According to The Guardian, Keir Starmer is going to say today:
If you think our job in 1997 was to rebuild a crumbling public realm, that in 1964 it was to modernise an economy overly dependent on the kindness of strangers, in 1945 to build a new Britain, in a volatile world, out of the trauma of collective sacrifice – in 2024 it will have to be all three.
Apparently he will add:
This is about taking our party back to where we belong and where we should always have been … back doing what we were created to do. That's why I say this project goes further and deeper than New Labour's rewriting of clause IV … This is about rolling our sleeves up, changing our entire culture, our DNA. This is clause IV on steroids.
All of which is a string of platitudes, largely because I gather that the draft Labour manifesto is dedicated to having iron-clad fiscal rules and reaffirming the role of independent institutions like the OBR and Bank of England and to establishing an Office for Value for Money.
You can transform the state if you abandon the constraints of neoliberalism that are deliberately intended to prevent that happening but you can't transform the state and keep those constraints in place.
Starmer has to decide. What is more important? Neoliberal rules that deliver a small state or making the state work for people? Trying to do both will be a recipe for failure.
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If that is what he is going to say then he should not bother. It is saying a lot without actually saying anything at all.
Cut the BS, Starmer and give us something worth voting for.
Craig
Hi Richard
on this point will you be writing a blog post with your thought on the Labour draft manifesto?
https://labourlist.org/2023/05/labour-manifesto-2024-election-what-policies-npf-party/
I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool Corbynite but there seems to be stuff in here that is actually….pretty good.
Whether Starmer can be trusted to deliver on these promises is another matter but tentatively I would say that the draft manifesto is more radical than I would have expected.
I will be looking and reviewing – but nothing is possible within the fiscal constraints they are imposing on themselves
When the 2020 Labour leadership election was happening, Starmer praised Corbyn and pledged to keep to the 2017 manifesto. Although I am not a betting person I know those who are study ‘form’. There is a GE being prepared for. You can guess my view on the speech and draft manifesto. As you say, if you don’t open the door you are not going anywhere.
Joe Biden, by no means a real man of the Left, seems to have got the message much better than Starmer.
Government investment can grow grow the economy.
Great, Keir. A positive vision of the future is just what we need. So what exactly are you actually going to *do*?
There is much needed, on schools and universities, hospitals, social care, energy, sewerage, housing, poverty, living standards, equality, human rights, immigration, justice, and all the rest, so give me some examples.
What do you hope to achieve, specifically, that will rebuild the public sector, modernise the economy, and build a lasting legacy on the scale of the 1945 government?
Precisely
Exactly. And HOW are you (Keir) going to do any of it constrained by “iron-clad fiscal rules” ? A small matter of squaring the circle?
“How” involves deployment of the power and resources of the state, in a mixed economy, in concert with a private sector under appropriate regulation. Anything we can actually do, we can afford.
Squaring the circle is exactly the right metaphor. We know the original problem – constructing a square with the same area as a given circle geometrically, in a finite number of steps using only compasses and a straightedge – is impossible, there is a formal proof that it cannot be done, but the answer is obvious algebraically (a square of sides r times the square toot of pi).
Just as Starmer will find it impossible to achieve anything of lasting value if he confines himself in an iron straight jacket of so-called “fiscal responsibility”. It is a neoliberal trap, mentally, politically, and economically. Starmer needs to think outside the box, use more of the tools available to him, and explain how and why that will work.
Agreed
Indeed Starmer has to decide whether to be a Starmtrooper for Neoliberal or NeoClassical economics or a soldier standing up for democratic socialism the original motivating idea for setting up the Labour Party.
It ought to be easy enough for him to justify the case for the latter since the evidence is strong the current Conservative Party’s project is to take the country backwards in the sense of removing checks and balances which facilitate elite looting including “rent” extraction. Holding bank or base rate high obviously serves those who have savings or want to extract “rent” using various methods. Reducing taxes and providing tax breaks on this elite also form part of the project. The alternative highlighted in the following paper reveals how backward this looting is for a country:-
“Our findings indicate that to build fiscally capable states, a key route is the consolidation of cohesive political institutions, providing strong checks and balances on the discretionary power of the executive.”
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5833119140f0b6437b00001d/esid_wp_59_ricciuti_savoia_sen_1_.pdf
Since a strong and central feature of human society is to engage in collective action it’s clearly vital that money, which operates as a “collectivising tool” for such action, is as equitably available for use as possible.
Ha Ha!
I like that!
‘Money’ as a socialist project!! Discuss.
Which to me explains even more why there is an agenda to narrow people’s access to it, as well as to increase the use of credit.
Agreed.
What Stymied seems to ignore is that the rules he will be adopting were created by a party of rule breakers and liars. So, he should come in and do what they did and chuck their edifices away. Who remembers the PSBR today?
His next track should be what I would call ‘fiscal populism’ – with a set of polices (under advice of course) that will immediately see more money in people’s (voters) pockets. Since the markets operate on the basis that taxes have to pay for stuff, he should aim his hefty tax rises at capital and soak up some of the funding for the Tory party in the process no doubt. He might also be able to convince people that this can also fund the NHS more etc., whilst secretly getting more more printed into it with service based reforms.
Any reforms he comes up with need to be felt by voters and if that is the case, he would need to keep telling voters about what he is doing because the Right would most certainly go to a full-on information war as we have seen in Brazil and U.S. with dire consequences.
