FOR socialists there is a good deal to be discontented about Rachel Reeves’s policies as Chancellor. The cut in winter fuel payments has rightly caused anger and talk of cuts to spending suggests an austere 2025.

While she has been engaged with socialists who have thought a good deal about the historic roots of Britain’s crisis and what might be done — such as David Edgerton at Kings College, London — it’s difficult to discern much practical influence.

Of course, a certain portion of the attacks on her are firstly because she is the first female Chancellor and the world of finance is still largely that of men in suits. Secondly, she is a Labour Chancellor. Of what stripe is entirely irrelevant to the likes of the Mail, Telegraph and GB News: it’s just Labour of any kind they hate.

The real way to understand the origins of Reeves’s crisis is to look at several historical contexts.

It’s hardly news to point out that Reeves follows an orthodox Treasury line when it comes to the economy. She was, after all, a Bank of England economist. The perspective, if one were to play devil’s advocate, is that what working women and men want is a stable economy with low inflation where, as the government has it, work pays.

It sounds OK until it is recalled that capitalism is a system of crisis, of boom and slump. Simply being a manager of a largely mythical status quo is unlikely to work well.

Yet this has been a strong line in right-wing Labour thought back to Labour’s first chancellor Philip Snowden in 1924. Snowden too was a Treasury man. He saw no reason to increase public spending, even to address the significant problem of unemployment after the first world war.

He did however differ in one significant aspect from Reeves. His background had been in the Independent Labour Party and while he saw little chance of changing market capitalism, he did argue that a socialist society was needed.

The other historical context is the economic crisis that has more or less traditionally beset Labour governments in the modern era. As a party that promises to slightly tame the tiger of capital, the reality that it is a system of boom and bust perpetually confounds it.

Gordon Brown had claimed that the post-1997 Labour governments had got rid of it, only to be faced with the 2008 world financial crash. Brown got out of it by making sure the less well-off paid for the crisis caused by the much better-off, a pattern we remain stuck in.

The 1976 IMF crisis when James Callaghan was prime minister underlines the point. The economy had been hit by the impact of the policies of the 1970-74 Tory government and the 1973 Middle East oil crisis. Then chancellor Denis Healey determined that the way to resolve matters was to take a loan from the IMF. This came with significant strings, in particular cuts in public spending.

The loan was opposed by left ministers including Tony Benn and Michael Foot but in vain. It set the course for the Labour election defeat to Thatcher in 1979.

As with this earlier crisis, there were alternatives but Labour stuck to economic orthodoxy and Reeves is firmly in that historical mould. Instead of spending cuts, wealth taxes and levies on the profits of energy companies could be utilised.

This of course would lead to even more attacks by the right-wing media. Mobilising support on the ground for what would be popular measures could address this but that is not the politics of Reeves and Starmer.

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