Chancellor Rachel Reeves was attempting to get some positive news coverage while recording with media outside a petrol station on Wednesday, but was reduced to stammering and ranting about British values when a tradesman arrived to fuel up his truck.
Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) Rachel Reeves announced a temporary cut in tax on fuel would be extended on Wednesday, and discussing the policy with media at the topical location of a petrol station forecourt in Leeds, England was heckled by a passing tradesman.
Arriving in a tipper truck and wearing jobsite hi-vis clothes, the working man recognised the Chancellor and started shouting “get Keir Starmer out! Nigel Farage, go on Nigel!”.
The jeers prompted Reeves to remark to the waiting journalists “shall we just wait until they’ve gone?”. The man called out to the Chancellor again as he drove away, telling her she is ruining the country while making a rude gesture, and defying the politician to have him arrested as he left.
Reeves smiled blankly while the heckling went on, but as the van driver pulled away the Chancellor appeared to suddenly find her voice, and replied, stuttering:
I love our, I love our, I love our country. I love our country. I love, I love, I love our country. And one of the things about our country is good manners. It’s not very British. Right, very good.
That those who have fundamental disagreements with Britain’s ruling Labour Party are somehow un-British is an ever more common refrain of senior party figures. This includes the Prime Minister, who has taken to the view that Britishness as an identity is essentially values-based, rather than more traditional ideas that link the distinct people associated with the British isles for millennia with a nationhood.
An expression of this world view came in April when Starmer made an address on St George’s Day, England’s national day, in which he managed to avoid actually naming England and mainly focussed on criticising his critics as “plastic patriots”.
Nigel Farage, who had been named as a preferable leader by the tradesman in the heckles, later responded that he wanted to track him down to buy him a pint of beer in thanks. Reform UK party spokesman Zia Yusuf went further, perhaps joking that a future Reform government would like to give the heckler a place in Parliament, so he could keep “all the crooks” there in line.