Stymied has to realise what he is dealing with and I’m not sure he does. He is dealing with a society riven with underinvestment and a lack of resources. As long as that remains the case, it will be extremely easy for him to have one term in power as such societies are always susceptible to falling out amongst themselves and not forming a concerted and long lasting agreement as to how to be governed.
My intent if it were me would be to lock the Tories out forever. They have truly revealed themselves since 2010 to be corrupt and unsuitable to be in government. Policies – and Stymied’s other weak spot – the ability to share power with others – would see to that.
Starmer is so scared of exploring ways to actually do things. Even Tory Simon Jenkins says so. But Starmer could still say hes only doing what they are already doing in the US, Denmark etc .
If it wasnt so nightmarish – it would be almost funny that he’s spending all his time trying to construct more and more institutional contraints for himself – in what hopefully will be a vain attempt to avoid saying he will rescue the NHS, – retaining the doctors and nurses now going to Australia and elswhere by paying them properly.
https://skwawkbox.org/2023/05/13/starmer-admits-hes-a-tory/
If Labour had stuck to iron clad fiscal rules in 1945, we would have gone back to the dark ages. Starmer doesn’t seem to understand what Labour did in 1945. I will give him a clue, they didn’t become Conservatives.
Agreed, entirely
A full set of Labour’s policy proposals can be found at https://labourlist.org/2023/05/labour-manifesto-2024-election-what-policies-npf-party/. Some of these ideas are quite interesting, but I agree sticking to fiscal rules might be a mistake.
I will take time to look at them and comment
Writing in his famous essay – The Lion and the Unicorn in 1941 George Orwell commented that the current war could only be won by implementing socialism. He warned that if the common people of Britain were to keep enduring the hell they were living through needed something to give them hope. Starmer has jettisoned socialism. Those left Wing MPs who have progressive ideas have been side-lined. They are deaf to economists like Richard and others who propose something different and which worked for the Attlee government. Close study of that Labour manifesto and its effects would seem wise. The debt to GDP ration in the years after 1945 was 250% . Still what was achieved by that government and to be fair the Macmillan Tories was for folk like my parents little short of a miracle. I have an awful feeling Starmer will be a latter day Ramsey Macdonald. If you read the history of the second Labour government you will see the exact arguments for betraying the working class were used. Almost word for word. The Labour Right have a very long record of treachery.
Of course the Attlee government was transformative and spent a lot of money, stretching the Debt to GDP ratio. However, that was in a completely different era, after a cataclysmically devastating World War when virtually every country was engaged in re-construction aided by huge loans from the USA.
The UK birth rate was exceedingly high in comparison to nowadays, in a still Industrialised nation that still had the remnants of an Empire. Life expectancy was significantly lower in the 1940’s and 50’s than it is today, with many more workers in comparison to pensioners! The two eras – 1944 and 2024 are not realistically comparable in economic terms, and it is infuriating that Boomers fail to repeatedly point this out… The ending of Bretton Woods and the OPEC crisis feel like the real seeds of de-industrialisation, stagflation and the subsequent economic strife of ‘Western’ nations. Neoliberalism arose out of the flames of the post-war consensus. It has remained as the dominant force because the Multinational Corporations, Big Agribusiness, Big Pharma and the MIC got hold of the levers of government. Politicians have relatively little influence and much less power than we assume. Starmer and his political acolytes cannot be held responsible for the Worldwide kleptocracy and the collapse of economic stewardship. Nowadays, politicians are mostly beholden to the Media which is controlled by a handful of Billionaire Barons, the FAANGs and Hedge Funds… The significantly altered demographics of highly developed nations has reduced the PSR substantially but politicians and commentators keep avoiding this huge elephant. The need for ‘UBI’ in the face of rapidly advancing automation and AI is often talked about but very few people talk about actually implementing it.
We need a cabal of ‘insider’ politicians who understand the system but who are prepared to overthrow it from within whilst withstanding the maelstrom of opposition from Multinational Corporations, The Banks and other plutocrats. God help us!
As a near Boomer (1951) there are different interpretations available of post WW2 history, for example the USA conducting warfare both literally and economically throughout that period (the Evil Empire view quoting the Volcker shock), the world as a stage for three-power manoeuvres (USA, China, Russia and allied agents like the Israeli lobby), neoliberalism as a 1930s pandemic virus that has to have a pliable government to break through (Thatcher, Reagan etc), the pivotal role of Saud…. the list is big and confusing!
However, the only actual breakthrough attempt in this country was vilified and killed off, and Starmer is the plug to permanently stop any further leakage from that area.
Boomers do know about that, but what are we expected to do about it?
Die?
Refuse our state pension that we’ve paid into all our working lives?
https://labouroutlook.org/2023/05/11/the-public-are-crying-out-for-a-proper-change-of-course-ian-lavery-mp-on-the-local-election-results/
Ian Lavery is usually one of the more outspoken MPs. It sounds to me like he is scared to say what he really thinks here.
He was on the picket line today at Newcastle Central Station with the RMT, and at least he says that he thinks the entire rail network should be publicly owned.
It is concerning that the growing homogenization of political parties towards right to right-wing neoliberalism is being met with so much praise… we used to criticise states such as North Korea or China for having “democracies” in which the common man effectively had no political options – but now we welcome it.