The overwhelming impression Labour has given during its first few weeks in office is that it has no idea about why it wanted to be in government, or what it will do with power now that it has it. After fourteen years in opposition that appears quite extraordinary, except that it reinforces the idea that the whole Starmer project to date has simply been about defeating Corbyn. But in that case, it's fair to ask, where is Labour going?
The audio version is:
This is the transcript:
Where is Labour going? I think that's a really important question after the vote on the winter fuel allowance.
We all know that that vote was not necessary.
We all know that Rachel Rees did not have to try to claw back £1.5 billion as a consequence of taking away this allowance from maybe 10 million pensioners.
We all know that if all of the pensioners who qualify for pension credit now claim it, she will get no net gain.
So, what does that tell us about Labour thinking? Because I am presuming that there is some thinking behind what they're doing. That might be generous, but I'm going to carry on with that assumption.
What are they actually planning to do? And I'm guessing here, and I think that's a perfectly fair thing to do, because none of us know that if this is an indication of things to come, what it implies is that Labour is going to impose ever increasing means testing on access to what we might call the welfare state.
So, for example, might Labour follow up this denial of benefits to the elderly, which has been easy for them to implement, with a further denial in due course, which is to simply deny the state pension to some people because they earn too much? Why wouldn't they? If they believe that there is no requirement to support pensions as a universal benefit, and that's clearly their thinking behind the Winter Fuel Allowance, then they might move to the position where the entitlement to the state old age pension that is implicit in the payment of national insurance throughout a working life might also be denied.
Now, that would, in effect, be a breach of a social contract that has existed since before the First World War, where the payment of a contribution in the form of national insurance did give rise to an entitlement to a benefit at the age of 65 then and now at ages a little above that.
But would Labour be willing to break that to maintain its fiscal rule? I seriously wonder.
And if that's the case, what else might it try to means test?
We can see some other things going quite quickly, I suspect.
For example, people over the age of 60 now get free prescriptions from the NHS. I have a very strong suspicion that will go.
There's also a real prospect that those who are not on pension credit might lose the entitlement to free prescriptions throughout old age, which would be a massive tax on the elderly, but which might be something Rachel Reeves will claim we can't afford to deliver anymore.
And there are other worrying directions of travel as well. Looking at another subject which has come up very early in the life of this parliament, let's look at the future of the BBC. Now, this has been on the Tory agenda for 14 years. It's well known that the Tories hate the BBC. It is a state corporation, and pretty much as a matter of ideological faith, you have to hate state corporations if you're a Tory.
That has not been the foundation of the belief of the Labour Party. They have traditionally been in favour of the existence of state corporations.
But right at the beginning of this Labour government's trajectory, Lisa Nandy, who is now responsible for the future of the BBC, has suggested that maybe it should be mutualised.
Now, mutualisation is an interesting concept. It used to be widespread, and there are still a few examples of that. For example, the Nationwide Building Society is still a mutually owned company of substantial size.
I happen to use the Nationwide Building Society. It's one of the few remaining banks in Ely in Cambridgeshire, where I live. And therefore, why not use it? I also happen to like the fact that it is mutual. In other words, it is owned by its members. And what Lisa Nandy is suggesting is that the BBC cease to be a state corporation, effectively without any control by shareholders, but direct control by government through its board, and instead become a shareholder-owned corporation, with all those who pay the BBC licence fee becoming the members.
So there would be millions, many millions, of households who would be paying the licence fee who would become members of the BBC as a result. What power do you think each of those members might have over that corporation? I think we can safely presume that it is the square root of not a lot. Call it no effective control at all, if you like.
So why is there this sudden interest in mutualisation? Well, that's easily explained. Labour has seen that in the past mutual companies have ended up in the private sector. Many of our building societies passed from being mutual companies into being private companies. during the course of their career, particularly early in this century.
Northern Rock shifted from being a mutual to being a quoted company. So did the Alliance and Leicester, which ended up somewhere after it failed in 2008, and so did Bradford and Bingley, and so many others, all of whom seemed to go to the wall at that time. There is an unfortunate history here.
