THE pedigree of Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer’s political outlook — cutting pensioners’ fuel allowances, flagging cuts in public expenditure — reaches much further back in parliamentary history to Labour’s first chancellor Philip Snowden. He introduced his first and only Budget in May 1924 and later issued it as a pamphlet, the Housewives Budget.

Snowden had been a member of the Independent Labour Party, a populariser of socialist ideals and a temperance campaigner. However, he had a distinctly Gladstonian Liberal frame of mind when it came to economics. Churchill noted that Snowden shared the “Treasury mind” with the governor of the Bank of England. Reeves of course is a former bank economist.

Snowden saw the chancellor’s job as managing the economy in a prudent way and certainly not increasing public expenditure.

Even so, on a class basis, his Budget was well crafted in that sense that it made some minor concessions to the have-nots, primarily around what is known as the “free breakfast table” while doing nothing to increase taxes for the rich.

Snowden halved sugar duty and tea duty at a total cost of £23 million and reduced tax on cocoa, coffee, chicory and prunes. He cut entertainment duty meaning cheaper seats in cinemas and theatres and abolished tax on sweetened table waters altogether. Tax on the middle-class drink of soda water remained.

Reeves has agreed to a range of public-sector pay increases sat on by the Tories, and ended discrimination against young people on the minimum wage. VAT on private school fees will be payable from January 2025 and the Budget itself in October may address some wider issues of wealth and tax.

As with Snowden, the issue of class is addressed. This is not what the Tories would have done while leaving the basic financial structure very much as it was, which is what the Tories would do.

While Reeves and Starmer have talked about economic growth, she has also cancelled spending on new hospitals and rail projects. In 1924, a Liberal MP who went on to become rather better known, John Maynard Keynes, asked Snowden why he had not committed £100m to construction engineering.

In her post-election economic statement, Reeves was clearly aware of Keynesian economics, but like Snowden a century before, she rejected them in favour of “the Treasury mind.”

Snowden’s view was clear. He said in 1924: “It is no part of my job as chancellor of the exchequer to put before the House of Commons proposals for the expenditure of public money. The function of the chancellor of the exchequer, as I understand it, is to resist all demands for expenditure made by his colleagues and, when he can no longer resist, to limit the concession to the barest point of acceptance.”

It is a view that has been consistently challenged from within the ranks of the Labour Party. Speaking at a lunch to mark the centenary of the birth of Ramsay MacDonald in October 1966 then-Labour prime minister Harold Wilson said:

“When perhaps any government would have been broken by economic events beyond the control or even the influence of this country — but when the outdated Treasury views of the pre-Keynes era, reinforced by the Puritan Cobdenism of Snowden, prevented any expansionist action to relieve unemployment.

“Men were sacrificed and left to rot under the Treasury doctrine that the way to deal with unemployment caused by chronic deficiency of demand was to add to that deficiency by cruel retrenchment.”

Like her predecessor Snowden, Reeves may have some working-class window dressing to hide a Victorian economic policy, long since discredited. History reminds us that another policy is possible.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian. Follow him on X @kmflett.