Keir Starmer does not know what a working person is.
As the FT notes this morning:
Sir Keir Starmer said on Thursday that anyone who owns shares and rental property is not a “working person”, as his chancellor Rachel Reeves prepares to unveil a Budget that will feature numerous tax increases.
They added:
The prime minister promised in Labour's election manifesto he would “not increase taxes on working people”, ruling out rises in income tax, national insurance or value added tax.
This is, of course, another fine mess wholly of Labour's own creation. If only they had said long ago that they would not increase tax on income from work, they would not have most of the budget difficulties that they now face. They would, instead, have had available to them the options I offered in the Taxing Wealth Report 2024, and they could have used the argument that beating inequality required them to use at least some of them to justify what they were doing.
But instead, as the FT notes, they made a complete mess of their communications strategy by using the hopelessly inadequate term 'working people' to define a tax strategy, and we have had confusion ever since.
As a matter of fact, working people can have savings. They might also own shares. If they do not do so directly, many of them will now, because of enforced pension registration in the City of London Ponzi scheme, have some indirect interest in shares.
What is more, many very wealthy people work even whilst enjoying a significant unearned income that lets them accumulate ever more wealth.
As a consequence, it was perfectly obvious that Labour's term, 'working people', the use of which I have long derided, was always going to get them into trouble. And it has. Just wait for the backlash next week. The Telegraph has already been on the case for ages.
As I asked elsewhere this morning, isn't it reasonable to expect that we have competent politicians? Ones capable of making errors as basic as this really are not competent. And that is the problem that we face.
Meanwhile, Labour ministers are digging themselves out of yet another pointless hole they need never have dug for themselves.
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Simply put, it is a category error.
Quite possibly.
The “dear leader’s” father ran a tool-making operation – one can imagine the cloth-capped men (it would have been men in those days) clocking on & discussing the racing, footy, etc. They would have read The Scum or maybe The Daily Mirror. They would not have been, for the most part, the owner of shares. Thus his idea of “working people” may be based on this. By contrast, most of the engineers I did my training with (1970s and 1980s) were share owners & regularly dicussed what was up & down. One supposes in the world inhabited by LINO, that they are not regarded as workers.
‘Working people’ is a completely idiotic phrase. For the record I get some rental income from land but I also carry out environmental work on that land – providing a range of environmental services. Thats work!
It’s come straight from across the pond: the dumbing-down of political language because they arrogantly assume there’s an electoral base that doesn’t understand ‘convoluted’ language.
Starmer’s party don’t understand what wealth is either. Interviewed on BBC by Charlie Staite in late September, Lisa Nandy was asked about the Winter Fuel Allowance said that wealthier pensioners should not get it – wealthier defined as not actually being on pension credit so having an income of
more than £218 a week.
“It’s come straight from across the pond: the dumbing-down of political language”
Crossing “the pond” is a two way channel and the traffic is very heavy in both directions.
They are also in another fine mess with slavery. Starmer has continued to botch his job. The Samoa commonwealth meeting is a catastrophe. Three hundred years of British arrogance, indifference, and deep stupidity has come home to roost. The Caribbean nations are not being fobbed off with pith helmets, walkabouts and condescension anymore. Even the stupidest of the one-eyed British press have noticed that now Labour are in power, they are no longer singing the same song on acknowledgement of our ghastly past they had in opposition; the Single Transferable Party rules in Downing Street: always.
We can see the problem in the tortuous, twisting ritual dance being performed in Samoa by King Charles. Here is the problem:
“The King is caught in the middle. Buckingham Palace says he sits above politics and cannot comment or apologise without his government’s agreement. But the royal family were historically one of the biggest traders of enslaved people. Not only that, it was a trade they made huge profits from.” (Sky News report).
Here is how that works “That the king can do no wrong, is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution” (William Blackstone, Commentaries). It has a longer tradition in english law than Blackstone – ‘Rex non potest peccare’; it is a statement of sovereign (Government) immunity. Britain thinks it can still use it over commonwealth countries, even countries over which it has no sovereignty (save the pith helmet, a fawning Royalist Press and sheer audacity); and no immunity. Brexit is another example of a wider and deeper problem the British public has with ‘furriners’. Our problems in Britain run deep and we are not shaking them off. I did not arrive at the solution of independence for Scotland, by accident (and I have no illusions about Scotland’s complicity, but I think Scotland is capable of learning something from its past).
