I re-read the speech Starmer gave yesterday before writing this post. I wanted to be sure I was being fair. I am left with a number of impressions having done so.
First, there are some warm words about aspirations that any politician could have said. There was nothing to distinguish them as being original or indicative of a particular political ideology.
Second, there was blame. He has forgotten the election is over. Like Boris Johnson before him, he has already forgotten that once the election is won, the job is to govern, not whine.
Third, it was intensely managerial. The claim is that Labour will be very busy. Doing what, apart from setting up the GB Energy private equity fund and turfing prisoners out of jail to make room for new inmates, is not clear. Being busy is easy, though. It's being useful that's the hard bit about governing.
Fourth, the overwhelming theme is that it is going to be very hard for Labour to deliver what the Tories promised. There is, supposedly, a £22 billion shortfall to do that - although given the nature of government accounting, this figure is by no means reliable, and I might even suggest it to be wrong. But there is no aim to go further. All the moaning and groaning is about how hard it will be to deliver the dire level of services to which the Tories aspired. There is, apparently, no margin at all to make things better.
So what does Labour want to do? In a nutshell, it seems that they want to deliver the plan Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak set out in the spring. That seems to be it. Only to do so, they are going to make children living in poverty suffer, pensioners suffer, and the users of public services wait, even though, as a result, some will die, and children will lose out on the education they need. As for global heating, it's as if that is someone else's problem.
What Starmer made clear was that there was a vacant space in the middle of his government where leadership, thinking, strategy and understanding should be. Instead, there are just moans about 'tough decisions' as if he, for some reason, thought being prime minister was going to be easy.
Being prime minister is never meant to be easy. It requires the holder of the office to think, and that is something few people want to do precisely because genuine reflection to determine right outcomes on the basis of ethically held values is never easy.
The trouble for us is that I do not think that Starmer and Reeves ever realised that this is what might be asked of them. That is partly because there are no clear signs that they have ethically held values. It is partly because there are no signs that they can really think. Instead, they believe that the roles that they think their roles are technical, managerial and functional when that is the job demanded of the civil service - with whom they are necessarily required to disagree on occasion, which I strongly suspect is something that has not occurred to them.
There is, then, a void at the heart of this government. That was always likely. After two months in office, that is now very obviously confirmed to be true. And there is no room for compromise with that technocratic thinking that simply seeks to deliver the Tories' strategy, at best.
We can do better. Describing what is possible is, I suspect, the role that this blog will take on.
Doing so, it will do two things. It will say what is possible. And it will show it can be paid for because Labour need have none of the problems it has if only it had not dug deep pits for itself into which it might fall before the election took place by declaring in advance that almost every known funding option on which it might call would be closed to it.
Now that the summer is over, it is time to get on with that.
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£22B is a small percentage of government annual expenditure. If there were a war or we had another pandemic, the government would have to spend and it would find the money. A mountain is being made out of a molehill all due to tory made rules that are, anyway, totally meaningless.
Starmer is already a total failure, imho.
He is fully committed to working within the taxation/spend equation since additional borrowing has been ruled out as has the use of public money for public benefit. His stated purpose appears to be to solve the nation’s problems while preventing the national debt from rising.
This being so he can only reduce public expenditure whilst increasing the tax take (reducing demand) in the short term. How this generates growth is not clear.
He is then expecting growth to increase the tax take over the longer term and this will enable him to allow public expenditure to grow again within his beloved “household expenditure” equation.
How he plans to react to existential risks (viral epidemics, US Foreign Policy decisions) is anybody’s guess. As Osborne said to the Covid Inquiry -what’s the use of a risk management plan if you have no money to manage the risk.
None of it makes sense.
Meanwhile the private sector can keep on borrowing until the cows come home.
As much as I admire Peter Oborne and his excellent criticism of Johnson etc., and his humanistic take on events in Gaza, the last Byline Times I read before cancelling my subscription was an interview with him. In this interview he spoke admiringly of Starmer/Stymied as if he was the second coming of the sort of conservatism Oborne saw as a ‘golden age’.
