Reeves: Brexit Made UK "Poorer, Weaker and Less Secure"

Rachel Reeves, the former chancellor, has said that Brexit has made the UK "poorer, weaker and less secure". She is scheduled to give a speech at Harvard University on Monday, 2 November, where The Guardian reports she will argue that a closer relationship with the European Union, even rejoining, may be credible as well as radical.

The remarks come under a new prime minister. Andy Burnham has held the office since this summer, and Reeves backed his bid in June, saying he would stick to her fiscal rules, the limits a government sets on its own borrowing and spending. Burnham later dismissed her as chancellor, and John Healey has since taken the job and delivered his first budget.

The Guardian describes the Harvard speech as Reeves's first public intervention on her own record and Britain's future. She believes the UK should one day return to the EU, saying economic interests, common values and geography all point towards Europe. Asked whether Britain would rejoin in his lifetime, Healey said it was his job to make the most of Britain's position now.

In an earlier lecture, Reeves argued that Brexit had done deep damage. She said the government did not seek to turn back the clock, but to look towards a new and stable future relationship with the EU.

The Guardian reports that the themes of that lecture have become the agenda for Burnham's government. Reeves argued that what most sets Britain apart from its closest peers is the relative underperformance of major cities outside London compared with their European counterparts. She called for regions to be freed from what she described as stifling Whitehall orthodoxies, meaning the habits of thought within the central government departments in London. She proposed giving regional leaders a share of national taxes that central government allocates.

That tax-sharing proposal now forms the centrepiece of Healey's budget, according to the Guardian. Reeves's main theory of growth centred on investment, and in pursuit of it she raised employers' national insurance contributions, a payroll charge on businesses.

Burnham has promised that Labour will cut living costs through other measures alongside energy support, including a new mortgage measure, according to the Guardian's coverage of the budget. At his first meeting of the International Monetary Fund, held in Bangkok, Healey heard IMF economists say the UK's deficit reduction plan, the effort to narrow the gap between government spending and income, stands out among G7 peers. The economists praised his predecessor, Reeves, for it.