Rachel

Rachel Reeves has urged Labour MPs to unite behind her Budget as she vowed to stay on as chancellor in the years ahead.

Speaking to a meeting of Labour’s Parliamentary Party on Monday evening, Reeves warned MPs they must “stick together” if they wanted to win the next election.

The Budget, which is expected to contain tax rises, will be delivered on Wednesday following weeks of speculation.

Reeves said she thought Labour MPs would like 90-95% of her spending plan but warned they would have to accept the tougher measures as well saying: “It’s a package, not a pick-and-mix. You can’t say you like the cola bottles but you don’t like the fruit salad.”

“It all comes together and hangs together as a whole.”

She said her three priorities would be: “Cutting the cost of living, cutting NHS waiting lists and cutting the cost of debt.”

Following the meeting, one Labour MP said the chancellor had been “strong and honest” but another said her pleas for unity had sounded “desperate”.

In the year since the last Budget, Labour MPs have become increasingly critical of Reeves’ judgement.

The Chancellor has been forced to make U-turns on some policies, including cutting the winter fuel payment.

There had also been concerns in the party about suggestions she would use this Budget to raise income tax rates, a move that would have broken the party’s election manifesto promise.

The government now appears to have stepped back from that proposal.

Instead, it could consider extending the freeze on the levels at which people start to pay income tax, meaning more people are drawn into paying more tax on their wages and pensions over time.

The chancellor could also look at a range of smaller measures to raise money including new taxes on high-value homes in England, electric vehicles and gaming companies.

She needs to find more money in order to meet her own rules aimed at reducing debt and borrowing.

Reeves has also suggested she will scrap the two-child benefit cap, which limits the benefits parents can claim for their third child or subsequent children born after 6 April 2017.

Conservative shadow chancellor Mel Stride said he worried the Budget would see “tax on hard- pressed hard-working people being transferred into the benefits system”.

Speaking at a conference on Monday, head of the Confederation of British Industry Rain Newton-Smith urged Reeves not to inflict “death by a thousand taxes” on businesses.

She said the chancellor should have “the courage to take two tough decisions rather than 20 easier ones”.

Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesperson Daisy Cooper accused the government of “rank hypocrisy” over its potential tax plans.

“Rachel Reeves once accused the Conservatives of ‘picking the pockets’ of working people by freezing tax thresholds – now Labour plans to do exactly the same,” she said.

Renate Reinsve is the new face of Scandinavia: depression with a smile. Standing 5 feet 10 with open, friendly features, the Norwegian talent has a grin that makes her appear at once like an endearing everywoman and a large, unpredictable child. Reinsve zoomed to international acclaim with her Cannes-winning performance in Joachim Trier’s 2021 “The Worst Person in the World,” a dramedy tailor-made to her lanky, likable style of self-loathing. Now, Trier has written his muse another showcase, “Sentimental Value,” where Reinsve plays an emotionally avoidant theater actor who bounces along in pretty much the same bittersweet key.

“Sentimental Value” gets misty about a few things — families, filmmaking, real estate — all while circling a handsome Oslo house where the Borg clan has lived for four generations. It’s a dream home with red trim on the window frames and pink roses in the yard. Yet, sisters Nora (Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) aren’t fighting to keep it, perhaps due to memories of their parents’ hostile divorce or maybe because they don’t want to deal with their estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård, wonderful), who grew up there himself and still owns the place, even though he’s moved to Sweden.

Trier opens the film with a symbolically laden camera pan across Oslo that ends on a cemetery. He wants to make sure we understand that while Norway looks idyllic to outsiders jealous that all four Scandinavian countries rank among the globe’s happiest, it can still be as gloomy as during the era of Henrik Ibsen.

More impressively, Trier shifts to a fabulous, time-bending historical montage of the house itself over the century-plus it’s belonged to the Borgs. There’s a crack in it that seems to represent the fissures in the family, the flaws in their facade. Over these images, Reinsve’s Nora recites a 6th-grade school essay she wrote about her deep identification with her childhood home. Having grown up to become terrified of intimacy, today she’s more like a detached garage.

