Listening to Budget reaction in the media this morning, one would think that the Budget was a disaster not because it did not do enough but because far too much is being spent. The assumptions appear to be:
- Government services are broken.
- There is nothing that can be done about that.
- The money Reeves is planning to spend is like pouring good money after bad into an ever-growing black hole.
This is deeply depressing. The reality is that:
- Government services are broken.
- They need massive investment to deliver the foundations for our economy in the future.
- Reeves is not doing nearly enough to deliver the services that we need and is not taxing wealth nearly enough to assist that process of transformation, which will require a major reallocation of resources within our society.
So, let me provide an example of what was wrong with this Budget. The Budget says (para 3.82):
The government will also invest in the natural environment and in climate mitigation and adaptation to protect the economy from the impacts of climate change. The Budget confirms £5 billion over two years to support the transition towards a more productive and environmentally sustainable agricultural sector in England and over £400 million of support for tree planting and peatland restoration. The government will invest £2.4 billion over two years in flood resilience to support the building of new flood defences alongside the maintenance of existing assets to protect communities.
I would put this in the context of what happened in Valencia yesterday.
And what I would note is the limited commitment made here. It is estimated that hundreds of billions of investment is required to manage climate change in this country, much of it by the government. We got £7.8 billion over two years. It's as if they really do not care.
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Politics – a functioning politics – was always about hegemonic forces competing with each other to win the day – as Chantal Mouffe has pointed out. Debate was around crucial issues that drove policy and policy was rewarded or punished at the voting booth.
But all I see now is a phony politics that presents itself as a battle, when in fact it is just contrived theatre, tinkering around the edges. It also helps bad politicians to keep their jobs or rotate in the private sector.
This budget is just another act in that theatre.
What we have now is an ossified politics that is just a holding place to keep the status quo for the real hegemonic force of capital which does not want change, unless it benefits them. That is why holding back State fiat money for services, investment etc., will benefit capital who can turn a State obligation or commitment into an income stream. They get to have their cake – and eat it – at our expense.
The money must come in, and keep coming in to the rich. That is the only rule we seem to live by at the moment. And that is why being rich is sold to us 24/7 in the media and why we have a new programme on TV which can only be described ‘yacht porn’.
Can you imagine the production company’s pitch to get that aired? That it fitted the psychological profile of the channels ‘aspirational’ demographic of its viewers.
Money is the new religion. Being rich is the sum of all human effort. Apparently.
Well, let’s get one thing clear: becoming rich these days is all about moving resources (man made and natural) around from the many to the few. If you are low enough to consider that the height of humanity, then you need help as far as I am concerned. You are simply anti-social.
I’d like to add to, and extend the PSR thesis of dangerous ossification.
I view it as suicidal for human civilisation, as is.
Money is anything but a new religion. Old money was/is class.
There is a thread that runs from Joseph Townsend’s “A Dissertation on the Poor Laws.” of 1786, to Edward Bernays “Propaganda” of 1928.
According to Townsend, the justified disgust of the righteous in the indolent poor, untermensch, was that their poverty was due to their actual inferiority.
Their worthiness for survival ought to depend on their work ethic in the service of the master class.
They ought to be left to die.
As we still label the underserving poor today.
And justify their deprivation.
Such is the underlying principle of austerity.
Pure, but concealed, Townsendian loathing of the poor.
The thread continues through Social Darwinism to the logical conclusion that the ownership and hence unhindered pursuit of wealth and consumer materialism is the ultimate goal of mankind, and we all must aspire to the conspicuous consumption goals of intensively marketed capitalism.
Money, as expressed in materialism, demonstrates Veblen’s success.
This is very much a manipulated mindset in consumers. It is not innate.
Marketing then creates those consumer wants in an ever expanding range of products.
These products must always be replaced, by the new, hopefully when the original rapidly failed to serve its purpose. Obsolescence drives consumerism.
Lord Stokes once opined that the best Leyland car would simply fall apart at about 50,000 miles
However, Varoufakis argues that the 21stC oligarchical goal is not in production, but in tech-enabled rents, which “flows from privileged access to things in fixed supply”, so technofeudalism. We rent online access. Suppliers rent ‘space’ in Amazon’s virtual warehouses.
Most billionaires are rent seekers, not producers. Paid up members of the Drones Club.
The hegemonic forces which have led us to neoliberalism have taken over 250 years to become ingrained into our socio-economic system. The next stage is AI, but exclusively owned and directed by the oligarchical class, into such tech as self driving vehicles and such other essentials.
But the weak link is that AI is a very intensive energy consumer at a time when the last thing we need is more energy consumption.
Anyone thinking we are on a course to a net zero carbon and sustainable society, is living in dream land.
All renewables have done so far is allow even more fossil fuel extraction, and the flimflam of Carbon Capture extends the con-trick.
Now that, to me, is where PSRs ‘anti-social, really arises.
The accumulation of wealth is highly concentrated, as is energy consumption.
These are absolutely fatal trends.
We all need help to escape this Townsendian dystopia, before it destroys us all.
Thanks
It’s essentially magic thinking that the problem isn’t that bad and hopes that it will go away, despite all of the scientific consensus to the contrary. Looking at a fragile civilizational system in light of the enormous risk from climate change and all of the other planetary boundaries, and then throwing chump change to prepare is like buying an umbrella to prepare for a tsunami.