When you have no control over the company that you supposedly own a part of and somebody comes along and says we'll pay you £250 for something which you place no value on, then vast numbers of people will queue up to sell, I guarantee you. In other words, what Labour is looking at is how to offload the BBC with ease.
But that indicates something much deeper and more profound, apart from its lack of faith in the public sector, of course. It is showing that it does not believe in the virtue of state control. It believes, as is normal amongst neoliberal thinkers, that any organisation is better controlled in the private sector than it is in the state sector. And I believe that is the trajectory we are looking at with regard to the BBC.
If that happens to the BBC, one of the great institutions that has identified Britain and separated it from other countries, although it's a deeply tarnished organisation now compared to what it once was, then what else might this happen to?
Might you become a mutual member of the NHS at some time? I think that's entirely possible. I think we're paving the way for that as well. And then, mysteriously at some point, somebody will offer to buy out your interest in that as well.
So what we are looking at is a Labour Party, and I've only used two examples but I could find more, that is doing things which in the past we would have found it very difficult to believe Labour doing. Means testing of access to what we thought were universal rights. Basically, access to a pension, but I have little doubt, in due course, access to other things as well.
And, the mutualisation, as a precursor, I am quite sure, to privatisation of something which has been so identified with the state for a century, with, I believe, the NHS potentially in line to follow in its path.
This is not what I expected Labour to do, but it is where I think Labour is going, and that really troubles me.
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Keir Starmer is going to have a problem with any restrictions on pensioners’ pension.
He is one of the few people with a law written specially for him:
“The Pensions Increase (Pension Scheme for Keir Starmer QC) Regulations 2013” https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/2588/made
“The legislation means Sir Keir is exempt from paying tax on pensions savings over £1m.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65037136
Alright for some.
My feeling is that we might have had Corbyn as PM if it hadnt been for Brexit, and perhaps we ended up with Starmer as PM because of the Tory Omnishambles.
I suggest that the Starmer Labour Party simply presents as ‘Not Corbyn’ nothing else.
If that is what you think, then I suggest you read this piece from the Observer this weekend. You may well find your suspicions confirmed.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/sep/14/corbyn-had-flown-too-close-to-the-sun-how-labour-insiders-battled-the-left-and-plotted-the-partys-path-back-to-power?CMP=share_btn_url
That a faction in the Labour Party deliberately set out to remove and discredit Corbyn, to neutralise left wing MP’s and to shift policies rightwards in 2017 is well known, but this article is interesting in revealing more detail about how this strategy was developed. Anyone who hopes for a resurgence of the left should learn from this, but the question is how should these opinion moulding methods be countered? Should the left focus on exposing this type of plotting or stoop to use the same Machiavellian, manipulative tactics?
We might have had Corbyn as PM if the PLP and the staffers at Labour HQ had not conspired with MSM to prevent the election of a Labour prime minister.
They didn’t want a genuine Labour PM. They wanted a Labour PM in the mould of Bliar and approved of by Trump, Biden, Pompeo, Murdoch, Netanyahu et al. That’s what they plotted for and achieved, courtesy of the BBC, Guardian, Indie and other supposedly “decent” news outlets, as well as the rest of the media mob. For that they were prepared to let Boris and his gang do their worst, never mind the ordinary citizens who suffered because of it.
Possibility of new left of centre political party being formed called the Collective Party :-
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/sep/15/jeremy-corbyn-addresses-meeting-new-leftwing-party-collective
“So, for example, might Labour follow up this denial of benefits to the elderly, which has been easy for them to implement, with a further denial in due course, which is to simply deny the state pension to some people because they earn too much? Why wouldn’t they? If they believe that there is no requirement to support pensions as a universal benefit, and that’s clearly their thinking behind the Winter Fuel Allowance, then they might move to the position where the entitlement to the state old age pension that is implicit in the payment of national insurance throughout a working life might also be denied”.
Why? To introduce Means Testing as the natural form of the Welfare State. We now have returned to the ideological conception of the influential Presbyterian minister Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847): the Deserving Poor.