Much to agree with
Thank you and well said, John.
John’s analysis of this and other issues is, unfortunately, rarely, if ever, undertaken by politicians and the wannabes (spads, lobbyists etc.), but even civil servants, too.
Whatever one thinks of the BRICS and Kazan summit, it was noticeable that the heads of government from some Commonwealth members went to Russia, not Samoa. Malaysia will preside over ASEAN next year and plans coordination with the BRICS, which it has just joined.
I note my former employer, the Home for Scottish Bank Clerks, plans to reorganise itself on east and west lines.
Readers may be interested in: https://www.history.com/news/what-was-the-royal-african-company and https://www.ourhistory.org.uk/the-royal-african-company-englands-colonial-commerce-and-the-transatlantic-slave-trade/. It’s estimated that 300 mansions were built or rebuilt using profits from slavery in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Just when this country needs people of the calibre of Richard, Mike and John S, we have Starmer, Reeves and Streeting. We’re done, aren’t we?
Yes….
If Trump wins, the whole world will burn. Possibly literally. We are indeed done!
Thank you, John.
My parents come from Mauritius. Dad and I are descendants of a Farquhar and, until 40 years ago, had that name as a second barrel.
There are Scottish place names and churches all over Mauritius, e.g. Auchindrain, Holyrood and Monymusk. Some descendants of Scottish oligarchs remain. It’s the same in the Caribbean.
Oh, and the PMs of most of the political and economic “heavyweight” Commonwealth nations are not even there (they have better things to do than squirm with embarrassment with Britain making a regular fool of itself in public). Australia’s PM turned up, but note – Australia is in the same Pacific region as Samoa. Canada’s PM is not there, and only sent the UK High Commissioner. Far worse, India and South Africa effectively snubbed the Commonwealth Conference , their political leaders preferring to attend the BRICS Conference, presided over by Putin in Russia. And that really is a brutal and condescending snub. The leaders who attended, led by Caribbean States, have clearly had more than enough of British hubris and bluster covering the obscenity of our past (and our difficulty even acknowledging our guilt – because guilt is solely to be attributed to ‘furriners’); and have decided the time has come to lay down some ground rules of their own.
I doubt if Britain is grown-up enough to learn anything.
Keir Starmer may want to reflect on his failing strategy to ape everything the Tories do so as not to have to answer difficult questions from their press as he observes all the council seats Labour are now shedding up and down the country with swings that are usually seen at the end of failing governments ie. the Tories were suffering similar defeats only months ago.
Labour councillors disappearing because of the selfish indulgence of their leader whether through the colossal naivety of freebie-gate, the rank political incompetence of the Winter Fuel Allowance cut, or the continuing pointless appeasement of the soundly-beaten Brexiteers in the reset of our relationship with the EU. This has bad portents for future elections.
Despite all the praise heaped on Blair’s head, his tenure was in fact a decade long emboldening of Conservative orthodoxy with all the ramifications that had when the Tory establishment got its grubby mitts back on the tiller after 2010. Keir’s achieved the same in little more than 4 months. I despair.
Thank you and well said, M.
Let us not forget that, under Blair and Brown, more manufacturing was lost than under Thatcher and Major.
It’s a forlorn attempt to get away from “working class” as the identifying character of Labour’s base support.
EP Thompson eat yer heart out.
Labour and the left in general really does have an identity crisis in some ways, but that party PR machines have perverted this, and continue to try to do so, for electoral machinating, is bleedin’ obvious.
Now that Labour is driven almost exclusively by middle class metropolitan activists, and the solid blue collar base has long gone – along with the mines, steelworks, heavy engineering works, and all of Thatcher’s other victims, then the language has had to change.
(The ‘working class’ did alway include the servant class, clerical and administrative groups.)
If Labour has become led, almost exclusively, by ABC1 groups instead of engaging both C2DE and those ABC1 left intellectuals and professionals, then it has morphed into a mere servant of technocracy.
And technocracy is neoliberal.
Yet, the pretence that class no longer exists is very useful.
If we’re all just into issue based cultural politics in our wee silos, it acts as a lovely diversion for a ruling elite’s divide and rule strategy.
That still succeeds, just as well as it ever did.
If there is any significant class unity amongst those groups who have to sell their labour to survive, then they are so much more difficult to manipulate and herd.
That applies to Labour governments just as much as the Tories.
