Wes Streeting - Labour's shadow health secretary - wrote this in the Observer yesterday:
Friday in my constituency summed up for me the state of our country. Local headteachers I respect and admire were in tears as they described the challenges they are grappling with. The owner of a popular local chippy showed me his energy bill, up from £5,000 a quarter to £11,000, as he shared his fears for his business. A parent showed me a photo of his straight-A son beaten black and blue in the middle of his GCSEs and shared his frustration that he has put more work into the investigation than the police.
I can only presume he was suggesting that Labour would solve all these problems. Why else mention them?
Except he then dashed hopes, saying:
Labour faces two big hurdles.
The first is the car crash of the public finances.
Keir and Rachel Reeves face tougher choices than Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in 1997. As Keir said in his conference speech in September, this means there will be good Labour things we want to do but won't be able to promise.
In other words, Labour is going to claim there is no money, so it cannot help.
And, he said:
We face a huge deficit of trust in politics too. It's a far bigger problem for us than it is for the Tories. As Britain's progressive party, Labour is where people turn when they believe things can get better.
There is no one who can now think Labour is a progressive party. And when it comes to trust, Keir Starmer has u-turned on almost every commitment he made to become Labour leader - which I was not alone in thinking he might mean at the time. So, Labour is massively contributing to that deficit of trust.
Streeting went on to say:
That's why we are being so careful to only make promises we know we can keep.
Even this, though, is not true. Labour is promising nothing at all.
Despite that he says:
Imagine Britain leading the G7 with the highest sustained economic growth, with a million more jobs in green energy, with an NHS fit for the future, safe streets and a trusted justice system, and with every child, whatever their background, having the best start in life. That will be Labour's platform at the next general election.
None of those things can be achieved without major investment. Rachel Reeves has backtracked from all such spending now. So what Streeting is doing is precisely what he says he will; not. He said:
The only thing worse than no hope is false hope.
There is not a hope that any of the things that he talks about will happen because Labour is promising to do precisely nothing to achieve them.
No wonder I have a huge deficit of trust in Labour politics
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The central issue is the widespread failure to recognise ultimately it’s the state that has the final power to” take position in promises,” the promises of course being debt which is the way money is created from thin air.
This means the Sado-Monetarism (which many know as Austerity) that every single political party in the UK believes it needs to automatically inflict on the UK is just mindless ignorance. Come war, pandemics, tackling climate change, optimising the economy, etc. the state can in fact control how much position the private sector takes. This is going to be particularly necessary for tackling climate change since it needs reducing private sector consumption in order to secure resources for that tackling.
Very obviously the Labour Party under the leadership of Keir “I hate tree-huggers” Starmer is a million miles from understanding what I’ve just stated but so is the Green “We love tree-huggers” Party with its adherence to the Sado-Monetarist ideology of Positive Money. Very obviously the other parties suffer from massive ignorance and the reality is it’s going to be a very long haul to re-educate but re-educating we must!
Agreed wholeheartedly.
His name ought to be ‘Wes Bleating’ ‘cos that’s all he does.
The headline of the Wes Streeting piece in the Observer, “false hope is worse than no hope”, was particularly amusing, given what an obvious no-hoper the guy is. I mean, there were certainly problems with the Corbyn/McDonnell era, but Starmer and team are just appalling.
Agreed
And under McDonnell/Corbyn, at least we had some hope. Working in the public sector, I did feel some hope at least.
Here’s the problem expressed as simply as I can with the Sado-Monetarism or Quantity Theory of Money dogma dominating the thinking of most people in the UK.
The quantity of money in active circulation actually adjusts to trade and the state’s need to spend it’s therefore not as the dogma argues trade to the quantity of money including how much revenue the government can bring in.
Both are of course subject to resource availability and the productivity level prevailing, which in turn are subject to the phenomena of population growth, wars, pandemics, weather effects including climate change, financial crashes, etc.