Progressive taxation is dead. That would mean those best able to accept the burden without suffering are least affected. Who should pay? The weak, the politically defenceless and the Undeserving Poor. Who decides, who makes the moral judgement? The Single Transferable Party.
Sadly true of the STP
But it may not survive
Given our state pensions are paid out of existing taxes not invested funds and the ratio of workers to pensioners is declining rapidly, it was obvious that at some stage we would have to means test it. I speak as a woman who has lost 7 years state pension since I started work and have always known that the triple lock and associated benefits would be gone by the time I finally got my pension. Any talk of a contract is meaningless when the retirement age keeps going up without any compensation. And I have friends medically retired and unable to work on UC for years in real poverty waiting for their pension.
However the way Labour are tackling it baffles me. Pensioners who have been cushioned from most of the cost of living crisis still think they are the hardest up. Any attacks on their benefits should have been subtle and incremental. Instead we have all out war that was totally unnecessary and shows very poor leadership and PR.
I had very low expectations of Labour. I haven’t liked Starmer’s very authoritarian approach and his purge of the left. I didn’t vote Labour, despite feeling pressure to tactically vote and already feel vindicated. But I am sad for an NHS already on it’s knees and a country that has already been battered by 14 years of austerity and Brexit. I’d like some optimism but I’m not feeling it.
Why is it obvious?
I would suggest that the only thing that is obvious is migrants will make up the labour shortfall
To me it’s been obvious that we can’t keep pushing the pension age up and cutting in work benefits whilst many in their 70s and 80s have substantial wealth and don’t need a full state pension. Yes we need migrants to offset our falling working age population, but at some stage we either need to tax rich pensioners more effectively or means test the state pension. I am totally in favour of fairer taxation of those who can well afford to pay, but this seems unpopular with those best able to defend themselves.
You are proposing either pensioners or the wealthiest pay
That is not a choice.
“Pensioners who have been cushioned from most of the cost of living crisis still think they are the hardest up” Really? The only pensioners who have not noticed a cost of living crisis are those who have large private pensions or have a high income from work. Most pensioners are not in that happy situation!
Agreed. Google searches only seem to return average income for pensioners – I was looking for the spread of income. How many actually have these huge private pensions that they can comfortably live on without the need for state pension? Certainly this household would struggle to exist if we only had our work pensions.
I think most pensioner households would
I could not agree more – and for Labour to pit one section of the population against another is a disgrace.
Also, as my hair has grown more grey and my limp has become more pronounced I note that I’m actually less ‘seen’ in society than I was? It’s as if sometimes I’m just not there – yet I am. And if I need to take my time to understand something, well, I’m old and slow. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. So, I’d better stay on top of my game for as long as I can.
Labour pre-supposes none of this stuff, thinking that its only about money. It is not. I think older people get treated badly and WE get blamed for having it better than our children. Whether we have money or not, I detect a lack of status. We are a burden, that just needs to die suppose and get out of the way. Well, bollocks to that.
The fact is that that situation has been created by politicians supping from the same mug as Thatcher. It is they who have created the ‘grab it whilst you can’ society with its lack of proper sustainable re-distribution of wealth with too many policies that were one way streets and temporary in their gains – look at Right To Buy for example and the problems that has caused us.
All my generation has done is take the opportunities they were given with out realising that this was their ONLY chance and that their own flesh and blood would not have the same opportunities. Because they were lied to.
And too many young have swallowed the myth that their elders have done this without looking at how our so-called democracy has produced this situation and that people have been manipulated into competing for housing, schooling, services, with immigrants and now – the ultimate Neo-liberal/Libertarian nirvana straight out of the U.S. southern state universities – competing to win against their own flesh and blood like the American Civil War for fewer and fewer resources – just like the book Democracy in Chains explains to us in great detail. The South has risen again, and this time its generals are von Hayek, Friedman, Buchanan, Reagan and Thatcher.
Young and old alike should forget about who has got what and concentrate on those above us who now have the most at possibly any previous time in human history.
You raise an issue that is deeply significant, and I am older than you
I will muse on it
I will not be going quietly into the night
The current OAP, plus additional NHS costs for the elderly, have been calculated as between 10-12% of total government expenditure, and total £140-160bn.