Nora and Agnes were young when their father, a modestly well-regarded art-house filmmaker, decamped to a different country. At a retrospective of his work, Gustav refers to his crew as his “family,” which would irritate his kids if they’d bothered to attend. Agnes, a former child actor, might note that she, too, deserves some credit. Played in her youth by the compelling Ida Atlanta Kyllingmark Giertsen, Agnes was fantastic in the final shot of Gustav’s masterpiece and Trier takes a teasingly long time to suggest why she retired from the business decades ago, while her older sister keeps hammering at it.

Gustav hasn’t made a picture in 15 years. He’s in that liminal state of renown that I’m guessing Trier has encountered many times: a faded director who’s burned through his money and clout, but still keeps a tuxedo just in case he makes it back to Cannes. Like Reinsve’s Nora, Gustav acts younger than his age and is at his most charming in small doses, particularly with strangers. Trier and his longtime co-writer Eskil Vogt have made him a tad delusional, someone who wouldn’t instantly recognize his graying reflection in a mirror. Sitting down at a cafe with Nora, Gustav jokes that the waitress thinks that they’re a couple on a date. (She almost certainly doesn’t.)

But the tension between Gustav and Nora is real, if blurry. He’s invited her to coffee not as father and daughter, but as a has-been angling to cast Nora as the lead of his next film, which he claims he’s written for her. His script climaxes with a nod to the day his own mother, Karin (Vilde Søyland), died by suicide in their house back when he was just a towheaded boy of 7. Furthering the sickly mojo, Gustav wants to stage his version of the hanging in the very room where it happened.

His awkward pitch is a terrific scene. Gustav and Nora are stiff with each other, both anxious to prove they don’t need the other’s help. But Trier suggests, somewhat mystically, that Gustav has an insight into his daughter’s gloom that making the movie will help them understand. Both would rather express themselves through art than confess how they feel.

When Gustav offers his daughter career advice, it comes off like an insult. She’s miffed when her dad claims his small indie would be her big break. Doesn’t he know she’d be doing him the favor? She’s the lead of Oslo’s National Theatre with enough of a social media following to get the film financed. (With 10 production companies listed in the credits of this very film, Trier himself could probably calculate Nora’s worth to the krone.)

But Gustav also has a lucky encounter with a dewy Hollywood starlet named Rachel (Elle Fanning) who sees him as an old-world bulldog who can give her resume some class. Frustrated by her coterie of assistants glued to their cellphones, Rachel gazes at him with the glowy admiration he can’t get from his own girls. Their dynamic proves to be just as complex as if they were blood-related. If Rachel makes his film, she’ll become a combo platter of his mother, his daughter, his protégée and his cash cow. Nora merely merits the financing for a low-budget Euro drama; Rachel can make it a major Netflix production (something “Sentimental Value” most adamantly is not).

It takes money to make a movie. Trier’s itchiness to get into that unsentimental fact isn’t fully scratched. He seems very aware that the audience for his kind of niche hit wants to sniffle at delicate emotions. When Gustav’s longtime producer Michael (Jesper Christensen) advises him to keep making films “his way” — as in antiquated — or when Gustav takes a swipe at Nora’s career as “old plays for old people,” the frustration in those lines, those doubts whether to stay the course or chase modernity, makes you curious if Trier himself is feeling a bit hemmed in.

There’s a crack running through “Sentimental Value” too. A third of it wants to be a feisty industry satire, but the rest believes there’s prestige value in tugging on the heartstrings. The title seems to be as much about that as anything.

I’ve got no evidence for Trier’s restlessness other than an observation that “Sentimental Value” is most vibrant when the dialogue is snide and the visuals are snappy. There’s a stunning image of Gustav, Nora and Agnes’ faces melting together that doesn’t match a single other frame of the movie, but I’m awful glad cinematographer Kasper Tuxen Andersen got it in there.

The film never quite settles on a theme, shifting from the relationship between Nora and Agnes, Nora and Gustav, and Gustav and Rachel like a gambler spreading their bets, hoping one of those moments will earn a tear. Nora herself gets lost in the shuffle. Is she jealous of her father’s attention to Rachel? Does she care about her married lover who pops up to expose her issues? Does she even like acting?

