by In one of the most famous psychological experiments of the past 30 years, Harvard-educated researchers Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons asked a group of young people, three in black T-shirts, three in white, to pass a basketball around on limited space.
Viewers of the video were then told to count the number of passes silently in their head. What more than half of them missed, almost incomprehensible it seemed, was the person in a gorilla suit who walked through the running game, who faced the camera, beat his hands on his chest, and walked out of the shot.
The Invisible Gorilla experiment was an example of the “selective attention” phenomenon. The audience is so busy focusing on one thing, that they completely miss something else significant that is going on right in front of them.
For the purposes of this election, Rachel Reeves is the person in the gorilla suit. If you want to know what is going on in the game, watch her every move.
After 14 years in opposition to Labour, the polls suggest the party is almost certain to win on election day. Sir Keir Starmer will be prime minister and Reeves will be the UK’s first female chancellor. In the first 20 pages of the Labor manifesto, published last week, there was only one person in the picture who was not a Labor leader. It was Rachel Reeves.
Despite their struggle to maintain any kind of unity on how best to fight the coming Labor tide (from “they have no plan” to “they have a socialist plan” to “they have a secret plan”) , the Right after landing on at least one significant point. Starmer has a problem with consistency and the voters know it. One senior Labor figure I spoke to last week said the fear of tax rises was real among the public and business leaders – who also think a confetti of policy proposals will be raised and dropped with alarming regularity. after the 4th of July.
The attack has legs precisely because Starmer’s political history is his greatest weakness – Mr. Flip Flop. He now says that he did not believe that Jeremy Corbyn had won in 2019, despite his wholehearted support for precisely that result at the time. Such an answer stretches credibility.
As for Europe, Labor has made a public pledge that the UK will remain “out of the EU”, including the customs union and the single market, which will cut off any return to freedom of movement. This pledge comes from the former Brexit shadow secretary, who passionately supported a second referendum.
He has promised to “reduce net migration”, but won’t say by how much.
And in his more hazy romantic moments, he calls himself a socialist. It is not entirely clear why, since Starmer is not proposing that the workers, through the state, own the means of production and distribution of goods and services.
When the going gets tough, Starmer tends towards uncertainty – the reversal of the £28 billion green policy pledge, another example where delays have shown uncertainty at the top. The Right can smell weakness, and the more honest voices in Labor know it’s true.
Step forward Reeves – a controversial woman with a level of consistency lacking in the member for Holborn and St Pancras. For those worried that Starmageddon is ahead, Reeves should smooth a few brows.
She refused to serve under Corbyn, preferring to spend several fruitful years chairing the Business Select Committee. She was very reluctant to back the second referendum, representing as she does the Leave seat of Leeds West, rather than the Remain seat in north London. She studiously avoided the “socialist” tag.
If he succeeds in the election, Labour’s economic growth plan will be yours and it will succeed or fail under his leadership. In a country desperate for some kind of change, Reeves believes in an industrial strategy and an active state, building houses and infrastructure “Yes, In My Backyard” and closer trade relations with the EU.
She will try to erase Ronald Reagan’s declaration that the nine most dangerous words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”. The public sector tends towards bureaucracy and inefficiency and ministers towards rivalry and ego. The Shadow Chancellor has promised the farm that it can reverse these trends.
If her plan for economic growth works (and if that’s in capital letters), everything else follows. More money for public services, NHS and social care reform, defence, tax cuts.
It is a high stakes game. Each month Reeves eagerly awaits the latest growth figures from the Office for National Statistics. Stay anaemic, and they are a millstone around their neck. If there is a bounce, it will show a path to prosperity that millions of people are wearily waiting for. The Chancellor’s ruthless judge and jury will be the GDP figures.
Reeves has to believe that she will succeed. If the economy does grow, it might be worth betting on tax thresholds being unfrozen – one way to kill the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ substantive argument that £11 billion of tax rises are ahead under Labor because the frozen preserves. thresholds and allowances, which attract more people to pay higher rates.
When I spoke to her last week, the shadow chancellor insisted again and again that she wanted taxes to fall on working people – and by that she means people on middle incomes, not the rich. She would wear it as a badge of honor.
If her first budget in the autumn has the public finances in better shape, that could be the rabbit out of the hat.
Launching the manifesto in Manchester, Starmer admitted that “all the costs” for the plans for the government had been written by Reeves, who was sitting in the front row closest to him on the podium. This throwaway phrase revealed more than Starmer intended to convey. Nothing moves with a price tag in Labor without telling Reeves.
In 2019, the poll asked “Who Would Make the Best Chancellor?” saw Sajid Javid ahead by 16 percentage points over John McDonnell. Reeves is now two percentage points ahead of Jeremy Hunt.
The Right have plenty of ammunition to shoot at Starmer and are already preparing their cannons for election day plus 1 his government will not deliver, economic disaster will follow and voters will be left with little more than regret the buyers.
Labor believes Reeves is the insurance policy, people have yet to be fully noticed by the Iron Chancellor.
