Sources tell me that following Monday night's Parliamentary Labour Party meeting, at which Rachel Reeves outlined her desperate plan for growth, including her newfound support for the expansion of Heathrow, word was let slip that Labour might support leaving the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) if those impacted by its plans seek recourse to that Court to block Labour's desperate desire for growth, whatever the human and environmental cost.
Leaving the ECHR has long been a far-right dream of the likes of Suella Braverman, who wished to deny human rights to refugees by exiting this court, which has nothing to do with the EU and which was founded on the initiative of the UK that Winston Churchill supported as a buttress against the forces of fascism. Now it seems Starmer and Reeves might be rethinking their support for it.
Why is that? It's because Starmer has changed his view on Heathrow. This was him in 2020:
Now, he is the person supporting the plans for the expansion of that airport.
Those opposing will include the 10,000 whose homes might have to be bulldozed, and unsurprisingly, they will fight for as long as possible to keep their homes and their communities. One option for them would be to go to the ECHR. This would delay the whole process, of course, and so Labour's rumoured intention is to put these people in the same position as newts that stand in the way of politicians' follies, like this airport expansion, by denying them their rights, including an appeal to the ECHR.
Labour could, of course, deliver this plan even if some of its MPs rebelled. The Tories would line up to vote for it. So, Starmer, who is supposedly a human rights lawyer, could deliver one of the most significant setbacks to human rights in the UK ever, all for the purpose of delivering utterly pointless, environment-wrecking, value-destroying growth when that is not what people want from the government.
The rumour may just be an idle threat, of course. It could be deliberately misleading. And it could be a planned action by desperate people who are losing touch with reality. I fear it might be the last of these options. If so, it says all we need to know about Starmer and Reeves. But what worries me is that someone could have even thought this up. We should be worried.
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Presumably a third runway will take a long time to complete and feed through to growth in GDP. It doesn’t look like a quick fix. You could also argue the same for a UK silicon valley. I am all for long term planning (although against aviation expansion) but how are Labour going to make people better off in the next 4-5 years? It seems that Biden actually achieved economic growth but still lost because many didn’t feel the benefit.
Excellent questions.
See this morning’s video.
This is by no means to suggest support for any new runways – an appalling reversal of policy on Labour’s part – but wouldn’t GDP related to this project start to grow as soon as the work was underway? And, since this is a crucial measure for Reeves, wouldn’t she then be able to claim this as a sign that her policies are starting to work? Or is my understanding of GDP completely awry?
But Heathrow has not even made a planning application – which makes this whole issue very bizarre
“It seems that Biden actually achieved economic growth but still lost because many didn’t feel the benefit.”
Many people “on the street” interviewed after the election stated they agreed with the $2 Trillion USD infrastructure bill but the immediate financial benefits would not reach them. The people “on the street” felt that the only people who would feel “immediate tangible financial benefits” were those people directly employed on the infrastructure projects and their households.
People in the USA feeling the effects of so called “inflation” (basically economic changes caused by neoliberalism) want “immediate tangible financial benefits” for themselves and their household: more money immediately and directly in their pockets, major decrease in cost of food, major decrease in the cost of housing and gas at $2.50 per gallon of lower. How people think deporting immigrants and instituting tariffs will achieve this boggles my mind. However, this mentality of a large majority of “swing Voters” caused the Democrats to lose the Presidential election.
See an old Guardian Article below on the Biden Infrastructure Bill.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/31/biden-infrastructure-plan-address-climate-crisis
Thanks
Are insufficient flights into Heathow an impediment to investment in the UK? Somehow I doubt it.
Me too
Sounds familiar, is starmer going to withdraw from the WHO if the activists make the claim that it would impact on their health?
Encouraging more holiday flights to foreign currency lands is not a good idea; foreign holidays are mostly imports. They make the nation’s “current account” deficit larger. The UK’s is a “twin deficit” economy (currently minus 7.8% of GDP) and in terminal decline.
As Richard says. All the time Chancellors’ think the government’s budget process is the same as a household; there is no way out of this decline. Households are currency users, not currency issuers.
Since 2019 The US has created and injected into the non-government economy some $12 trillion through a few federal Acts. Most of that went into production processes including employment. US debt to GDP topped-out at 130% which is now coming down, due to the increased taxes it is generating. The exact opposite of the UK’s fiscal policy which has concentrated of fiddling with several different metrics of debt to GDP so it can keep fooling itself and the rest of the population.
(Me being slightly ironic) I’ve got an idea for Reeves and the government, that would not involve environment shredding proposals such as Heathrow expansion and would boost the economy up to 4-5%: Britain could re-join the Single Market and Customs Union.
Silly, I know!