I just posted this on Twitter:
What else is there to say? How gullible do Labour think we are?
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I burst out laughing when I saw it reported, and then I felt massively angry. Gaslighting, condescending, lying bastards.
It’s unutterably depressing.
When humour contains more truth than government statements…
“Austerity is the idea that the global financial crash of 2008 was caused by there being too many libraries in Wolverhampton.”
Alexei Sayle.
@ Gareth. Indeed this country is in the grip of a Single Transferable Party that is deeply neoliberal stupid!
https://news.sky.com/story/economy-could-have-crashed-if-winter-fuel-payments-for-pensioners-werent-cut-labour-minister-claims-13207619
Do no media ppl have the guts or the knowledge to call this the laughable bs that it is?
With a government budget of £1000 plus bn, will the economy be undermined by capital flight from the bond markets if spending £2 bn on winter fuel payments is maintained?!!
(Correct my rough figures if necessary.)
And that’s still within the ‘tax or borrow to spend’ framework error.
Less than two months in office and LINO/TCP are showing themselves to be the banksters’ glove puppets. As suspected/expected.
Can someone revive or adapt Spitting Image, please?
How gullible?
I think they have it about spot-on.
You think they won’t get away with this ? Ha!
What an extraordinary policy from Reeves. Even if you take the view that government debt is bad, and we have to ‘balance the books’ why do it by cutting the WFA in a country with one of the lowest state pensions in Europe and by refusing to lift the 2 child benefit cap?
She could have reversed the cuts to NI Hunt made or equalised CGT with IT to ‘balance the books’. But instead it’s yet more austerity for the most vulnerable. Whilst at the same time refusing to reverse the Tory’s lifting of the cap on bankers bonuses!?.
Absolutely incredible for a supposed progressive party.
It sounds to me as though Labour/Reeves seem to be suggesting that the markets would have reacted like they reacted to Truss & Kwarteng if she had not implemented the cut to winter fuel payments? They are super-imposing a former market reaction to an incompetent situation to justify – through fear – an unnecessary act.
Is that plausible? Not to me.
Who is in charge around here?
So markets are the bellwether for what is good for a society – obviously!!!
This sounds like capitulation to me and goes deep into the heart of our new government.
So the next question has to be, what are you here for Rachel? Keir? Wes? Just to realise market sentiment?
Now it is obvious that the Labour government frontbench is just for show – it is being driven from the back, from the boardrooms and executive homes of the country’s corporations and rich.
The guidance from Scammer & Co is that the rich are in charge of the planet and you’d better get used to it! Aneurin Bevan’s description of the Tories “scum” comes to mind!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan
He said they were “lower than vermin” and that nothing could convince him to able them.
Sorry. Able to abide them.
I heard some presenter on BBC1 this morning suggest that something called “dynamic pricing” (?) for Oasis tickets was just the market behaving naturally, as the market will. Of course, this is true: the law of the market jungle. If you want to pay three times the original price, you do: if you don’t, you don’t. No worries. That doesn’t make it right, in my opinion. We have lost all sense of right and wrong in the West, it seems. The BBC certainly seems to have done so.
There was a 1 line description of Communism that went “To each according to their needs, from each according to their ability”.
An equivalent for Capitalism as exhibited with this dynamic pricing, could be:
“To each according to what they can afford, from each the most we can get”.
Thank you, IMH.
I watched on the news about 6 am and was equally stunned.
I am glad that you mentioned the west.
The UK MSM is obsessed with the US, in a way that is not reciprocated. This includes standing up for Zionism. There are so many developments overseas giving humanity hope, vide Mexico, Brazil, the Sahel and SE Asia, support for Palestine etc. People in the west are being kept in the dark.
It is estimated that something like 10 million pensions will not get £200 winter fuel payments pushing some of them into fuel poverty. So at most that is a “saving” of £2 billion, but 5% of that would come back straight away as VAT on domestic fuel and more as corporation tax of fuel companies.
The UK government spends over £1000 billion each year so £2 billion is a rounding error, and very much smaller than the two successive cuts of employee NIC from 12% to 8%.
I wonder if Reeves will take responsibility if there is a cold winter and a surge of hypothermia cases.
With this government in power, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.
Agreed
“Paying the winter fuel allowance would have resulted in a crash”? Sorry, Rachel, you have “jumped the shark”.
William Keegan sums it best in his last piece when he quotes from Proust….
“Give me good policy and I will give you good finances”.
Thank you, Richard.
I must quibble.
Most people think what I consider a rounding error in government expenditure to be a lot of money. Dominic Cummings explained how the £350m (for the NHS) on a red bus came about. Most British people think £350m is a lot of money. They also associated red with Labour and progress. From my non-City circle, I’m inclined to agree with Cummings. Labour know what game they are playing.
It’s up to the left to ridicule this nonsense, like pointing how much more City banks and fossil fuel firms get in subsidies.
I think you are right: they do know what they are doing
Thank you, Richard.
Here is crack in the pavement. Interview on BBC Radio Scotland Drivetime with a Fraser of Allander spokesperson; who couldn’t understand what John Swinney meant by a fixed budget. Swinney is an accountant, and the interviewee was an economist; perhaps the blindness is right there. Clearly a neoliberal who thinks economics isn’t political (but it is) the interviewee didn’t appear to understand the difference between a devolved fixed budget and no material overdraft and a porous UK national budget that is invariably not met, but covered by borrowing, overdraft open-ended facility (it owes itself) and can always pay it’s bills. It isn’t difficult if you aren’t lost in neoliberalism, in denial of the politics of national economics, clearly ill-equipped on the basic accountancy and lost in biddable apologetics of a markedly obsequious stamp. And didn’t understand what “austerity” meant, because austerity is not a sufficiently defined term. I would ask you to listen to this toe curling nonsense Richard, if I felt it was worth the loss of five minutes of your life. I know I want mine back….
I have decided to accept your word for it, John
What is Fraser of Allender?
What is their brief?
Does anybody know?
A part of the economics department at Strathclyde University with all the usual biases such units usually have.
It claims to be independent. Like almost all economics departments it seems to offer decidedly hegemonic thinking.