Reeves Peddled HBOS “Economist” Myth to Get into Parliament
As Guido revealed earlier, Rachel Reeves has been doing some digital back-tracking, editing her LinkedIn profile to “reflect” that she wasn’t an economist at Halifax for three years but instead worked in “retail banking.” As Guido also revealed, she was in fact, part of a small complaints team at HBOS, handling routine tasks far away from the economists’ desk…
Reeves has been peddling her supposed credentials as an long-time economist for years—long before her becoming a senior figure in the Labour Party. Back in 2009, when she was the Labour candidate for Leeds West, her campaign page proudly claimed she had “spent her professional career as an economist working for the Bank of England, the British Embassy in Washington and at Halifax Bank of Scotland.” Hilariously, her pitch to the people adds that she will “will subscribe to high standards of integrity [and] transparency”. Fourteen years later she’s finally had to be transparent about her real role at HBOS…
In a 2009 Guardian interview, Reeves said she worked as “an analyst for one of the recapitalised banks, Lloyds Banking Group,” saying, “I guess you could say that, moving from banking, I am one of the few people entering politics to be going to a more popular profession.” That joke hasn’t aged well…
Embellishing her background as long-time economist in order to get elected into Parliament is more than a little eyebrow-raising. If Reeves has been exaggerating her CV for years, Guido wonders what else she’ll be economical with when it comes to transparency...
