The OECD has issued a new report on the state of the global economy, as it sees it. It includes this chart:
You will note that the OECD's growth projections for the UK come at the very lowest end of its projection scale.
In commenting I am not suggesting that growth is necessarily a good thing. Nor am I commenting on the accuracy of the forecast - although it seems to be consistent with many others. Instead I am noting that if Labour is going to base the whole of its promise to the electorate on growth then it had better start talking fairly quickly about what it is going to do to deliver it, which so far it has totally failed to do.
A wave of euphoria at the Tories leaving office is not going to happen. Nor is that sentiment going to release a pent up desire to invest in the country.
Labour's promise to balance the books is an anti-growth policy.
Its cancellation of its green investment programme undermines its desire for growth.
So too has limitation of its programme to support employee rights limited the growth potential of the economy - because people living in fear do not deliver growth.
Nothing it has said or done suggests how it will change the Tory pattern of economic management that has produced the forecast the OECD has made. In that case there is nothing to any of its promises. I wish it were otherwise.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
“Nothing it has said or done suggests how it will change the Tory pattern of economic… mis… management”
Fixed it for you.
What is the difference between Labour and the tories?
The spelling.
Somebody clearly in need of treatment for delusion: “In December last year, Keir Starmer admiringly said that Thatcher “set loose our natural entrepreneurialism”
Not so much out of touch as out of his mind (unless one is talking about the growth of slum landlords on the back of discounted council house sales – does that count?).
All the above economy related. Now put yourself in… 2010 & write a novel on UK events 2010 to 2024 – it would never get in to print – it would be regarded as mad.
Thank you, Mike.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/tony-blair-and-his-associates-are-waiting-in-the-wings-to-seize-back-power-in-the-uk.html has a few more delusional quotes from Starmer and his crew.
Depressing ain’t it ?
Very recently, the Prince of Darkness has been fulsome in expressing his joy that several Momentum members who were Labour councillors have resigned and become Independents. These were councillors in Southern England.
Meanwhile, in South Tyneside, the constituency seat of South Shields is now dominated by Greens and Independents on the local council..
Maybe the phoenix of the Independent Labour Party mighr emerge ?
The Naked Capitalism post was interesting – this offers a quite interesting alternative:
https://unherd.com/2024/05/the-mcsweeney-project/
extract:
“The McSweeney project is not a restoration of Blairism, but a rejection of it.” Of course it could all be smoke & mirrors (Sun Tszu stuff to distract).
What is interesting in the article is the acknowledgement by several in LINO (past & present) that there is plenty deeply wrong with the UK. The article suggests that Blair is now wholly detached from the lived reality of UK citizens. Add to this that Starmer/McSweeney are boxed in – in terms of what they can do – by the fiscal straightjacket imposed by Reeves. LINO is packed to the rafters with contradictions & there is no indications that they can even see them. This extract from your article reduced me to sniggers contempt at how blinkered LINO is:
“McFadden (deputy to McSweeny) “Curiosity is an essential function of leadership, and people who want to occupy positions of government responsibility have a duty to be curious about technological change….in an era of tight money, where so much of the debate is around fiscal events and headroom, you need a broader debate. I’m not saying that public services don’t need investment — of course they do — but there is also going to be interest in how services can be reformed and whether technology can help you get greater productivity.”
Nope, the gov does not own the BoE, nope it is only tax n spend etc etc. Are there ANY adults in the room?
Nope, in answer to your last question…
All that stuff about Blair and the City pulling the Starmer strings so depressing
Thank you and well said, Richard.
Richard rightly says: “So too has limitation of its programme to support employee rights limited the growth potential of the economy – because people living in fear do not deliver growth.”
Labour is advised by and in thrall to Big Finance. I can’t think of someone from industry, small business, agriculture (other than toff landowner and future Labour MP Henry Tufnell), academia, civil society etc. advising Labour.
Big Finance attracts a disproportionate amount of sociopaths who create and thrive on fear. One often hears the phrase “climate of fear” in financial services. It can lead to collapses like RBS in 2008. RBS was not the only one.
There is research that suggests that Big Finance not only attracts sociopaths, it creates them! Apparently there is evidence that finance workers behaviour becomes more sociopathic the longer they work in that sector.
Economics undergraduates show the same trajectory as their studies progress
Thank you.
I wasn’t aware of the research, but have observed.
Trivia with respect to RBS.
My business partner knew the lads that did the RBS logo. Doubtless many have seen it.
I have it on good authority that it is a………stylised cats anus. (designed after the usual long lunch and various lines).
Which speaks volumes about both the intuition of the designers, how they saw their client, and an interesting take on “speaking truth to power”.
Feel free to do a compare, if you feel up to it.
A lot of voters are going to realise after 6 months of Reevesism that nothing has changed. Your comments on a lack of a credible plan to generate economic growth (as opposed to some wealth redistribution which would be more beneficial) are spot on.