There is a projection that another £80-100m will be needed within 20 yrs, but I haven’t been able to verify this as I do not trust ONS or OBS figures.
Obviously the OAP is mostly spent on daily needs and will have a multiplier effect in the economy, in terms of spending, and with NHS investment actually benefiting the whole population.
I think the OAP actually helps in sustaining aggregate demand, and has to be seen in those terms. Cutting it would be an act of self mutilation and is another deflationary pressure.
Even with the pensioner demographic bulge over the next 20 yrs, there is no reason for this to go over 18-20% of total government expenditure, and this can be funded by pretty minor annual productivity increases from the existing workforce year on year.
Bill Mitchell has argued this point pretty consistently, that productivity increases from a smaller work force need to be the main support in funding future government expenditure covering demographic changes.
This means better education and training as well as physical investment in plant and infrastructure.
I see heavy reliance on immigration alone over short and even the medium term, to cover falling working age cohorts, as a false premise.
It is a sticking plaster to cover failings in our own education system, which have created the shortfalls, and then distorted employment markets by underpaying professionals in health and education, let alone industry. Inevitably, we then have lower productivity.
Apparently, in 2023-4, TEN secondary subjects had fewer new teacher entrants in training in England than were necessary to cover retirals. (TES). That is an emerging crisis.
Yes, we do need temporary immigration to cover the very short term and immedaite shortfalls, but it is an exploitative policy and basically “farms” less developed countries for their skilled persons.
It is very much post colonial.
In the medium term we need all less developed nations to be stabilised and able to sustain their own populations without creating immigration push factors. This means retention of their most educated and skilled.
Most actively employed immigrants have families under 18, and so will not significantly reduce the dependency ratio, as is intended. They will also increase total housing demands, compounding existing government failures.
With approaching 25% of those of working age in the UK inactive, for a variety of reasons, it makes more sense to invest in reducing this inactive % by improving mental health care, employment protection, provide better disabled opportunities, and frankly, make work more attractive.
There is no doubt that much of 21stC work culture has deterrent qualities.
Of course, those NHS and social care investments aiming to increase employment participation, allowing more inactive persons into active employment has the effect of increasing tax revenues, and is part of the multiplier of public service investment.
I have seen recent suggestions that there will be attempts by Nu-Labour to make benefits ever lower, as Osborne et all did, and restrict access further through stricter means testing. Such is the austerity mindset,
But it will rebound, create more poverty, raise social service demands, provide a weaker and inadequately qualified work force, weaken productivity growth even further and probably swell the current 9.4m inactive persons of working age.
Both barrels in both feet by SKS and Reeves, I suspect….. One term…
That requires more discussion than I have time for
Apologies, because there are things I both agree and disagree with there, and also would like to develop
There is a not unrelated blog probably coming in the morning
In my many social media exchanges on this matter, both local pages and international, I have discovered that nobody under the age of about 50 seems to have a clue about universality of rights and security as a citizen of the UK. Most seem to be children of Thatcher where possession of money is a virtue, and community no more than your local area.
That’s a horrifying scenario but quite probably given the first steps have been taken. When will the members, MPs and Trade Unions who have true Labour values wake up to see what is happening and have the decency to oppose the small sinister group now running labour.
Difficult to disagree with any of this – but they dont show much sign of even understanding whether they will or will not do any of these things – if they do , they will say they have no choice, because there ‘is no money’.
Their ‘narrative’ such as it is – is to ‘rebuild the foundations’ by taking ‘difficult decisions’ early on – so as to reap the ‘growth’ and reulting benefits over a five or ten year period.
As you say Riichard they seem to think that the only way to turn the economy and public services around is to double down on the erosion of the public sector – a strategy that has has manifestly failed over the last 14 years.
They have not been prepared to engage with economic ideas which show how the economy actually works, as opposed to their mantra about only private sector creates growth and that fiscal rules are sacrosanct.
That has already ended their honeymoon period – and will lead to an immediate crisis . They do not have the luxury that Osborne and Lansley had in 2010 of a functioning NHS and some semblance of economic growth.
