I’ve been more than slightly troubled by Rachel Reeves’s CV, and I’ve been wondering if she was ‘let go’ by one or even both of her main employers – the Bank of England (BoE) and Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS). I don’t have much material to back up my suspicions, but sometimes in life, we find ourselves in situations where we have to make a judgement based on inadequate information and our experience. Having worked in almost 100 organisations in the private and public sectors across fifteen countries, and having been hired and fired several times in my less than distinguished career, I believe one can develop what our German friends, in their melodic language, call ‘fingerspitzengefühl’ (fingertips feeling) about certain situations. And that’s what I’ve tried to use for this article.
Let’s start with Rachel Reeves’s time at the BoE. According to PA Media Factcheck, the Bank of England confirmed to the PA news agency that Ms. Reeves worked for them during the dates on the LinkedIn page (2000 to 2006). This includes a stint with the British Embassy in Washington DC, which was a secondment from the U.K.’s central bank – and which Ms. Reeves talked about in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, in August 2023. Some of Ms. Reeves’s time at the Bank can also be charted through papers she contributed to during her employment there.
In a December 2005 paper, she is listed as part of the Bank’s structural economic analysis division, which matches the detail on the LinkedIn page. She is also thanked for her contributions to a December 2001 speech by Charlie Bean, who was the Bank of England’s chief economist at the time.
Following her six years at the BoE, Reeves went to work for the bank HBOS in their Leeds office. From the little I’ve been able to find out, I believe the Leeds office dealt mainly with administrative issues rather than the type of intricate economic analysis Rachel Reeves would probably have done at the BoE. If I am correct, then a question arises: why would someone who had a successful career at the centre of the economic action at the BoE in London and Washington move to working in a mainly administrative office for a retail bank in Leeds? I’m sure Leeds is a wonderful town, but it doesn’t feel like the move from the BoE in London and Washington to HBOS in Leeds was part of a major career progression for an economic superstar who would one day become our Chancellor. In fact, it rather feels to me as if someone at the BoE had a quiet word with Rachel Reeves and suggested that there would be limited opportunities for her at the BoE, so perhaps her no doubt considerable talents could possibly be better employed elsewhere.
As most readers will know, there is reportedly a lack of clarity about what Rachel Reeves actually did at HBOS. We do know that she was employed there from 2006 to 2009. I believe she was in some kind of management role. But if that role had been quite senior, one might have thought she would have highlighted this on her LinkedIn profile rather than just writing that she had been an economist. After all, someone who has demonstrated skills in economic analysis and who had also shown that they could successfully manage large numbers of subordinates would, I believe, be much more attractive to a future employer than someone who had only spent their whole career as an economist.
HBOS collapsed in the 2008 financial crisis and was taken over by Lloyds. Following the Lloyds takeover, the bank’s management launched a massive programme of cost cutting. In 2009, the Guardian newspaper explained:
When Lloyds’s rearing black horse kicked Halifax’s white Xs off a huge brown brick building in the centre of Leeds, marketing manager Rachel McHale thought her job was safe; she could not have been more wrong. Six months after the takeover in January, she was made redundant. “It was a slap in the face,” she said. “I was shocked because I’d been there for 15 years and thought they would want to retain my skills. I didn’t just lose my salary. I lost everything I had struggled for, like health insurance for my family and a company car.”
The redundancies have not stopped. Many of McHale’s former colleagues were told last week they would also be losing their jobs when Lloyds announced that 460 posts would be slashed in Leeds, one of Britain’s financial hubs.
That was part of 5,000 job losses earmarked by Britain’s biggest high-street bank. It has axed an estimated 15,000 roles since the rescue takeover of HBOS, which put 43% of Lloyds’s shares in the hands of the taxpayer. The toll has been higher at Royal Bank of Scotland, in which the taxpayer stake will soon rise to 84%, with 20,000 cuts announced.