In short an economy is always in dynamic flux responding to change and the state needs to monitor this flux because ultimately only the state has the power to take any necessary corrective action.
Neat idea
But reflecting reality…..
How many hours/days before Starmer does a u-turn on Ed Miliband’s idea of large scale state investment to make the UK housing stock more energy efficient because the nation can’t afford it?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/09/labours-plan-to-insulate-more-homes-would-create-4m-job-opportunities
I thought that had already happened
Labour party HQ will be trolling through Ed Miliband’s tweets and retweets to find an excuse to get rid of him as a member.
I note what the tories say at the end of that article. I think if they were sensible they would adopt that plan and give hope to millions of tory voters who are thinking of voting labour next election.
The Starmer mob getting the excuses in early why they’re going to be the Tory Mark 2 Party if they win office:-
“Well, obviously, the financial circumstances have changed quite a lot since Keir became leader and things that might have been possible are just not possible now.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/10/if-you-want-cartwheels-im-not-your-person-rachel-reeves-on-charisma-u-turns-and-rescuing-the-economy
“This article was amended on 19 July 2023. A previous version referred to a public affairs officer for Samaritans when the Salvation Army was intended.”
The end of the Rachel Reeves article. The Guardian can see into the future! Only by 9 days but it could come in useful at the next election.
“Jonathan Church is impressed with Reeves, who worked as an economist at the Bank of England and at the British embassy in Washington DC before winning Leeds West for Labour in 2010”.
She is 44, which means she was a very junior something in the BoE and @ the embassy.
“Church thinks she would make a credible chancellor – serious, informed and with a previous life outside politics. “I’m not a great fan of career politicians,”
Reeves has been a politician longer than she has worked. That suggests a “career politician”.
Overall a pathetic human-interest puff piece – with zero policy & zero questioning. Oh so typical of the G’.
The questioning on Loach was appropriate
I think it is very telling of the state of British politics that the Graun is so positive about the current Labour leadership group.
They have always been critical of the Tories, of course, but tended to damn Labour with faint praise (and with outright hostility to Corbyn & Co, of course), whilst talking up the LibDems. The LibDems are now such a busted flush and Starmer has moved the Labour Party so far to the right, that the Graun can happily back them, whilst generally turning a blind eye to or tacitly supporting the anti-democratic behaviour within the party.
Apologists for the Labour Party, such as Polly Toynbee a few weeks ago, are still exhorting us to be patient, and accept that the party must appeal to the centre ground; we must put our left wing expectations to one side, and wear a giant nose-peg and vote Labour. Because it’s better than the alternative. We are Tory enablers if we criticise Starmer.
Well, we did that in 1997, and although we got some improvements, we also got the illegal Iraq war, and we also failed to change the basic corruption underlying our system.
Now, I could still, just about, be persuaded to wear that nose-peg, on the rather dubious basis that Starmer et al are actually lying to us now, about what a future Labour government will do.
But, and it’s a very big but… what I know about the vindictiveness and ruthlessness within the heart of the labour party is more than enough to convince me that the apologists have got it very wrong.
There is no hope that tactically Starmer is wooing the centre and right, in order to appease the press, but will, after the election, somehow lead a left of centre social democratic government.
No, the Labour Party is a lost cause, and I’m very sad to have to say that.
I’m using a pseudonym, as I’m currently still a member of the Labour Party and involved in the selection process for our next parliamentary candidate. So I am afraid that what I have to say about the Labour party, as a long time member and activist, will result in my being suspended or expelled. I don’t care if this happens when I step down from the executive committee, but right now, we are trying to avoid a right wing candidate being imposed on us.
You’ll have to let us know what happens. At the moment it’s the importand candidates being suspended, expelled or not allowed to stand who get in the news. People like Ian Byrne, Corbyn and Jamie Driscoll.
I’ll be voting for Jamie Driscoll next year whether he stands as labour or independent, because that’s where I live. In fact County Durham was not going to be part of the north east mayoral group, until we found out how much money we would lose!