Maybe in desperation Starmer will call Mazzucato – whom he is said to admire…..?
.
She seems to be distancing herself from him though
Back in 1964, Enoch Powell had this to say.
“In the end, the Labour party could cease to represent labour. Stranger historic ironies have happened than that.”
I think we’ve got there.
Reading the first two posts today, I suggest George Orwell was so right in the final sentence of animal farm:-
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
What about where is Jersey going?
Your thoughts Richard?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9353zzx354o
I always said the policies of the place were unsustainable
I have a pretty decent defined benefit pension BUT the State Pension is an important part of my retirement planning.
Given that future retirees will have defined contribution pensions and much smaller ones at that I suggest that means testing the state pension spells disaster for the future
Agreed
It’s quite important to me
I think that this blogpost by Phil Burton-Cartledge captures much of this clear disquiet with new New Labour.
there is much to worry about here.
https://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2024/09/confessions-of-gravediggers.html
I have no doubt they want to do as much as they can in the time they have.
British politics is undergoing a transition due to the huge – and I really mean that – failures of the neoliberal experiment that started on the watch of Jim Callaghan and Denis Healy, when they swallowed the Treasury line on economic management. Thatcher intensified it – she should never, ever be credited with being an original thinker, and her successors in both major parties have been shameless political cyphers because they have all ended up being compared to her.
Labour’s unusual showing at the election of a massive majority built upon a worryingly small proportion of the electorate is possibly an indication this transition, with more to come.
I date it back to Callaghan and Healey too. Doubtless it was because of Treasury advice that they called in the IMF and let it dictate neoliberal policies to them, starting with a crack-down on genuine efforts to reform education in schools (I was about to start my career as a teacher). I see that as the moment when social democratic England started to die.
I think you may well be right
You want to know the essential essence and purpose of a political party?
“By their donors shall ye know them”!
Bloody hell, I can’t get “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, won’t get fooled again, out of my head. The Who, June 1971.
‘After fourteen years in opposition that appears quite extraordinary, except that it reinforces the idea that the whole Starmer project to date has simply been about defeating Corbyn.’
Never has a truer word been spoken in my view. This hits the nail on the head for me. Labour forgot about us and went to war on itself.
And this why we get the tinkering bollocks like ‘mutualisation’ from Labour – it is their way of sneakily keeping with the continuity of the Tory -Establishment agenda.
Blairite Labour – conceived by Thatcher – prefers to whittle away slowly at existing structures under our noses whereas the boot boys of the Tory party just gleefully smash things up.
I loathe the Tory party but at least I can admire them for being honest in their contempt.
The Labour party OTOH are the worst possible people to be in charge of the country claiming to be something they are not.
They are totally unprincipled.
I think you have correctly identified a political/cultural shift in relation to the BBC and the Starmerite Labour Party (aka LINO). They cannot openly fly the flag of privatisation for health or the BBC , besmirched as that banner is by water and sewage and soiled with extortionate and inefficient railways – but they are leaning that way. Now they need a model which ‘looks like’ it has some sort of benign public features.
This has happened before, for your point about Labour’s relationship with the BBC is particularly interesting – but historically potentially misleading or, if one prefers, deeply ironic.
The Tory party in the founding era of the BBC was deeply committed to the Corporation – only second to their intimate relationship with the first decade of sound newsreels – and the Labour Party, rightly, regarded it as a class/party weapon aimed against them. The change in Labour sentiments came with the experience of the war, where the awareness of what government proaganda could do in both media then fed into postwar pro-welfare state campaigns. Searching for a possible template for nationalised industry and having, as Shinwell put it, “Nothing we could pick out of a drawer”, the then structure of the BBC was siezed upon. Labour had become not only its new defender but its inheritor. Tory disenchantment came much later – mainly with the culturally more liberal attitudes of the early 60s – TW3, and on.
(Nandy is an interesting proponent as she is revealed in Asthana’s new book on the creation of LINO, as one of the plotters’ chosen influencers in “rescuing” the Party from Corbyn.)
