Yorkshire Post business editor Chris Burn takes a look at the claims about Rachel Reeves CV and attempts to suggest she isn't a real economist.
Category
š
NewsTranscript
00:00Hi, Chris Byrne here, Yorkshire Post Business and Features Editor. I just wanted to take a quick look at the evidence for and against all of these claims around Rachel Reeves's CV.
00:11Now, basically, her political opponents have been claiming or insinuating quite strongly that she's not a real economist and that she's basically over-emphasised her CV.
00:24And the reason for this is there was a change to her LinkedIn profile recently, which had said when she worked for Halifax Bank of Scotland, she'd been an economist.
00:34That was updated to say actually she works on the retail banking side of things at the bank.
00:39So that's the evidence that she's over-emphasised her credentials, basically.
00:46The evidence that she is a real economist, however, is this. Firstly, she studied politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Oxford.
00:56That led her to get a place on the Bank of England graduate scheme where she worked as an economist for six years.
01:04That's the second point. The third point is while she was doing that, she studied for a master's degree at the London School of Economics doing economics.
01:12The fourth point is that I interviewed Ray Newton Smith, head of the CBI this week, who worked with Rachel Reeves at the Bank of England back in the early noughties,
01:21who says she was very sharp, smart economist, true expert, well thought of, well regarded by her colleagues.
01:28And the final point is in 2021, I interviewed Rachel Reeves about her time at Halifax Bank of Scotland and other things, too.
01:36And she went in to give a very, very detailed answer about her work on the retail mortgages side of the bank.
01:42So if she was making it up rather than this being a kind of an error, a LinkedIn error, shouldn't she have said at that point, you know,
01:51oh, I was a big economist for Halifax Bank? She didn't.
01:54So my conclusion is that people trying to make the point or attempt to kind of insinuate the point that Rachel Reeves is somehow making this up
02:04and isn't an economist are either misguided or trying to misinform people.
02:09You don't have to agree with her policies to say she is qualified as an economist.
02:14That's super clear.