My constituency will disappear, and we will be in Kevan Jones’ constituency, assuming he’s allowed to stand, or someone to the left of him. Not sure what’s happening yet.
We’d probably got the Iraq war with the Conservatives too. Only two voted against, seventeen abstained and rest voted for war.
Labour had 84 voting against and 69 abstaining. 254 voted for.
That suggests if the Conservatives had been in office, they would have had a majority just with their own party.
I’m not sure that matters, does it? Blair took the country to war. The fact the Tories may have done it as well does not, for 1 second, absolve Blair.
Cyndy
I didn’t it did absolve it. Jenw commented Labour i got us the illegal war. My opinion is we would have got it with the Tories in power. The Lib Dems dissented.
“In the latest blocking of socialist Parliamentary candidates by Keir Starmer’s Labour, Dawn McGuinness was prevented from standing before members for the new seat of Bangor Aberconwy, despite backing from Unison and Unite which should have seen her longlisted. The reasons given by the Labour Party focused on Dawn’s previous support for Jeremy Corbyn. On Monday, two-thirds of the selection committee resigned in protest at the way the selection process had been conducted.”
They can use that reason for getting rid of half of the people who want to stand for parliament, can’t they?
Thanks for covering this Richard. I’ve always been a fan of Ed Miliband on climate change. His podcast “reasons to be cheerful” is worth a listen, and full of lots of ideas on policy.
Starmer seems to be doing everything he can to appease the right wing press, but it won’t make any difference. The red tops brought down a Jewish Labour leader over the way he ate a bacon sandwich, then saw no irony at all in accusing the next leader of anti semitism. They’ll always find some attack line or another to use. The current tactic just seems to be as Tory as possible, but they’ll never be as Tory as the tories are, will they?
What a mess the country’s in when so many Labour Party members are putting their name to a message which is basically vote for less crap and mess under Starmer than under the Tories but crap and mess there’ll be!
The deficit of trust in the Labour started a long time ago. Here’s one Gordon Brown giving independence to the government’s own bank which has resulted in unnecessarily increased cost for the government:-
“Last week, the Treasury paid its highest borrowing costs this century at 5.6% on £4bn in government debt. Borrowing costs have risen above even the levels hit during Liz Truss’s tumultuous time in office.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/10/if-you-want-cartwheels-im-not-your-person-rachel-reeves-on-charisma-u-turns-and-rescuing-the-economy
The Unite Union have ‘put Starmer on notice.’
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jul/10/starmer-put-on-notice-by-unite-leader-after-vote-to-retain-ties-with-labour
So Labour are saying that despite being one of the worlds richest nations we cant have decent infrastructure, functioning public services and we cant all get enough to eat or keep our homes warm.
What an offer!
Interesting read here. This was the Socialist Health Association at the Durham Gala on Friday night, a meeting before the Big Meeting.
https://www.sochealth.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/WEBSITE-DMG-leaflet.pdf
Mary Kelly Foy was giving a speech at it, labour MP for City of Durham, at the moment.
I bet it wasn’t approved by Streeting or Starmer.
Streeting seems to be saying there is no economic case for investing in the future.
Not for health, not for education , not for housing , not for utilities and public infrastructure. Equally not for combatting global warming and rising sea levels.
If he genuinely believes that he is not fit to be a minister in a Labour Government.
If he is saying so for effect : to quell the fearful hearts of tax payers who fear for Labour and its spending ambitions, he needs to clarify the difference between spending on investment and consumption , and how he will tax wealth not those close to marginal income thresholds.
Here’s someone who should get in next year. She only has IDS to beat, and at the last election she cut his majority. I wonder if Starmer will let he stand.
https://labourhub.org.uk/2023/07/12/faiza-shaheen-keeping-hope-alive/
I have worked with Faiza and think she would be great asset to parliament