The Note

14 years on from Liam Byrne's line that there was "no money", the new Labour government needs the media and public to accept a similar narrative.

Previously: There didn't need to be dirty deal with Murdoch for Labour to dismiss reviving Leveson II

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It’s had a long life for such a short note. In 2010, when Liam Byrne followed tradition by leaving a jokey message for David Laws, his successor as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, he couldn’t have known that his line “I’m afraid there is no money” would lead to Tories brandishing copies of it for the next 14 years.

Byrne’s replacement in the Treasury, the Lib Dem minister, David Laws, made it public to back up the incoming coalition government’s claim that Labour had left Britain’s finances in a mess. When the new Chancellor George Osborne needed to shift blame for the austerity agenda he was pushing, he could refer back to the note.

During the 2015 general election, David Cameron waved the note around at events, the perfect prop to illustrate that Labour couldn’t be trusted. Even in 2023, Tories still believed the note had power; then Tory Party chair Greg Hands tweeted about it more than 40 times that year. That Byrne had apologised for his joke in an Observer article in 2015 didn’t matter — the pretence that the note was incontrovertible continued.

Rachel Reeves didn’t find a faux apologetic note when she marched into the Treasury nor did she bump into her predecessor on the building’s steps as Jim Callahan did in 1964 when the outgoing Tory chancellor Reginald Maulding told him: “Sorry to leave it in such a mess, old cock.” Instead, Reeves had to compose her own ‘note’ to ensure the blame for her decisions will rest with the previous government.

The Chancellor announced yesterday that she has discovered a £22 billion black hole at the centre of the public finances. In the voice of a Creature Comforts sloth moaning about parking tickets, Reeves rose to high dudgeon: “The contingency reserve has been spent more than three times over and they told no one. How dare they? How dare they?!” At the same time as the speech, the Office for Budget Responsibility released a letter announcing that it would review the forecasts the previous Tory government supplied it ahead of the spring budget. It lacked the pithiness of the note but will be waved around just as much by Labour in the years to come.

In The Times, sketchwriter Tom Peck called Reeves’ speech “the sort of performance familiar to any parent who has had to pretend that six-year-old child mounting the worktop to gain unsanctioned access to the chocolate digestive is up there with humanity’s gravest ever crimes, and not, let’s be honest, kind of hilarious.” Meanwhile
for The Telegraph, Tim Stanley, Britain’s premier bowtie-sporting builderphobe, called her “stunningly naive” and suggested, “Ms Reeves apparently skipped through the last election as innocent as a lamb, assuming the economy was bad but there was still cash in the biscuit tin”.

Inevitably, The Daily Mail has focused firmly on the removal of the winter fuel allowance from pensioners who aren’t on pension credit. Andrew Neil, who tends to keep warm in the South of France, writes:

It is the oldest sleight of hand in the political playbook. Deny until the cows come home while seeking election that you plan to raise taxes then, duly elected on a 'no-tax-rises' platform, you hold up your hands in horror.

'We've seen the books!' you exclaim. 'It's much worse than we thought.' 

… Pay rises of this magnitude are not included in current fiscal projections. They are 'unfunded' in the jargon. Ruthless Reeves will pay for some of it by ending winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners and making social care more expensive.

So old folk on modest pensions will help appease Labour's union paymasters and finance generous pay rises for junior doctors.

Doctors vs. those in their dotage will be an appealing battle for the Mail, even as the Chancellor says settling the public sector pay claims will help pensioners by ensuring they get appointments when they need them. The Mail treats individual medical staff as heroic but frames doctors collectively as well-paid already and frankly greedy.

On the other side of the divide, in The Guardian, economist Professor Jonathan Portes writes that the ‘discovery’ of unfunded liabilities in the public finances is “a transparent political manoeuvre” by Reeves but that she’s also right and needs to “move from patching up the holes to fixing the foundations”.

Just as the press and wider media became obsessed with Liam Byrne’s note, turning it into a resilient political meme, Reeves needs the story of the Tory blackhole to take root in the minds of commentators and the public alike. People already believe — quite rightly — that the Conservative Party left the country in a complete state. If Labour can further persuade them that everything the Tories left them with serves as one giant “there’s no money left” note, the opposition will be stuck with that reputation for at least 14 years.

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