Monday 25 May 2026 5:20 am  |  Updated:  Friday 22 May 2026 4:34 pm

Supermarket price caps? Rachel Reeves is truly panicking

By: Eliot Wilson

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Rachel Reeves’s impulse to meddle in supermarket pricing shows she is not seriously interested in growth at all, writes Eliot Wilson

Labour’s offer to the electorate at the 2024 general election depended for any chance of success on one overriding factor – making the British economy substantially more productive. If that could not be achieved, then Sir Keir Starmer and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, would be unable to fulfil any of the party’s other promises, whether cutting NHS waiting lists, spending on major new infrastructure projects or enabling the police to reduce crime and make the streets feel safer.

It has hardly been a shining success. Most growth in 2024 came in the first two quarters, when the Conservative Party was still in office, the rate was a modest 1.4 per cent last year, and this year even the upgraded forecast from the International Monetary Fund was one per cent, raised from 0.8 per cent. With inflation hovering stubbornly around three per cent, Britain is in stasis.

Rachel Reeves’s reputation is now a burned-out shell, and she has provided much of the accelerant with a slew of tax increases, uneven public performances and, it transpires, a professional CV which at best could be classified as a docudrama. But she knows that the cost of living can make or break an incumbent government’s electoral fortunes, and her panic is increasingly obvious. Last week, the Treasury floated the idea of........

© City A.M.