Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner: the two most powerful women in the new UK Labour government

Two women hold a large share of power in Keir Starmer’s new government. Both share a large share of responsibility for the strategy and efforts that led the Labour Party to victory in the UK elections on 4 July.

One of them is the daughter of teachers, a dedicated girl who became the national chess champion at the age of 14, and a university student who studied economics at Oxford and worked in the research department of the Bank of England.

The other grew up in a social housing project in Stockport, a dependent town in Greater Manchester, in the midst of poverty. She is the daughter of a bipolar mother, who could neither read nor write. Who for many days did not get out of bed. With suicidal tendencies. Who only got through it by taking care of her little girl. Until that little girl got pregnant, at 16, and her life turned upside down.

One is Rachel Reeves (London, 45 years old), the first woman to hold the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer in the history of the United Kingdom. The second is Angela Rayner (Stockport, 44 years old), Deputy Prime Minister of the new British Government and Minister for Housing and Territorial Balance.

The best introduction to both policies is in their own words:

“There have been two things I have always tried to prove: that a girl can be just as good at something as a boy, but also that a girl from a normal family background can be just as good as a boy from a privileged background,” Reeves explained to the newspaper. The Times.

“I have been called stupid because I didn’t go to university or because, according to them, I didn’t speak correctly. I’m not stupid, obviously, or I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am. I speak like the people in the neighbourhood where I grew up speak. And you know what else? Being a woman doesn’t make you inferior to a man,” Rayner replied in the newspaper. The Guardian to the conservative MPs who tried to mock her.

Economic growth and pragmatism

Reeves defines herself as a social democrat. Rayner, as a socialist. Reeves worked at the British Embassy in Washington, as a trainee at the Bank of England. She got to know the ins and outs of the Federal Reserve and the ropes of power in the United States. Her time in banking shortly after, back in the United Kingdom, allowed her to understand the impulses and incentives of private enterprise.

Married to Nicolas Joicey, who wrote many of her speeches to Tony Blair’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Reeves travels with a light backpack of ideology and full of pragmatism: she is more in favour of modernising and reforming the economy than of nationalising companies or raising taxes.

During the years when veteran leftist Jeremy Corbyn took over the reins of Labour, Reeves remained an MP, but remained in the background, clearly distanced from the policies the party was then pushing.

It was not Starmer’s first choice for the role of “shadow finance minister” (shadow chancellorThe Labour leader, who was questioned in his first months at the head of the party, was nevertheless shrewd enough to reinforce his mandate with a woman who brought a discourse of prudence, fiscal responsibility and an outstretched hand to businessmen. Her influence is clearly behind an electoral programme focused on reforms, investment and growth.

His hand is also behind the lowering of the ambitions of some of the initial measures proposed by the Labour Party, such as the reform of labour legislation or the promise of multi-million euro investments (33 billion euros) in the new “green economy”. The first, so as not to scare off businessmen. The second, so as not to further aggravate public accounts affected by an inflation that has been rampant over the last year.

The Guardian of the Left

While Reeves is viewed with suspicion by the party’s left wing and its natural allies, the unions, Rayner symbolises for many of them the guardian of the essence of the left in the new government.

Having abruptly transitioned from teenager to single mother, she decided that her life would not be dictated by the welfare and social assistance that many people in her neighbourhood depended on. “I had a little boy to look after, and I wanted to prove to everyone that I wasn’t going to be the scum everyone thought I was destined to be. I wanted to be a good mother, and I realised that someone was going to love me the way I deserved to be loved,” she told a Labour Party conference.

She started working as a carer for dependent people in a private company. Her combativeness was immediately noticed by her colleagues, who appointed her as a union representative. Before she knew it, she was already a Labour MP.

Rayner was in charge of Work and Pensions during Jeremy Corbyn’s years in opposition. He remained loyal to the veteran leftist until the end, although he has never wanted to identify himself as a Corbynista.

In a similar, though even more belligerent, process than Reeves’, Starmer wanted to get rid of her, as part of his effort to erase the traces of the previous leadership from the party. Elected directly by the rank and file as the number two of the party, Rayner emerged triumphant from the struggle and even accumulated more power, but both began to understand that they benefited more as allies than as rivals.

“The idea that Rachel [Reeves] and Keir [Starmer] “They are in the employers’ corner and I am in the workers’ corner. It’s nonsense. We all support the English workers and employers. We have all committed ourselves to that,” the new deputy prime minister recently stated.

Her position is rather honorary and depends on the personal and political strength of the person who occupies it. Which is a lot. Rayner’s mission is to return powers and autonomy to the United Kingdom’s municipalities, strengthen workers’ rights and – her main dream – build a million decent social housing units that will leave behind the world of poverty and deprivation that she experienced as a child.

Rayner boasts of her two tattoos – the busy bee representing Manchester and the Labour rose. Her son Ryan made her a grandmother at 37, but she has two more children, and she fought like a lioness to raise the one who was born prematurely at 23 weeks and suffers from severe blindness and a slight disability.

During the frivolous years of Boris Johnson’s premiership, the conservative press went so far as to accuse Rayner, who sat in the front row of the opposition bench alongside Starmer, of misleading the prime minister as Sharon Stone did in the film Basic Instinctcrossing and uncrossing her legs. “She can’t compete with the rhetorical skills Johnson acquired at Oxford, but she has other skills,” an anonymous source told the tabloid. Daily Mailwhich earned him a reprimand from the Speaker of Parliament.

There are 11 women in Starmer’s new 25-member government. More than anyone else, Reeves and Rayner symbolise the ultimate reason for Labour’s electoral victory. Their respective personal backgrounds, imbued with willpower, pragmatism and a desire to rebalance British society that is more instinctive than ideological, have won over many voters.

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