You can measure how much trouble this government is in by their invocations of Liz Truss. So naturally, her happy time in office merited a mention. In fact, curiously so considering how absent the Tories are from mainstream political discourse these days, Reeves kept spinning the old record of "don't let anyone tell you there's no difference between a Labour government and a Tory government". Desperate stuff. There was also an attack on those who might dispense with her fiscal rules, which she venerates as if a child of her genius. Her credibility on this issue - with whom exactly? - might have been aimed at Andy Burnham, who late last week shockingly suggested that the bond markets shouldn't be the be-all and end-all of economic management. But with Zack Polanski's eco-populism making waves on social media, and the return of Corbynism, it might easily have been aimed at them too.
On her achievements, school breakfast clubs got a mention. Which is the government's new get-out-of-jail-free card in the manner Sure Start centres used to excuse New Labour's record in office. To be honest, any normal person would be embarrassed offering that up after taking money off pensioners, attacking the disabled, declaring war on trans people, and guaranteeing arms shipments and military intelligence to a military undertaking a genocide.
In the last fortnight, the Labour leadership have discovered it's a good idea to criticise Reform. Which Reeves duly did. Nigel Farage is the "single greatest threat to the way of life and to the living standards of working people." Who, apart from Farage aficionados would disagree? They "are not on the side of working people" she said. Yes, but neither is Labour - unless by "working people" the chancellor meant Peter Thiel, Euan Blair, etcetera ad nauseam. And if they want to see Farage off, it's going to require something more than just saying he's racist. Delivery, delivery, delivery is supposed to switch off the Reform-curious. Socialism is the language of priorities, right? It's a good job Reeves had a policy broadside ready to blow Farage out of the water. She cheerily reeled off new forced work placement schemes for young unemployed people, promised more Covid fraud investigators, and announced enough money to fund an extra shelf of books in every school. An agenda whose ambition future historians of Labourism can only marvel at. Meanwhile, Farage must have spent the day pinching himself.
Reeves is clearly living her best life. She's the first female chancellor in history, in case you haven't heard her say so. But despite this accolade, she will always be remembered as the politician whose alacrity for cruelty sent her party's polling into a death spiral within a month of winning a landslide. Still, the consequences of her actions are for other people to bear, be they at the sharp end of her policies or current and future Labour activists and politicians that have to clean up after her mess.
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3 comments:
Seems to me as though the real, squalid nature of what's going on finally came out in the Burnham episode this week gone.
The all-powerful Markets - the very same ones which summarily booted Truss in under a lettuce, eviscerating the Conservative Party in the process - have decreed that no UK government will be allowed to borrow any money for spending in the foreseeable future.
With raising taxes on the rich currently being like trying to pin down a lubricated eel, and raising taxes on the non-rich being understood as political suicide, this means that anyone who wants to rule the UK has to get elected without being able to promise any nice things which might require money to deliver. At all.
Potentially, that explains the behaviour of the current regime without requiring personalities or beliefs to play any significant element. They're stuck trying to play the same game as the far right - promising little more than to wave flags and attack scapegoats - because they're not allowed to play anything else.
Which in turn means that the next government will be far right.
I fear Reeves and the Labour leadership are delusional. The problems the country or countries face are immense, long term, structural and ideological and the solutions that they come up with are more of the same delivered, delivered, delivered faster and wider. At some point they must realise they are not going to work and lives are not going to get better and we can't distract with being nasty to foreigners or the poor, especially since Reform can do it so much better. I suppose at that point we will see them prepare for their next job outside politics - perhaps helping Pasha Blair administer Gaza.
There's a lot of wibble about 'bond' villains (geddit?), but in reality the Gov't needs to borrow, not so much for genuine investment, but for spending to prop up the low growth/low productivity economic model it seems wedded to. Burnham has no skin in the game at present, so he can spout populist wibble for the useful idiots, but Reeves can't because the people who the Gov't wants to borrow from are at least listening to her.
The UK can't have nice things because there aren't enough people who are economically productive enough to pay for them all, and this appears to be deliberate. Immigrants are easy scapegoats because a feature of historically unprecedented mass immigration is that whilst some portion of it is economically productive, some portion of it is unproductive and only adds to the existing problems in a material way (the sheer size is too big to pretend otherwise). The Gov't (and even the cleverest of apologists for mass immigration) find it difficult to refute some of the specific claims Farage makes against that portion of mass immigration which isn't productive, so they shout 'racist' instead, but that only affirms Farage's claims.
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