It seems that Reeves’s departure from HBOS coincided with the 2009 jobs massacre. What we don’t know is whether her departure was voluntary, as she sought to move on to develop her career in pastures new, or whether the bank’s management decided that Reeves’s talents were no longer essential to ensuring the bank’s future financial success. Somebody out there does know the truth. But finding that person might be difficult.
I fully accept that my suspicions of Reeves possibly being let go by HBOS and maybe even by the BoE are purely based on a vague feeling that we haven’t been told the whole truth about our Chancellor’s career success or otherwise before she was handed control of our fine country’s finances. And I believe that this information could be important to those of us who are somewhat unconvinced by her economic performance in her first six months as Chancellor. So I feel that there are some probing questions which could and should be asked by our mainstream media’s intrepid and dogged investigative journalists, like… like… well, um… like… Actually, having seen how all our mainstream media journalists seemed to have obediently parroted the government line on such issues as the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, the necessity of lockdowns, the safety and effectiveness of certain medical treatments, the motivation for the appalling Southport murders and the utter nonsense of anthropogenic climate change, I can’t really think of any real mainstream media investigative journalists I would trust. So I doubt we’ll ever find out the truth about Ms. Reeves’s real reasons for leaving the BoE and HBOS.
However, whatever doubts people may have about Rachel Reeves’s qualities and suitability as our Chancellor, we have to remember that her predecessor as Shadow Chancellor was the intellectual and political colossus Anneliese Dodds. I invite any interested readers to have a look at Anneliese Dodds’s education and career highlights so you can judge for yourselves her fitness to run our country’s finances.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
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The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
Perhaps if these moronic complainants had bombs dropping on their heads, or were trying to work out where their next meal was going to come from, they’d not be so concerned with being offended by someone’s words. Part of the reason we are where we are is that nobody has to endure hardship anymore, so they invent it. Put these tw*ts on the frontline somewhere and see if they’re still so preoccupied with being ‘misgendered’ as bullets whistle round their head.
They are not hurt by the words. They are weaponising them with their own hate
It isn’t a crime to hate something. Or it shouldn’t be anyway. Hatered is what you feel about something. If we start outlawing what we feel we are in real trouble.
But once again the population has been bamboozled and everyone speaks about “hate” as if it was the worst thing in the world and needs to be stopped.
It’s really very difficult sometimes to live in a world of lemmings.
Police Scotland agree that it’s not a crime, but nevertheless have recorded it as a ‘hate incident (non-crime)’
Why are the police recording things that aren’t crimes?
Because they’re utterly useless at dealing with real crimes.
They have nothing better to do.
I don’t think this a decision by Police Scotland. They are following instructions by the Government who wants to use this list in future to identify political enemies.
In that specific case. But there will be others where someone’s says or writes something which is considered a hate crime.
The term is what is especially dangerous. They’ve used a word that is about what you feel and stretched it to define certain types of actions derived from certain types thoughts. So they’ve blurred the between thought and action. Which opens the door to criminalising thought without any associated action. It’s just a question of time.
For anyone who doesn’t get it, you just replace ‘hate” with ‘thought’, as in ‘hate crime’ or “thought crime’ because hating something is just a certain type of thought.
Exactomundo, Stewart. Nail on head. You can’t legislate against being human and humans have feelings and not all of them are loving ones.
Marmite could well trigger a lot of hate crime.
There is no criminal offence of hatred in English law currently. However if a person is guilty of a criminal offence and the prosecution can prove there is an aspect of hatred on various grounds, the sentence can be enhanced.
My latest hit (with apologies to Free)
There she stood, in the street
Singing gospel music so sweet
I said, “Hey, what is this?
A free concert that I don’t want to miss!”
Just then arrived a gang of cops
Telling her that she had to stop.
There’s been complaints, dragged her away,
And banged her up in jail till the next day.
Far Right now, everybody’s Far Right now.
Far Right now, everybody’s Far Right Now.
I hurried home to my place
Told my wife it was a disgrace.
She said “Egad! Dad, that’s pretty bad –
She’d be better off proclaiming jihad.”
