What is being offered is not transformation, but placation. A recalibration of state capacity designed to mollify markets and blunt the sharper edges of discontent, without ever confronting the economic logic that made the discontent inevitable. Rachel Reeves’s inaugural Spending Review has been hailed as a return to seriousness: real money for the NHS, a long-overdue investment in social housing, infrastructure commitments aimed at “left behind” regions. But seriousness, in this context, is not synonymous with ambition. It is the language of technocratic reassurance.
The review contains genuine material gains: an annual £29 billion boost for the NHS, £39 billion for social housing over a decade, and investment in rail and regional development. These are not trivial. For communities ravaged by austerity, the collapse of local government, and the corrosion of the public realm, even marginal improvements matter. But to mistake these injections for structural change is to fundamentally misread the terrain. What Reeves has done is reinforce the existing order with steadier hands and better headlines. The architecture remains.
This is the Osborne settlement, lightly redrawn. The fiscal rules. Market-calming devices masquerading as principle. Are still in place. The commitment to balance the books within five years will, according to the OBR, require either deeper departmental cuts or further tax rises. And those taxes will likely fall on labour, not capital. Wealth goes untaxed; inheritance remains untouched; landlords are left undisturbed. The state will spend, but not redistribute. It will borrow, but only so far as it can reassure bond markets. It will intervene, but not interfere. The market remains king.
It will borrow, but only so far as it can reassure bond markets. It will intervene, but not interfere. The market remains king.
The working class. So often the subject of political ventriloquy, rarely the object of actual policy. Will once again be asked to underwrite the bargain. The tax burden, already at a post-war high, will edge upward. Public sector pay remains effectively capped. Local services, particularly those beyond the ringfence of the NHS and schools, face real-terms attrition. There will be money for some, but security for none.
This is the ambiguity in which Reform UK thrives. Reeves’s approach appears to be an effort to outflank Farage without ever directly confronting him. Continualy adopting fragments of his rhetoric while maintaining the polish of professional respectability. The scrapping of hotel accommodation for asylum seekers, vague gestures toward migration caps, nods to “British jobs”—these are signals, not substance. That promise to end the use of hotels for asylum seekers by 2029 is the kind of policy designed to placate headlines, not solve problems. Yes, the cost, around £3 billion a year, is staggering. But the reason hotels are being used in the first place is a deliberately broken system: a Home Office gutted by decades of outsourcing and dysfunction, a case backlog that no amount of ministerial bluster will fix, and an asylum infrastructure designed more to deter than to process. Unless there is a radical overhaul—faster decisions, safe routes, an end to the culture of suspicion—this pledge will simply shift the crisis elsewhere: into barges, detention centres, or outsourced housing contracts. The spectacle will change. The cruelty and inefficiency will remain..
Farage doesn’t need to govern. He just needs Labour to look like it’s governing on someone else’s terms.
The media insist on calling the current political diretion “right-populism”, as if what we are witnessing is merely another wave of anti-elite posturing. But the emotional structure is far more dangerous: resentment, dispossession, a yearning for moral clarity, the restoration of an imagined order through authoritarian means. It is not populism; it is fascism in formation. And it cannot be answered with marginal improvements to capital expenditure. It demands confrontation. Not with scapegoats, but with the social forces that hollowed out post-industrial life: the privatised housing stock, the asset-fattened landlord class, the casualised labour market, the extractive grip of financial capital. Yet Reeves is silent on all of it. Her review casts Labour as competent managers of a long decline, not agents of rupture.
There is always money for punishment. While Reeves offers little by way of structural repair, she finds £2 billion for extra policing and £7 billion for prison expansion. Another £700 million a year will go into the probation system. Less a gesture of rehabilitation than a bureaucratic buttress to the carceral state. The logic is familiar: placate capital, police the poor. Labour’s approach mirrors the Tory strategy it claims to disavow. Always treat the symptoms of social breakdown with handcuffs and holding cells, while ignoring the root causes: insecure housing, precarious work, mental health crises, and the collapse of public space.
There is a deeper pathology at work: a refusal within Labourism to articulate a politics of ownership. For all the talk of investment, there is no question of who owns the housing being built, who profits from the rail contracts, who controls the care homes or energy infrastructure. Growth is treated as a magic tide that lifts all boats. But it was that very delusion—growth without redistribution, technocracy without struggle—that helped dredge the channel Farage now sails through.
Growth is treated as a magic tide that lifts all boats. But it was that very delusion—growth without redistribution, technocracy without struggle—that helped dredge the channel Farage now sails through.
Labour’s real fear is not that Reform UK will win seats. They will. The fear is that Reform will define the political temperature. Becoming the emotional home for those who feel locked out, lied to, and left behind. And in that respect, Reeves’s review alters little. It soothes, but it does not inspire. It does not reimagine.
If Labour wishes to arrest the “right-populist” drift—fascist in affect, if not in form—it cannot rely on infrastructure announcements and fiscal prudence. It must be willing to name class antagonisms, to break with property-first politics, to rebuild political subjectivity around shared material interests rather than national melancholia. That would mean not just spending, but redistributing. Not just building, but changing who owns what, and why.
A serious rupture would have meant rent caps, an end to Right to Buy, taxing land and wealth, launching a mass retrofit and care programme under public ownership. It would have meant reversing the political economy of the past forty years. Reeves chose instead to finesse it.
This Spending Review is a high-stakes wager that material placation will be enough. But voters have been here before. They remember the promises. And they remember what came after.
Farage is not surging because he offers solutions. He is surging because he offers explanation. Until Labour does the same. Until it confronts not only the symptoms, but the system. It will govern nervously, while its opponents narrate with confidence. The risk is not simply that Reeves fails to blunt Reform’s rise. It is that she legitimises the very structure of feeling from which it draws its power.
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