The monomaniacal obsession about a single measure – growth; that is, change in GDP – is so depressing.
We all know how flawed a measure GDP is – for the things it includes (such as the invented rental income of owner occupiers) and the things it does not (domestic work and care, for example).
It is almost impossible to measure with any accuracy. Where are the error bars? We obsess about GDP ticking up or down by 0.1% but then the estimates are revised (often several times) by more than that amount. Don’t kid me that the estimates are accurate to better than one part in a thousand.
At least as important as the gross amount is how it is distributed. What good does it do if GDP doubles but it all goes to one person, or 1%?
What really is important is wellbeing. Also the environment. Meeting the needs of people within ecological limits, as Kate Raworth has it.
I sense some ideas for videos coming on…
But that nice gentleman Jeremy Hunt quotes the IMF saying we have done better than France, Japan, Germany, Italy etc
It was even on the BBC. Must be correct.
Surely he wouldn’t mislead us? This OECD lot can’t be right.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-68489588
There are lies, damned lies and statistics, as someone once said
Mark Twain who said Disraeli had used it.
My suspicion is that as Hunt dates it from 2010, the UK economy had fallen further than the other countries and to get back to what the others were, they had to cover more ground so to speak. It’s a slight of hand.
This year is the 100th anniversary of the Zinoviev letter.
1924 saw the first Labour government in power, albeit in coalition with the declining Liberal party.
The Zinoviev letter was published four days before polling day. It was purported to have come from the Soviet govt urging the Communist Party of Great Britain to engage in subversion. The Labour party was in favour of more trade with the Soviet union. They were smeared by implication.
It was received by the Foreign Office who co-operated with the Conservative Party to publish it in the Daily Mail. (who else?)
It was thought to have been written by White Russians ( the anti-Bolsheviks) and later research indicated possibly someone in the intelligence services.
It is thought unlikely to have changed the result of the election which saw the Conservatives returned to power.
What it did show is that vested interests tried to influence voters. Dark money has been deployed in recent times and I have no doubt will be deployed in the coming election.
With AI and some modern iteration of Cambridge Analytica, we need to be on our guard.
As a child the word ‘Growth’ was exciting: top of the head measured next to the door… However, as an older cancer survivor, the word ‘Growth’ has taken on a more ominous connotation; I was relieved to have my ‘Growth’ surgically removed! Now as a committed Green Party supporter, I am cognisant of the reality that “There is no Planet B”!
The smart areas for healthy growth must focus on the urgent need for our transition to a low-carbon economy. It will fall to the next Government to pay for several, long-postponed costly compensation schemes, but shoring up all areas of our crumbling infrastructure will urgently require significant investment. So too will building much stronger flood defences as we brace for the ominous product of our rapacious greed: the impending negative impact of climate chaos.
MedTech innovation is worthy of investment to improve the quality of our lives. However, a greater focus on enabling safe elderly independence is sadly neglected despite the exponential ‘growth’ of this sector of our population. Inventive modern designs should avoid creating a new rabbit-hole with reliance on diminishing finite resources. Our reckless squandering of Lithium on disposable vapes is the most obscene example, but the latest smartphones and similar devices do not have replaceable batteries. Lithium batteries tossed in the bin are causing lethal fires. It seems that we never learn from our mistakes.
While economic growth may be required in the first instant, surely sustainability is the desired outcome. Why would you continue to grow the economy if it does not need it? Overproduction is not good. It’s only neoliberalism that is never satisfied with “enough”.
We’re still just kicking the recyclable can down the potholed road, just before it ends up in landfill, or, more likely in the UK, a hedge..
There is no time like the present to shift the goalposts regarding growth economics, and for organisations like the OECD to contribute to essential change rather than reinforce the status quo.
There just seems to be much inertia but no momentum to achieve what is bleedin’ obvious.
The planet is finite, as are very many global resources, and we need thinkers who can work out how to achieve degrowth, rather than striving for constant Ponzi inspired expansion to stave off economic collapse.
Can destructive, resource depleting neoliberalism ever become circular ? How ?
The continued deferral of addressing sustainability issues in macroeconomics is feeding growth, but only in significant climate change targets.
1.5°C has morphed into 2.7°C as the inertia in addressing change becomes ever more obvious.
Depressingly, Labour have offered nothing that will drive that change, and Reeves is destined to hunt a factor 50 Snark, but with an insane banker in control.
Setting aside whether growth is such a great thing (there is good and bad growth) Labour MUST reverse the direction of the argument. Not ‘we need a strong economy to pay for health, education, transport and housing’ to ‘we need healthy, educated people who can get to work and home again to rest in a decent home in order to create a strong economy.’
Until Labour makes this leap we are destined for further decline in our well being.
