Britain must learn to stand on its own two feet again, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, Rachel Reeves, has said, outlining an emerging Labour plan for building a stronger country after the pandemic. A key theme will be fostering resilience in families, communities and public services, to protect people from shocks in their personal or national life. Reeves is struck that, despite being the sixth richest country in the world and having a proud manufacturing history, the UK couldn’t even muster enough protective clothing for its own key people in a pandemic. “I want us to be a more resilient country. I want us to build up our capacity to be able to stand on our own two feet, to build our manufacturing and productive capacity again so we’re not having to go cap in hand to China to get whatever masks they might be able to spare,” says Reeves, the shadow chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, arguing that overseas production of such key resources could return onshore. “The first duty of government is to keep our citizens safe.” Her new brief from the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, is to focus on “what sort of country and society we want to be after the crisis”, generating ideas for the next manifesto. She will explore ways of building on the “small acts of kindness” between neighbours during the pandemic, integrating health and social care, building more family homes with gardens, and tackling precarious working practices that some fear are hampering the battle against Covid-19. “I don’t think it’s a massive surprise that Serco [the company running the national contact-tracing system] is struggling to get through to so many people,” says Reeves, who suspects some precariously employed people are avoiding contact tracers for fear of losing earnings if they have to self-isolate. “People don’t want to know they’re positive, and they don’t want to tell on others. People want to do the right thing, but what’s the right thing? Putting food on the table, being able to pay rent, not being evicted – that’s very difficult if you’re not getting any money coming in.” Covid-19 has illuminated hidden strengths in society but also weakness, she argued. “We need change, we need big change. I knew that before this pandemic, but I do think it’s revealed something.” So what, exactly, does Labour intend to do about it?
Reeves is nothing if not diligent. The daughter of two teachers, she went from a south London comprehensive to Oxford before joining the Bank of England as an economist. Elected in 2010, she was the shadow chief secretary by 2011. Asked if she has ever broken any rules, the worst she can remember is fights at primary school. “I’m a cautious person. I worry about saying the wrong thing and making mistakes,” she confesses over a mug of tea in her Leeds West constituency. Such caution is in keeping with a Starmer strategy that’s all about steady competence. An Opinium poll last week had Labour level-pegging with the Tories, having been 23 points behind when Starmer took charge. With Joe Biden also leading Donald Trump in the race for the White House, could the mood be turning against the rule-breakers and risk-takers dominating recent politics? “I hope so. I hope Joe Biden wins in the US, and I hope people put their trust in Keir Starmer, because he’s a man of huge decency and principle and integrity, and I think he really cares,” says Reeves. “He’s quite cautious and sensible and he wants to make sure he’s seen all the information. Sometimes that’s the tendency I’ve got as well: quite cautious, don’t want to rush in or be burdened by making a decision that, when you’ve got more information, turns out to be wrong. “But actually I think it’s quite a good way to govern the country. This government is always about campaigning, not about governing.” She credits Starmer with helping force Boris Johnson into several humiliating U-turns. “I think Keir’s encouraging people to take a second look at Labour, and people are interested in where Labour are going,” she says. The ultimate destination, however, remains somewhat mysterious. Is there any such thing as Starmerism? She pauses. “I don’t think Keir would want to create his own ‘ism’,” she says. He is focused on getting things done. “If you say you’re going to do something, he expects you to get it delivered; he expects you to treat people with respect and integrity, because that’s how he treats people.”
Five months in, she says it’s too early for a party that’s still learning the lessons of defeat to set out its entire stall. “If we had all the answers, we wouldn’t have lost four elections.” But she says resilience will be at its heart. For families, she thinks that means building affordable homes with outside space to play. “I walk down Victoria Street to parliament and you see [signs for] a new ‘living quarter’ in Westminster – that’s not a living quarter, that’s second homes and buy-to-let properties for overseas investors. We need social housing, and the council should be free to borrow to build.” Exploring how to integrate social care with the NHS is a priority, too, after care workers have risked their lives in the pandemic for low wages and little job security. “The basis is those people who were doing the most important jobs should be properly rewarded for them. There’s no status attached to working in care, there’s no professional development,” she says, noting that in Germany care workers are trained to the level of a district nurse. Should care workers still be on zero-hours contracts? “I don’t want to see zero-hour contracts anywhere in our economy.” Brexit is also in her in-tray, since she shadows the chief no-deal planner Michael Gove. But when asked if Labour would fight a no-deal Brexit, she fires back: “What does fight mean? We’ll oppose it, we do oppose it, but what’s the …” She tails off. “That election we had last December has changed everything in parliament.” With a majority of more than 80, Johnson has his mandate and Labour a mountain to climb. Having spent the Corbyn years on the backbenches, Reeves wasn’t necessarily expecting a comeback. But she fits naturally into a strategy for wooing back lost seats that mixes robust messages on defence or welfare (she famously once called Labour the party of working people, “not the party to represent those who are out of work”) and with attacks on low pay and crony capitalism. Chairing the Commons business select committee’s inquiry into the collapse of the outsourcing giant Carillion, which was winning contracts to deliver public services right up until it went bust thanks to a near monopoly market, profoundly changed her own view of capitalism. “I was so angry about what I saw,” she says. “All these blokes who earn a hell of a lot of money and had clearly had media training, they’d come in and say: ‘The first thing I want to say is sorry …’,” Yet Carillion bosses clung to their bonuses, she notes, even as small contractors went bust around them. It’s why she attacked the awarding of test-and-trace contracts to companies such as Serco and Deloitte, arguing that local councils would have done better. But the experience may also explain why this eternally cautious economist now rejects a return to a pre-Covid status quo. “My children say: ‘I just want things to be like they were before, I just want things to be normal’ and I understand that,” says Reeves, whose daughters are five and seven. “But I don’t want to go back to the way we were before. I want this to have jolted us into creating something better.”