On July 4, after 14 years of Tory rule, Britons handed the Labour Party a landslide election victory. The new prime minister, Keir Starmer, appointed Rachel Reeves as chancellor of the exchequer or finance minister, the first woman to hold the position in the country’s history. The feat took just 900 years; the first mention of a Royal Exchequer, tasked with overseeing the king’s finances, dates back to Henry I.
Reeves, 45, joined Labour as a teenager. A national chess champion by age 14, she studied at Oxford University and the London School of Economics and landed her first post-graduate job with the Bank of England. She became a member of Parliament in 2010, when the Conservatives’ tenure began.
After years of economic uncertainty, Reeves’s first order of business will be spurring higher and more inclusive growth. Her approach, which she has detailed in books, speeches and interviews, is what she named Securonomics. “It is an approach that consists of a Bidenomics-like industrial strategy at one end, thereby protecting and supporting important sectors and technologies, while it also looks to recognize the importance of security for workers in the everyday economy,” says Andrew Westwood, professor of Public Policy, Government & Business at the University of Manchester. “This model is now being widely adopted not only in the US but also in the EU, as a more volatile global economy and geopolitical tensions have pushed more nations to active strategies supporting critical supply chains, defense manufacturing, energy security, and so on.”
The second part of Reeves’s approach, Westwood argues, will be to create a path to greener growth that is fairer to cities and regions that have been in decline: “These issues have become crucibles for discontent and populism, creating a threat to both domestic politics across many countries … and to global institutions and co-operation as well, as it is in the case of the anti-institutionalism of Trump and Le Pen, or Johnson, Farage and Suella Braverman in the UK.” It’s been called “the revenge of the places that don’t matter,” Westwood says, referencing economic geographer Andrés Rodríguez-Pose: “Securonomics will only succeed if it can effectively address this discontent.”