Reinsve’s skyrocketing career is Trier’s most successful wager and he gives her enough crying scenes to earn an Oscar nomination. Skarsgård is certainly getting one too. But Fanning delivers the best performance in the film. She’s not only hiding depression under a smile, she’s layering Rachel’s megawatt charisma under her eagerness to please, allowing her insecurity at being Gustav’s second pick to poke through in rehearsals where she’s almost — but not quite — up to the task.

Rachel could have been some Hollywood cliché, but Fanning keeps us rooting for this golden girl who hopes she’ll be taken seriously by playing a Nordic depressive. Eventually, she slaps on a silly Norwegian accent in desperation and wills herself to cry in character. And when she does, Fanning has calibrated her sobs to have a hint of hamminess. It’s a marvelous detail that makes this whole type of movie look a little forced.

Nov. 4 (UPI) — British Chancellor Rachel Reeves signaled Tuesday that she was likely to raise taxes on ordinary people in her upcoming budget this month in spite of an election pledge by the Labour government it would not do so.

In a speech in Downing Street, Reeves said she would make “the choices necessary” to ensure the foundation of the economy was sufficiently strong for the government to deliver on its mandate to protect the NHS, get down the national debt and rebuild the economy.

Notably, she did not repeat the manifesto pledge the party ran on in the 2024 general election, in which it swept to power to leave untouched the three main taxes — income tax, National Insurance and VAT.

Instead, seeking to explain her actions in advance of her watershed budget, which she will deliver to Parliament on Nov. 26, she said people needed to “understand the circumstances we are facing” and that everyone needed to do their bit to rectify the situation.

“As I take my decisions on both tax and spend I will do what is necessary to protect families from high inflation and interest rates, to protect our public services from a return to austerity and to ensure that the economy that we hand down to future generations is secure, with debt under control.

“If we are to build the future of Britain together, we will all have to contribute to that effort. Each of us must do our bit for the security of our country and the brightness of its future.”

Reeves dangled the prospect of rewards down the line, stating that getting it right now would yield more resilient public finances with the headroom to withstand global shocks, which in turn would provide businesses with the confidence to invest.

She said that would in turn leave the government with more leeway to act when necessary, investing in infrastructure and industry to build a stronger economy and get down the cost of government debt, spending less on interest and more and schools and the NHS.

Reeves is betting on the budget, her second, to win the endorsement of the market for her management of the country’s finances by showing she can stick to the fiscal rules she set for herself in October 2024.

Those rules state she must balance spending with revenue — within a plus or minus margin of 0.5% of GDP — within five years, meaning no borrowing for everyday spending from the 2029-30 financial year onward. In addition, the ratio of government debt to GDP must begin falling within the same timeframe.

To do that, however, she must demonstrate how she plans to plug a fiscal hole of as much as $40 billion and boost lackluster economic growth.

The only options to close the gap and balance the books are a return to austerity — which the government has categorically ruled out — or boost the amount of money flowing into government coffers.

Reeves raised some taxes on business in her first budget in November 2024 and to come back for more after promising she would not do so, particulary when it comes to raising the basic rate of income tax — currently 20% — is very high risk, politically.

It hasn’t been done for 50 years and it didn’t work out well for then-Labour government with the country plunged into a currency crisis and forced to seek a bailout loan from the IMF.

Reeves mostly laid blame at the feet of the previous Conservative administration’s policies, including Brexit, austerity and cuts to infrastructure spending, all of which she said had led to falling productivity.

She also cited high inflation globally and economic uncertainty created by the trade tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump in recent months.

Conservative shadow chancellor, Mel Stride, said it was now certain tax hikes for families and businesses were on the way.

He said that if Reeves proceeded to go back on her word, she should quit.

Daisy Cooper, Treasury spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, said the government could no longer dodge responsibility.

“It’s clear that this budget will be a bitter pill to swallow as the government seems to have run out of excuses,” she said.