SKS’ ability to misstep has become his MO. His days are numbered.
Much to agree with
Hedge fund managers do work. Partners at Big 4 accounting firms and city law firms do work. FTSE CEOs do work. All are “working people” often in “hard working families”. Admittedly mostly not now “working class”.
So this is not about income from employment or self-employment.
But is also not about people who get most of their income from savings and investments. That includes many pensioners who are not “working people”.
He perhaps could talk about people who earn less than say twice median earnings. And who are not financially wealthy.
Politicians love talking about “hard working families”. I feel sorry for all the averagely working families, just quietly getting on with a balanced life. Who speaks for them?
If politicians didn’t have a fetish about ‘work’ they could think more about people and society, not categories and stereotypes.
In the USA, a loose definition of a working person is a person who derives 80% of their income from wages paid by someone other than themselves.
A working person can be a clerk at Walmart or a president of a bank if they fit the definition of how his wages are paid.
I admit I think the term fairly useless when it comes to tax.
There we should simply talk about income from work and income from unearned sources.
Wot about us pensioners? We’re not (in the main) working people. Are LINO going to tax us or maybe raid one of our small benefits…..? Surely not, as many of us have been part of “hard working families” for decades past.
A working person is someone with a precarious or under valued vocation who is vulnerable to have his/her earnings and needs exploited by the market and whom needs to be protected by their government.
Stick that in your pipe smoke it ‘Mr Knight of the Realm’.
🙂
I think Tony is closest to the mark, hardly anyone identifies themself as “working class” these days (the exception being politicians using the phrase as virtue signalling) although I assume quite a few fit the technical definition used by sociologists. It isn’t much use Starmer using a term no one thinks refers to them.
However “working person” is a fudge since it is ill defined. It clearly includes anyone who receives an income from some organisation for their work (so is much wider than working class, managers and doctors are working people) but also most who are self-employed. It clearly doesn’t include anyone who receives their income from a trust fund without an obligation to do any work.
Ironically the easiest definition currently is a circular one: a working person is someone who pays National Insurance on their income. It won’t do, because as RIchard has argued on this blog we need that anomaly correcting so that tax rates are the same regardless of the source of income. I would like to hope Starmer and Reeves have picked up on that idea of moving towards more equitable taxation by increasing tax on dividend and rental income (for example).
This is a deviation from the rest of the thread — but I’m just listening to R4 advertise question time — featuring again someone from The Spectator. So I’m typing this now because I’m irritated at the distorted over-representation of these groups…..
So Richard, what is your weekly readership? or the number of responses (to compare to letters received by MSM) ?? Can we aggregate if many of the visitors over a week are the same each day?
For reference:
Spectator – published weekly. Circulation ~110,000.
Private Eye (rarely featured, but possibly the main investigative publication left in the UK): published semi-weekly. Circulation 220,000.
Can there be some method to object to the under-representation of an alternative to the neoliberal orthodoxy ?
My viewing figures are about 1.2 million oer month now – 40,000 a day – on the bog and Youtube combined – and data supplied by Youtube suggests there is little overlap.
I’m sure that lots of people self-define as working-class today. A few years ago, a questionnaire established that, if asked if they were working or middle or upper class a narrow majority saw themselves as “middle”. But, when given the option of being “upper working class”, most of the “middle class ” ones realised they were working class after all. Just a bit better- off
maybe.
The question for the media to ask is what type of person is not “working class”. That would tie Starmer and his pals in excruciating knots even more!
Selling the Work Ethic by Sharon Beder is a good around the constant severance of work above all else and the mythical hardworking families, examining the roots of this fetishization of work and who promulgated it (it’s not hard to guess). I also found We have never been Middle Class by Hadas Weis illuminating, the book depicts how govt, advertisers, and corporation’s sold an idea of class based upon income, values and consumption rather than power. It is literally written into manifestoes produced by early twentieth century and agencies, and spread across the world. It leads directly to mass ownership of Dyson vacuum cleaners and IKEA shelves creaking with pristine Jamie Oliver cookbooks – the patron saint of social mobility according to a satirical tapestry by Grayson Perry I saw in Lincoln. These books resonate with PSR’s post – you discover what class you are when someone yanks your chain and you see who you’re beholden to, and how little power you actually have, and that all the middle class trappings afford you no protection whatsoever.
At the start is should read “is a book about the constant reverence”.