Judging from current Government policy, Labour’s first female shadow chancellor might be forgiven for thinking her party won last December’s election.
Anneliese Dodds takes on the brief of scrutinising an economy not far removed from a John McDonnell dreamland. She finds herself opposing a Conservative administration paying 80pc of the wages of employees not working because of the coronavirus pandemic, that has effectively nationalised the railways and is spending 5.3pc of GDP on a fiscal stimulus package.
The 42-year-old former MEP and university lecturer is seen in Labour circles as a soft-left, pro-European, uncontroversial figure who’s across the detail and would have fit in an Ed Miliband cabinet. As it happens, she will share the front bench with the former Labour leader, who returns as Keir Starmer’s shadow business secretary.
That’s not to say she’s immune to extreme proposals. When she ran unsuccessfully as the Labour candidate for Reading East in 2010, she told Labour List: “We need to see far more radical change if we’re to stop the climate change that is already leading to some of the severest floods and droughts in history. The time has come to contemplate painful but necessary action like banning domestic flights.”
Having graduated from Oxford University in the same year, from the same course, as the Chancellor Rishi Sunak –Politics, Philosophy and Economics in 2001 – she worked in academia, focusing on public policy, before becoming an MEP and then MP for Oxford East in 2017, when she was appointed shadow financial secretary to the Treasury under Jeremy Corbyn.