This is where I draw a line.
You cannot fault Oborne’s commitment to good, honest principled government – it is honest in itself. But it seems to me that as long as a Tory government does not behave like Johnson, Oborne seems to think it is OK doing what it does, and most of that to me over the years seems to be only bad things – the expansion of credit to hide drops in wages, the initiation of the destruction of the public transport system and even Thatcher seemed to have better boundaries than later Tory leaders, but look what she did to us.
Might point is that we do not need another Tory government.
Yet, we seem to have one.
At the end of World War II, Great Britain was knackered but somehow so much was created.
The Tories simply took money away and all that has to happen is that it needs to be put back.
And the way to do that is to put it back where it is going to be felt by voters the most and build it from there. Why is it Stymied refuses to acknowledge the power he has assumed control of?
And for us in Scotland. Anas Sarwar M.S.P. ” Read my lips, no austerity”. Aye right.
@ Alex Beveridge
Even if Anas Sarwar had had enough clout in Scotland to get to being FM he would have no influence on the policies of a Westminster based PLP. Anybody in Scotland who thinks differently is (IMO) living in cloud cuckoo land. There are sadly quite a few living there.
” I wanted to be sure I was being fair”
Jeez Richard, fair? Fair to whom, Starmer? He doesn’t deserver it. He is incompetent, malicious and greedy, along with the rest of his cabinet. He does not care a jot about those in poverty, sickness, homeless. Even if he did, he could still not work out what to do because his whole life is about money, status and greed.
The sooner him and his corrupt cabinet are gone, the better, so don’t feel the need to be “fair”, just tell it like it is.
Thank you, Sean.
You are right to call out the corruption at the heart of New New Labour. This is why it doesn’t matter if they lose the next general election. They will be well looked after by their owners, who include Zionists, apartheid sanctions busters, big pharma, Wall Street, fossil fuel firms, big ag, IT firms and autocracies.
@ Richard and Readers. You may enjoy these links:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/07/something-rotten-in-the-state-of-albion.html and
https://unherd.com/newsroom/labour-together-is-far-more-dangerous-than-momentum/.
Thank you for the link to the Unherd article.
I do so wish that commentators like Bastani would use the full title:
Labour Together LIMITED.
Just to remind us that Labour’s democratic National Policy Forum appears to no longer have a rôle. The money takeover is complete.
Thank you Colonel for your helpful links. I find naked capitalism very informative, and the discussions after links to Richard’s posts particularly interesting.
Thanks for the two articles. Readers attention is drawn to the second & more specifically – the 1st below the line comment. In my view this is worthy of a blog on its own. We knew PFI was on the cards, it would seem to be a runaway train and the corruption under LINO promises to be far far worse then even under Johnson – we are two months in & it looks bleaker than bleak..
Extract:
One of the first actions of Rachel Reeves was to “pause” or cancel every single road and rail programme not funded to completion. The mood music for this has been the mystical “£20bn” hole in finances. Meanwhile Reeves has been handing out enormous pay rises to state employees and reversing immigration changes that will cost an extra £10bn this year alone. The cognitive dissonance is dizzying but a meek media refuses to dwell on the contradictions.
The reason for the pause of these programmes is quite simple: every single programme is being raked over for opportunity to replace state funding with private finance. The DfT and the Treasury have external consultants burning the midnight oil (and a huge amount of cash) to repackage programmes for private finance. We already are being warmed up to the idea private finance will finish HS2 to Euston.
Be under no illusion that this is market-based capitalist finance offering efficiency and good value for the taxpayer. This is simply swapping funding; risk and delivery will be literally unchanged. Instead of low interest rate government bonds, programmes will be funded with far higher interest loans off the books with eyewatering locked-in fees for decades to come. All risk stays with the taxpayer. This is the kind of low risk, inflation-proof investment bankers dream of. It is the astronomically poor value former Private Finance Initiative (PFI) back for another gouging of taxpayers.
