions.”
The Labour Party placed the economy at the centre of its election manifesto, and targeted growth and wealth creation as key priorities in government, although its emphasis on wealth creation is not usually associated with the party’s traditional left-wing policies.
“Economic development was the mission of the Labor Party,” Reeves said on Friday.
“This is a national mission now. Let’s get to work,” the married mother of two said.
The ‘Iron Chancellor’
Reeves recently told company bosses that the Labour Party had become the “natural party of British business”, and said the party would show “iron discipline” when it came to public finance.
These comments were compared to those of Britain’s first female Prime Minister, the ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher.
Unlike Conservative leader Thatcher, who privatised key sectors after becoming prime minister in 1979, Reeves wants a form of renationalisation, particularly for energy, as he draws inspiration from the policy implemented by US President Joe Biden.
Labour has pledged to create a publicly owned company called Great British Energy, which would take a leading role alongside the private sector in funding a “green” transition away from fossil fuels.
James Wood, a senior teaching fellow in political economy at the University of Cambridge, said Labour and Reeves wanted to take a “responsible” approach to the public treasury.
“When she talks about being a strong chancellor, I think she means that we will balance the accounts and we will be responsible – and we will try to run the UK economy in a responsible way,” he told AFP.
London-born Reeves capitalised on public anger at Sunak’s predecessor Liz Truss, whose unrepresentative 2022 mini-budget slammed the pound and pushed up mortgage rates, worsening the cost-of-living crisis.
“They want to distance themselves from fiscal irresponsibility and not make big promises about spending that they can’t possibly keep,” Wood said.
Banking Career
Reeves, whose parents were teachers, is no stranger to outsmarting opponents.
She became the British girls chess champion at the age of 14, after which she studied philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford, followed by a master’s degree from the London School of Economics.
After graduating, she worked for a decade as an economist, first at the Bank of England and then moving to the private sector.
While working for British retail bank HBOS, the global financial crisis struck in 2008, resulting in his employer receiving a massive bailout from Gordon Brown’s Labour government, along with other lenders.
In 2010, when the Conservative Party came to power in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, Reeves was elected as the Labour Party MP for Leeds West in northern England.
Eleven years later, Starmer appointed her the Labour Party’s finance spokesman. Her sister, Ellie Reeves, is also a Labour MP.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)