It’s a familiar sight in Britain: An elected official standing up to cancel investment projects on the grounds that they are unaffordable, poor value for money or the malevolent design of an incompetent predecessor. The most notable recent example was former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decision last year to scrap the northern leg of the HS2 high-speed rail line. Now it’s the turn of Rachel Reeves.
On Monday, the newly installed Labour chancellor of the exchequer binned billions of pounds of road and rail projects and placed a hospital-building program under review as part of a strategy to address £22 billion ($28 billion) of unfunded spending commitments run up by the previous Conservative government. The claim of a hidden shortfall was hotly disputed by the former chancellor, Jeremy Hunt. In the view of Reeves, the abandonment of infrastructure works — along with other cost-saving measures such as cutting winter fuel payments to some pensioners — are decisions taken reluctantly in extremis. But there’s always a reason.