Rachel Reeves, Labour’s Chancellor, appears intent on resurrecting a zombie ideology long discredited but still haunting British politics: trickle-down economics. Her Mansion House speech, dripping with promises to slice through “red tape” and unleash the City’s supposed “innovative potential,” signals less a new economic dawn than a return to the neoliberal orthodoxy responsible for decades of working-class suffering.
We remember 2008 not simply as a financial catastrophe but as a stark lesson in class warfare. Bankers and speculators walked away rewarded rather than punished, bonuses intact, while millions of working people were subjected to austerity’s brutal logic. Jobs vanished, wages stagnated, and the welfare state was systematically dismantled to cover the City’s reckless bets. Reeves seems willing (even eager) to risk repeating this cruelty.
Trickle-down is a myth deliberately crafted, serving the dominant class by cloaking their enrichment in the language of collective benefit. Far from promoting general prosperity, deregulation has consistently unleashed predatory practices and speculative excesses. “Innovation,” in Reeves’s lexicon, is merely a euphemism for the financial sleight-of-hand and parasitic profit-seeking that triggered the subprime crash and subsequent misery.
Reeves’s embrace of Thatcherite dogma reveals Labour’s ongoing crisis of identity, a capitulation to capitalist orthodoxy under the guise of economic realism. This is not pragmatism; it is ideological surrender. A betrayal of the working-class base Labour claims to represent.
Trickle-down is economic violence disguised as common sense. It entrenches inequality, intensifies exploitation, and leaves working people vulnerable to cyclical crises engineered by an unaccountable elite.
Resistance must be uncompromising. Britain needs not fewer regulations but stringent oversight, democratic control of finance, and a fundamental redistribution of wealth and power. Reeves’s proposals deserve sharp denunciation and militant opposition, not polite critique. The working class, having paid dearly for past experiments in deregulation, cannot afford another lesson in capitalist cruelty. To forget this is not merely irresponsible; it is class collaboration of the worst kind.
