Preserving the Wealthy

I doubt Rachel Reeves wanted to lecture the country on the state of the public finances over their cornflakes, so what she had to say must have been important. Right? Her curious little speech on Tuesday morning, flanked by sharply folded Union Jacks in the Downing Street media room, basically said tax rises are coming - without explicitly saying tax rises were coming. Her warning was coded under layers of "years of failure", "difficult circumstances", and "poor productivity". This matters because one of the promises Labour made in its otherwise throwaway manifesto was no taxes on "working people". A promise made, a promise about to be broken.

Contrary to what politicians think, most of the British are electorate are not mugs. They are also quite capable of listening to justifications for unpopular or painful policies, and accepting them if they believe there is no alternative and they trust the government of the day. So limbering up to break tax promises wouldn't automatically put a black mark against the Labour's name, provided most people thought they were doing an okay and competent job. Unfortunately for this government, this is far from where the public are.

On the mess Labour inherited, most people would agree the Tories made a hash of things. In the abstract some would even accept the "tough choices" Labour promised to get matters fixed, albeit that pledge had less to do with getting the economy chugging and was more about managing political expectations. What the public weren't and aren't prepared to accept were self-evidently cruel, stupid, and counter-productive decisions. For instance, in her Tuesday morning address Reeves rightly attacked the Tories for their austerity programme, which led to crumbling public services and sucking demand out of the economy. Yet isn't the latter what she did with her Winter Fuel nonsense, and what would have happened with her plans, now largely abandoned, to hammer disabled people? Labour's stubbornly catastrophic polling shows that, as far as the electorate are concerned, they have traded away their right to look serious, and no amount of grown up cosplay and wittering about fiscal rules will change their mind. Their minds look made up, and Labour inhabits the same political place of pain John Major did after Black Wednesday, Gordon Brown after the election-that-never-was, Boris Johnson during Partygate and Pinchergate, and Liz Truss following ... Liz Truss. That is until the party retires its leadership. Then it might claw its way back to prominence.

The other problem is that, just like the Tories that came before them, Labour is seemingly determined to make "working people" pay for the country's difficulties. Leaving aside the fiscal rules, even if state finances resembled household finances, there was no hint whatsoever that Reeves was preparing to make further inroads into wealth. Be it propertied, sitting idly offshore, zipping through the City's speculative circuits, or materialising as dividends or rents. She might want to raise tax receipts to "modernise" the state, but at base what her speech previewed was a scheme for preserving the exact same class relations that exercised Nigel Farage's foray into economics.

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