Rarely has a speech been so heavily trailed in the media, with so many of the details – from the third runway at Heathrow to the revived Oxford-Cambridge corridor and the nine new reservoirs across the country – pre-briefed and leaked to the press in advance.
So you might have thought there were no surprises left from the chancellor’s big speech today. But here are a few intriguing lines worth pondering.
The first was something Rachel Reeves said quite early on in the speech itself. Before she even made any of those big announcements, she said a key priority was “building on our special relationship with the United States under President Trump.”
A second line that leapt out to me came a bit further down in the speech: “There is no trade-off between economic growth and net zero. Quite the opposite. Net zero is the industrial opportunity of the 21st century, and Britain must lead the way.”
I have mixed feelings about this, having written an entire book which documents the fact that net zero is indeed the industrial opportunity of the 21st century. However, and this is really important, that does mean that in the short run it’s also quite expensive.
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