It is no mystery why this is happening. Hedge funds have spent a lot of money buying the Labour Party. They picked the Labour Party precisely because the history, the brand, is the polar opposite of who they are. The financial vampire squid are wearing the workers’ clothes. And conveniently anyone who complains is far right (TM), a label that corals the doubters on the left.
Now hedgies want a return on that investment. And before you can say “conflict of interest” and before whistleblowers can reach for a whistle, the supposed Whitehall enforcers of government probity have been taken over by the money men too. This is naked cromyism, South American style. Our entire body politic is now just a battle between financial oligarchs for control of the fiefdom that was once a democratic United Kingdom. And we are now just economic units for them to harvest revenue, and the more people the bigger harvest.
Ends.
I fear this is right
@ Sean
Telling it like it is has to be fair.
If we aren’t even trying to be fair we have given-in and then what are we fighting for?
Money was created to bail out the bank(sters) and money can always be found for arms, wars and nuclear deterrents. It becomes suddenly unavailable to stop pensioners freezing to death, to lift children out of poverty, for the NHS or other public services.
Lost the printing press?
It was a joke, wasn’t it? Labour’s *Change* slogan.
@ A C Bruce
“It was a joke, wasn’t it? Labour’s *Change* slogan.”
NO!
It was never a joke. It was a lie. (A statement intended to deceive)
[…] We are seeing this in the UK, where entryism into Labour has reduced it to being a Tory continuity party. […]
Was this “black hole” not disclosed in the spring before the Kwarteng/Truss “fiscal event”.
Labour are certainly no better than the Tories. The gas lighting of the electorate continues. This is why Igivethem no credit.
I understand that Steamer’s faction are now looking to amend the Labour rule book at the upcoming Labour conference so that its membership and union affiliates don’t get a vote on the leader of the Labour parliamentary party whilst they are an elected Government.
Yet more evidence that they are authoritarian and have nothing but contempt for democracy.
I am not sure I follow your logic
You know Truss went in 2022, not this spring, don’t you?
I recall reading there was a shortfall in Government income, versus expenditure, of some, IIRC £25-30bn before the Kwarteng/Truss mini budget.
After that, the IFS reports a £60bn black hole. Some of the changes made in the mini budget are reversed, but not all of them.
Then, in early 2023, Hunt came along offering us NI cuts on the back of a £30bn surplus.
I appreciate it is a massive over simplification of events.
My point is, it is not at all likely that Labour stepped into office and only ‘just learned’ about the state of the Nations finances.
If it is true, then I would argue they were not doing their job in opposition and were not fit to be elected into Government.
My belief is that they are using false narrative to justify austerity which is what they had planned before entering office. The lack of vision from Labour, is purposeful. They are not the party for change. They are the party for the status quo.
Everyone and their cat knew there was a shortfall, by the definition that the likes of the IFS knew
I hate the talk of a “Black hole”.
Because to me it implies that all the extra tax paid and cuts made will create a chunk of cash which will disappear into this hole with no benefit to any of us.
And that it is only when we have filled this big black hole that we can start to have money to improve things.
That is why the term is used
It’s now glaringly obvious that we can’t change government by voting, so what comes next?
We have to make that possible
Thank you, both.
We work with Mike Parr and Sheila to get independents elected and get socialists to take over the Greens.
And of course I agree Colonel!
The trick now is to make the Indys visible in their neighbourhoods, ready for 2029.
Hence my support for Mike’s work on developing local projects which bring real local benefit, supported and hopefully even led by those who want to bring local change, then national change by becoming MPs.
Trouble is I’m not sure the current situation might drastically change soon….
What comes next? This is the projection many fear:
1. Tory govt
2. Despair
3. 2024 Election
4. Hope
5. Labour govt
6. Despair
7. 2029 Election
8. Anger
9. Fascism
But….there are always ‘events’. 5 years of the current parliament is a long time. Maybe new hope will come from somewhere.