“the whole Starmer project to date has simply been about defeating Corbyn”
Well, yes.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/sep/14/corbyn-had-flown-too-close-to-the-sun-how-labour-insiders-battled-the-left-and-plotted-the-partys-path-back-to-power
With the minimum wage at £11.44 this equates to £22k for someone on 37hrs a week. Also termed as the National Living Wage.
If this is so then the state pension for those pensioners not in receipt of a private pension, will need adding circa £10k to their state pension. No government will endorse this.
I don’t know how anyone on the state pension alone, manages day to day living .
Nor do I, to be candid, which is why I get angry at those taking away what little they have.
Where is Labour going? as usual – art provides an answer: (both for LINO & the country)
https://www.youtube.com/embed/2hL_ATXJ6JU
40 years old & still highly relevant.
Agreed
There is an implied contract in being required to pay NI contributions. “You pay National Insurance contributions to qualify for certain benefits and the State Pension.” (Presumably one of the reasons you don’t pay NI once retired is because you are no longer eligible for the benefits – can’t see maternity allowance being useful after age 65)
I paid voluntary contributions because I had very small “profits” as a small farmer precisely to obtain a State Pension. But the UK Parliament (which is really the English parliament due to numbers) can, thanks to the concept of parliamentary sovereignty, do what it likes and strike down any previous legislation.
https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance
“We all know that Rachel Rees did not have to try to claw back £1.5 billion as a consequence of taking away this allowance from maybe 10 million pensioners.
We all know that if all of the pensioners who qualify for pension credit now claim it, she will get no net gain.”
Agreed, however I think there is a paradox here. (And a possible instance of the law of unintended consequence).
I want people who qualify for pension credit to claim it and I think that sharing out £1.5 billion to the poorest in this way is better than giving it to people who don’t need it, and I think it would be better for the economy.
Obviously Rachel Reeves should have fixed the safety net first, and I am in no way justifying her actions, and I’m please I wasn’t fooled into voting for them at the GE, as I would be feeling pretty stupid right now if I did.
But millions will lose who need all the help they can get and do so not qualify for pesnion credit
The answer is that some means testing is destructive. This is an example of that.
Why bother with the wasteful process of means testing at all for poor people – especially those whose income is just above whatever criterion is used?
Instead, I recommend enacting proposals described in the Taxing Wealth Report 2024 and to keep on doing so until we have the NHS and schools well funded *by taxation not privatisation*, building inspectors (Grenfell report), youth clubs, libraries, probation officers and other social welfare staff so that there are fewer offenders (and re-offenders) and modern prisons but with the aim of phasing out the old ones, a programme akin to council house building.
All with the aim of a happier, healthier, more equal and better-educated society.
Then expenditure is needed in anticipation of phasing out private cars, floods, fires and seal-level rise.
Agreed
Blair’s New Labour introduced Foundation Hospital Trusts which were trumpeted as Mutuals. They had more freedom to procure goods and services than other Trusts and less regulation/ oversight. There was an article in the Co-operative News at the time explaining the benefits of having members, ie patients who signed up. The criterion for being a Foundation Hospital Trust rather than an ordinary Hospital Trust was fiscal. Some hospital boards were better at balancing the books than others. Of course it was a sham and the patient members had the wool firmly pulled over their eyes by Management, at the members meetings. So Labour as a party has ‘form’. New Labour laid the foundations for Lansley’s disastrous reforms!
Keir Starmer not a scammer? Accepting £76,000 worth of freebies over five years says otherwise!
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2024/sep/17/keir-starmer-gifts-labour-conservatives-lib-dems-uk-politics-news-latest-updates#comments
Meanwhile a lot of poor people struggle to pay their bills and provide for themselves and their children if they have them. Meanwhile all we get from Starmer is indifferent arrogance.
Richard
I have been considering the “privatisation” of the BBC, and it occurred to me that the one institution that might be left to privatise, would be the Bank of England. This worries me enormously as it would completely take away control of finances, ie money, from the government and place that control with unaccountable people/companies. Is this at all likely? I do hope you think not. I also hope you don’t think I am wasting your time by asking this question.
I think that would be technically nigh on impossible in the UK