For a sobering statistic on the cost of rectifying one of many ‘externalities’ (i.e. the damage we are doing to the biosphere), the estimated annual cost to remove the PFAs that are released into the world annually is >$106 trillion USD (more than global GDP): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969724007861. This is just one of many of the ways the biosphere is being degraded as the damage to the commons is not factored in from business processes, and there’s a profoundly unwise finite, short-term ‘game’ being played where there’s a disincentive to act in a pro-life, pro-commons and moral way.
The budget was truly a disaster for climate change mitigation. There was some additional funding in 3.78:
“Taking the first step towards a Warm Homes Plan, committing an initial £3.4 billion towards heat decarbonisation and household energy efficiency over the next three years. This includes £1.8 billion to support fuel poverty schemes, helping over 225,000 households reduce their energy bills by over £200. The government will increase funding for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme in England
and Wales this year and next, following the high demand for the scheme. The government is also providing funding to grow the heat pump manufacturing supply chains in the UK to support the plan.”
This does not deal with the root cause, which needs people to use less energy. This needs repair, insulation and retrofit to decarbonise UK housing stock. There is an ongoing social housing decarbonisation programme which has allocated ~ £1 billion to date. Based on the cost per home of that work, just to decarbonise the UK social housing stock (4.4 million homes) will need ~ £200 billion, let alone all UK homes.
It is woeful and does not address the scale of the problem. This and previous governments have stuck their heads in the sand while the planet warms. Not least because it continues to let house builders build rubbish quality homes with poor energy efficiency (why we are not not building every house to Passiv standards beggers belief).
Many of the pundits talk about the virtues of spending to invest and not on consumption or ‘day to day’ expenditure. The latter includes social security benefits and salaries for public sector employees.
I can see the argument for spending which shows a return, such as improving health care or some research, but I do wonder if the distinction is as clear cut. Once the money has started to circulate, is it the case that “a pound is a pound is a pound’?
I really don’t profess to know but I like to examine slogans.
It so happens money circulating from investment tends to copulate more as it produces returns beyond the initial spend
Copulate?
So that is where the multiplier effect comes from…
Was there a typo?
“ Government services are broken.
There is nothing that can be done about that.
The money Reeves is planning to spend is like pouring good money after bad into an ever-growing black hole.”
This is the neoliberal narrative designed to justify continued privatisation and shrinking of the state. The fact that “professional” commentators in the mainstream media are spouting this propaganda is deeply disturbing.
Reading the mainstream media about the budget just feels like reading fairy tales. The analysis is just appalling. For example, Climate change – What climate change?
I watched some of the OBR presentation yesterday and they said there were inflationary pressures from the Budget due to the economy pushing above its potential. Does this mean that the Reeves budget is at the limit of what we can achieve?
They think so
I do not agree
We need a plan for a real industrial strategy to really release the potential of our economy. We are not remotely near it at present.
In my 30p Penguin copy of “A Blueprint for Survival”, written by ‘The Ecologist’ Editorial Team in 1972, the Introduction starts as follows:-
“The principle defect of the industrial way of life with its ethos of expansion is that it is not sustainable.
Its termination within the lifetime of someone born today is inevitable – unless it is continues to be sustained for a while longer by an entrenched minority at the cost of imposing great suffering on the rest of mankind.
We can be certain, however, that it will end…..”
“….. and that it will do so in one of two ways: either against our will, in a succession of famines, epidemics, social crises and wars;
or because we want it to – because we wish to create a society which will not impose hardship and cruelty upon our children – in a succession of thoughtful, humane, and measured changes.”
We live in a world utterly dominated by that ‘entrenched minority’, with government more a part of the problem than the solution.
I’d recommend every single MP to re-read this short prospectus for sustainable change, now over 50 years old but entirely prophetic, and then send the government back to the drawing board, to construct a budget worthy of the times in which we live.
I recall reading that….
I don’t but I’m glad I read the comments section bcs I was about to write sth like the minority argument.
Put differently, if you owned the vast majority of the production capacity, trading capacity and influence, while considering yourself rather shielded from harm, why would you build mitigation infrastructure now instead of wait a little and then build relocation infrastructure AND a sort of late mitigation/compensation infrastructure?
It’d be the same as investing in precautionary health systems, as in better affordable diet with real food instead of processed junk food, physical activities integrated into your lifestyle, time required to do this etc.
Bar a grand catastrophe it’s simply more profitable and much less resisted through nimby-ism once people are under pressure.
IMO that’s one reason.
” The government will also invest in the natural environment and in climate mitigation and adaptation to protect the economy from the impacts of climate change.” etc etc. flood defences and so on. Meanwhile hidden away in the documents rather than announced by the Chancellor the construction of Sizewell C was allocated another £2.7 billion to fund it through 2025/26, to continue its environmental destruction.
Alison, Stop Sizewell C, said: “For a government that criticised the opposition for playing fast and loose with the nation’s finances, the Chancellor is surprisingly happy to do the same, allocating another £2.7 billion of taxpayers’ money on risky, expensive Sizewell C, without making any guarantee of a Final Investment Decision being taken. Including £2.5 billion already spent, this means £5.2 billion of our money will be spent on a project that cannot even help Labour achieve its energy mission and is looking increasingly toxic to private investors.” The area around Sizewell is already being destroyed environmentally not to mention fact that East Anglia has insufficient water so desalination plants will be required. Plus it is sited on a coast that is eroding. Makes perfect sense!
I am a member of the Stop Sizewell C campaign
How to undermine your own country:-
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/oct/31/ifs-says-extra-9bn-of-tax-rises-may-be-needed-to-avoid-uk-public-service-cuts
How not to:-
https://newrepublic.com/article/158221/government-can-afford-anythi-wants