Just then the Law broke down the door,
And pinned the wife and me down on the floor.
“You’ll get a fine! Or maybe time!
You know Islamophobia’s a crime!”
Far Right now, everybody’s Far Right now.
(We’re all fascists together…)
Far Right now, Toby, Toby, Toby we’re Far Right!
Yep very funny. ——And Ironically by a group called FREE.
“All White Now”?
I well remember ‘boogieing’ to the original in 1970, Andy Fraser, co-founder of Free as a 15yr old in ’68 co-wrote ‘Alright Now’. An instant classic. Those were the days of sanity.
I don’t think people “boogied” in those days? ——-Wasn’t it not till disco that we “boogied”? I remember having purple bell bottoms and platforms, a Lilac shirt and flowery clip on tie,,,,,,my god I must have looked horrendous, but probably we all did back then.
Is it a hate crime to baselessly accuse someone of a hate crime?
Couldn’t this non-law be used against these people who use this to try to win an argument that they can’t otherwise succeed with.
This springs to mind:
Wasting police time is a criminal offence as outlined under section 5(2) of the Criminal Law Act 1967. Knowingly making false reports to the police is an offence, including verbal or written statements that:
True, however there is a pleasing irony in using their “law” against them.
I’ve already done that at work. A Muslim patient in an abaya made a complaint against me. She had wanted a Muslim doctor and became quite angry when she found it was me she was due to see.
In my response I used the phrase ‘perceived recism’, which I felt had been directed at me.
It went quiet after that.
As the song said “There may be trouble ahead”. —-When you give more and more power to government this is where you end up. I have for years listened to an endless stream of politicians decare how “Progressive” they are. And who could possibly have a problem with that, after all isn’t “progressive” a really good thing? Who could object to “progress? ————–Except when it comes to politics “progressive” means progressing bit by bit to more power in the hands of government, and we all should know by now that the bigger the government the less the freedom. I urge all Scots (and I am one) to seriously have a think to themselves that the proper role of government is not to be some kind of morality police that decides what opinions we are all allowed to have. Or as C.S Lewis put it———“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
‘Cancer is progressive,’ is my usual response to that.
I think we can foresee a predictable trend come April Fools ( how apt ) that there’ll be a significant hike in complaints from Transtifa and the Islamists ( sounds like a pub quiz team ), due to these two camps enjoying perma-victim status in society nowadays.
Shall we wait and see how long the queues get outside Ann Summers, Home Bargains, or wherever else has been registered as your ‘One stop grassing shop’ in Scotland, as snitches line up to whinge about being victims of ‘microaggressions’ or bent out of shape because a bloke in a dress was called “mister”.
Well we can be absolutely sure that plod will no longer have the
resourcespeople to deal with real crimes so that’s alright then.Note the MSM headlines today re “trolling” and the Royals, also blaming China and Russia, its always useful to bring “the enemy” in too. We must see this for what it is, Our Rulers want to bring in Censorship and woke blasphemy laws in the same vein as Canada, thus shutting down voices of dissent and of course the alternative media. The MSM are fully on board as theybelieve their power will be returned as the only voices of truth along with the edicts of our leaders.
Do not be fooled, recall the focus of the Billionaire boys club at DAVOS this year, and the biggest threat to humanity, not war, but disin/mal information as blabbed by Vond der Layen, Schwab etc. This is their play using the Royals, in a “look at these people they are kicking a Kitten, we must stop them” play. Do not be fooled resist and see it for what it is, the elites through the puppet politicians and secretarial MSM shutting up the proles.
The concept of “hate crimes” is nonsensical. The concept of a “non-crime hate incident” is off-the-scale bonkers.
We’re not just living in Clownworld, it’s the Stephen King version but with Brownshirts and Maoists.
Who determines if something is a ‘hate incident (non-crime)’ or not?
The complainant.
Humza is carrying out the same destructive policy’s as his ROP mucker Khant in Old London Town !
Also is Murdo related to Michael Portillo