Rachel Reeves defends freebies: ‘I’m not personally a huge Sabrina Carpenter fan, being a 46-year-old woman’

Reeves says she is 'not personally a huge Sabrina Carpenter fan' as she defends herself over freebies rowReuters

Transcript

00:00Your welfare cuts will plunge a quarter of a million people into relative poverty

00:03but at the same time you've accepted lavish freebies including 600 pound

00:07tickets in a VIP box to watch Sabrina Carpenter. Do you regret accepting those

00:13tickets and will you repay the money?

00:16So a quarter of a million people is based on absolutely no one going into

00:23work who was previously out of work and yet we're putting a billion pounds in

00:28for targeted employment support to get people back to work. So I'm confident

00:34that our plans far from increasing poverty will actually result in more

00:38people having fulfilling work, paying a decent wage to lift themselves and their

00:42families out of poverty. Now it may come as a surprise to some of you that I'm

00:46not personally a huge Sabrina Carpenter fan being a 46 year old woman but a

00:52member of my family did want to go and see that concert. I'm not in a position

00:56now that I can easily just go and sit in a concert and some of the things I

01:00might have been able to do in my everyday life in the past are not so

01:05easy now and so I had advice that it would be better to be in a box. The

01:10owners of the O2 had a box of tickets that are not available to buy and they

01:16said that I could go in there and that was better for security reasons. I do

01:20recognize that people think that that's a bit odd but that's the reason why I

01:24did that rather than just being in normal seats which to be honest for me

01:29and my family would have been a lot nicer and a lot easier.