Good take on her speech by Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph just now:
“The real problem, however, is this. These announcements are not going to fix the damage done by Reeves’s Budget. The huge rise in employers’ NI, the tax on jobs, is still in place. The nom-doms are still being driven out, along with the investment they bring into the UK, and family businesses are still going to be wiped out by inheritance tax charges, while beefed-up employment law will make it punishingly expensive to hire people. Those are now the real barriers to growth.
Reeves’s personal tragedy is that she got this the wrong way around. She should have delivered today’s speech on growth in August, immediately after taking office, and then followed it up, if necessary, with tax rises on businesses in October. She might just have made it work. Instead, she shattered confidence in the British economy, and brought growth to a sudden stop. It is too late to turn that around now – no matter how many ‘growth’ speeches she delivers.”