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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10 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.
The most notable feature of ‘historically unprecedented mass migration’ is how economically beneficial it is. It was the only thing propping up the late Tory economy, it’s the only way to get the workers to build the homes and infrastructure the country needs, and it’s a necessary part of addressing the aging population problem.
What a serious government would be doing is making a full-throated cultural as well as economic case for it - pitching the culture of freedom fostered by diversity against the culture of cruelty created by exclusion. When the most conservative person steps onto the Tube and sees people of every colour and every religion, queer people, goths, people wearing shirts of different football teams, what he immediately understands is that mutual toleration is the norm and picking on people of different backgrounds will not go well for him.
Politicians like to cast the bond markets as an entity which somehow exerts control over a government. In fact it's just maths. Pure and simple.
Truss and Kwarteng properly blew a hole in the public finances and the resulting drop in the currency had to be offset to avoid Britain becoming Venezuela. Sunak and Hunt did this by borrowing HEAVILY at 30Y maturities but the interest on this debt is punishing, to the point that it is probably the biggest drain on the public purse. Now, as debt > 100% of GDP, this means Reeves either needs growth to support higher tax
Receipts, or she has to cut expenditure.
Given Labour refuse to reverse Brexit (a monumentally stupid act of self-harm) there is nothing left to do but either raise taxes or continue with austerity.
It's that simple.
So, let's not blame the bond markets. Let's blame idiots like Truss, and let's blame cowards who enabled and continue to enable Brexit.
Much as I dislike making any even vaguely supportive comment re Starmer and Reeves, the oligarchs favourite comedy duo, I have to say that Kamo has more cheek than that lass that streaked across Twickenham. He/she/they seem to have forgotten that between 1979 and 1997, and then 2010 and 2024 (i.e. 32 of the past 46 years) his/her/their lot were running the joint - so when he/she/they say "low growth/low productivity economic model", we need to remind him/her/them who came up with this 'model' and why.
Essentially it's neoliberalism in a nutshell, Kamo - low growth/low productivity/low wage/low investment/low R&D/low expectation/low prospect of any improvement but, crucially, big profits from concentrating the 'market' (which apparently only exists when Kamo thinks of it - like fairies) into a few mega corps and a few mega banks all owned by the same nexus of vampiric shits that he/she/they probably work for and certainly worships.
The next ploy is to use the energy eating AI illusion to replace anyone who has to read or write to do their work so that a mass of chips can recycle information quickly and slickly and gradually end up at the inflection where all information becomes one point that dances on the end of a fibre optic cable. At which instant humanity vanishes into a hole in the space-time-information quantumverse and neoliberals everywhere orgasm as their atoms disassociate.
@Anon 08:58. How much does it matter who is to blame, when the outcome is the same?
All this really comes back to a failure to understand money creation. The Exchequer and Audit Departments Act of 1866 still in force! explains.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/29-30/39/section/13
It is certainly not the Thatcher dictum, which Labour has imbued:
"The state has no source of money, other than the money people earn themselves. If the state wishes to spend more, it can only do so by borrowing your savings or taxing you more. It is no good thinking that someone else will pay – that ‘someone else’ is you. There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money."
In fact government creates money out of thin air and creating money is actually the way government gets stuff done.
So don't believe in the debt - it is a way of finance stopping democratic wishes...
It's no defence of Starmer/Reeves to point out Kamo's boorish, myopic, repetitive idiocy, Sean.
One can criticise an idiot, without fear of justifying the con-men who happened to earn the dislike of that particular idiot!
@Anon 00:05
Apologists for unprecedented mass migration claim, on balance, it has been economically beneficial, whether this is true depends on what costs and benefits you include or exclude, it's a legitimate point of argument, but those apologists absolutely present it as a false dichotomy. It's not a choice between undiscerning mass migration and no migration at all, it's about the optimal level of migration for the UK's benefit. I don't understand people who believe it's okay for migrants to use economic reasoning when seeking where to live, but the UK state should treat it more like a charitable endeavour. The so called 'Boriswave' wasn't brought in by Tories to solve housing and infrastructure problems, those still exist (it made the former worse), they were brought into prop-up low productivity end of labour market. Besides, just adding more people doesn't automatically fix an ageing population. The UK absolutely wants younger, highly skilled, productive migrants, who make a net contribution, but not so much the lower skilled, lower productive ones, especially those where any net contribution is wiped out by subsidies to dependents. This is regardless of colour, creed, sexual orientation, ethnicity or sporting preferences.
The 'Boriswave' was good for capitalists who rely on low productivity labour, it was good for some landlords, but not so good for the existing population competing for finite and/or subsidised resources. And these economic issues are parallel to concerns of existing populations who see the areas they live in transformed by large numbers of incomers from very different cultures. Nobody is surprised that the areas where social cohesion is most frayed are those poorer areas where poorer migrants tend to find themselves competing with pre-existing poor residents. A classic example of incoherent thinking was Angela Rayner's interview with Trevor Phillips where she expressed Gov't commitment to tackling housing shortage, only to claim there was no shortage of housing for immigrants when it was pointed out they are largest driver of population growth. We also get endless wibble about how if it wasn't for Scrooge McDuck and his moneybin there would be plenty of subsidies for everyone in the queue for subsidies.
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