Agreed
Thank you to Mike, above.
The Unherd article is interesting.
The Blair family’s country retreats* are a few miles down the road, on the border with Oxfordshire. During lockdown, Blair and his brood gave the impression that the restrictions apply to the little people. *The family came to enjoy country living and playing at squire at Chequers, a few miles in the opposite direction.
I don’t know any of the Blair employees, but know people, including headhunters, who know them. They are typically around 30, ex Treasury and Health, and seeking to cash in on their Brexit and pandemic experience. They are also Blair’s babes, confident in their abilities, less so in the abilities of others and see a career in politics, if only for some years, as the next step on the CV.
Blair recruited them as he sells their expertise to his clients.
The Blair organisation, going back to the late noughties, has raised eyebrows, not just those of regulators.
There was an extraordinary exchange between the PM and Starmer at PMQs today, which has largely been missed by everyone, as far as I can see. It arose over a scheme to release prisoners, in which Starmer questioned (on the basis of a critical Lewes Prison Report) whether there was a possibility of ‘high risk’ prisoners being released. Sunak’s election fuelled, politically inflected riposte to a serious question bringing Government publicly to account, revealed why he is not fit for high office. Sunak argued that no prisoner should be put on this scheme if they are a threat to the public; recounting that It does not apply to people serving life sentences, or to anyone convicted of serious violent or sexual offenders; and in a second reply added that nobody would be released “if they are considered a risk to the public”. Sunak answered narrowly, specifically to the “scheme”; but he must have known that Alberto Costa would be asking a closely related, and pertinent question on prison release almost immediately afterwards at the same PMQs. The Sunak response to Starmer and to Parliament over prisoner release, in the wider context of his public duty of office, thus turned into a clear failure of that higher standard of ‘integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level’ which he brazenly claimed when he entered Downing Street; but he and his government constantly fails to live up to, or that we are entitled to expect of a leader. The PMs inability to embrace the bigger, and wider obligation of accounting to the public, was in the context of his Parliamentary obligations, little more than a craven dereliction of duty.
Thus, later in PMQs Alberto Costa, Conservative MP raised the case of a convicted criminal, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1988, who was previously released by the Parole Board in September 2023, but was recalled to prison two months later for breaching the licence conditions, yet will have another parole hearing in September later this year (in a system Costa believes far too open-ended to such endless appeals). Sunak eschewed the political slapstick given Starmer, in his reply to Costa, to commend Costa for his diligence, but his careful answer to his own MP stands as an egregious contradiction of the disgraceful cheapening of Serious PMQ issues, in straight comparison to his response to Starmer on what was, after all a closely related issue. Sunak cannot ever, rise to the occasion. Parliament is now so witless, nobody in that hapless chamber seemed to notice the discrepancy. PMQs provides the ability to bring the government to direct account. Sunak (and the Speaker for indulging every week its gratuitous misuse by failing government) have reduced PMQs to a comic, but also shoddy political farce.
Would any apologist for Sunak (if such still exists anywhere) care to explain his fairly clear use of double standards in PMQs today on effectively the same topic, to the Leader of the Opposition, and his own Party MP; and above all, his shoddy reduction of his duty to give a proper account of his Government in office, to Parliament and public?
Still Starmer supporter idiots trying to pretend his watered down Green Deal is the best thing since sliced bread simply because the Tories are in denial global warming is happening. This country is a basket case!
Meanwhile the Tory stooge Keir Starmer is not going to raise taxes on the wealthy many of whom will have been profiteering or benefitting from such according to the analysis of the trade union Unite:-
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/15/uk-firms-accused-of-profiteering-study-finds-margins-rose-30-percent-post-pandemic
On a more positive note I recently received an invitation to attend the 2nd Well Being Conference in Rekyavik in June. The write up proposes some very interesting alternative socio political trajectories: https://wellbeingeconomyforum.is/?_kx=bDghE-MypqnMzeYAH_4Ac42iDSNmgcmyq2i3YcgUXxo.SfakVE
What will Starmer do about the following:-
https://www.theguardian.com/money/article/2024/may/15/landlords-selling-up-england-homelessness-renting
Nothing presumably because there’s no money to do anything about it until there’s growth in the economy! Imagine either a Conservative, Labour or Liberal politician saying anything like that in the aftermath of the Second World War. Those politicians would regard the country as a basket case for believing a politician like Starmer!
Aren’t the English in particular a “sycophant nation” with the obsequiousness shown to Starmer by many of his supporters straight out of the Emperor’s New Clothes fable?
Even Gordon Brown attacking Starmer over two-child benefit cap. Obsequious toad Wes Streeting has this to say:-
“Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting told The Independent that Labour would inherit a difficult set of public finances but would work to bringing down child poverty.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/child-benefit-cap-starmer-labour-b2545441.html