That’s my fear too (if we manage avoid war, disease and climate-driven calamity for as long as five years).
That’s what will let Farage and Reform in …..
Thank you and well said, Richard.
I notice the centrist log rollers gunning after Richard and Danny Blanchflower on X, unfollowing etc.
Starmer, the Surrey rich kid, is doing what his backers, neoliberal and neocon, not always the same, want him to do. That agenda is not ours.
I can live with that….
But no net unfollowers this weekend
Thank you, Richard.
You can change things by voting, but not for the 2 ConLab parties but for those with more imagination rather than those capitalist orientated status quo parties. For example Green , SNP, Plaid, Independent Socialist or other progressive independents. True, our first past the post system is tragically flawed but it is the only vehicle available and can be influenced by mass pressure from the other progressive parties and camaigning groups such as Just Stop Oil, Greeenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Liberty et al. For those of a more nihilistic disposition there are the alternatives of anarcho-syndicalism or other forms of anarchism or workers control etc.and other movements that are completely absent from mainstream discourse.
Why is it a surprise to so many?
Starmer is not a new hope – he never was. Many of us have known it for years.
He was a traitor to the Labour leadership with his wormtonguery to keep close enough to Corbyn to be able to destroy that win.
Which would have upset all their plans as our ex MI6 chief stated publicly.
He enabled the 2019 election loss with the same wormtonguerry on display now.
The great knight dope was selected to lead the U.K. towards further fascism by lawfare against dissent.
Domestically NuLabour redux has to deliver total destruction and no return of the remaining high quality NHS free at the point of need.
It’s a neoliberal global, WEF et al, plan of dividing the world into the rump imperialist golden billion Borrell’s Garden from the rising collective majority that is the multipolar law based order.
Things are only going to get worse as they find zillions to fight a world war but claim they can’t scrape together tuppence for the needs of the population here.
It will carry on being blamed on ‘foreigners’ – aimed to divide society – and usher in overt jackboot fascism which has been covertly developed so far with the EDL/kipper yarboo types led by the fake ‘Tommy’ and Farage media icons.
If we let them.
Afternoon Richard,
I’ve been away from your blog for too long, shame on me. Your comments on the PM’s speech yesterday resonate.
Can I suggest that we all write to our MPs, especially the Labour variety, and voice our concerns. Here’s a copy of the email I sent my MP recently, Alison is the first Labour incumbent for many years and I was actively involved in getting her elected.
My comments were targeted at the proposed restriction of the winter fuel allowance to pensioners registered to receive Pension Credits. I said:
Alison,
Rachel Reeves is starting to preach from Osbourne’s bible – the Book of Austerity… This is not the forward thinking economic planning I voted for.
Denying pensioners the winter fuel allowance (WFA) if their joint income is over £332 per week (the limit to apply for pension credits) is monstrous. At a stroke this turns your leader’s pledge to make no additional demands on working people a mockery. But perhaps pensioners have less rights to fair treatment than the workers!
Has no one at the Treasury investigated Modern Monetary Theory? If Labour wants to free up investment and stimulate growth it won’t achieve much in that direction by reducing public expenditure and increasing taxation. And denying pensioners their winter fuel payment is taxation under a sneaky guise.
And there are alternative solutions. Include a High Income Winter Fuel Charge in the budget that effectively removes the benefit of the allowance for taxpayers with income in excess of say £50,000 a year (basically higher and additional rate tax payers). Or appeal to our good nature. I would willingly repay, or elect not to receive the WFA. My sister pays hers to a charity.
Dear God, have we opened yet another Pandora’s box of ruthless, mindless economic mismanagement that means I will have to experience yet more of the gospel according to the Book of Austerity for my remaining time on terra firma.
I’ve no idea how you could impact this situation but please pass on my comments to the Treasury, and to Rachel if you have her ear.
I’d willing take a train to London to discuss these matters with the inmates in charge of the Treasury Asylum but very much doubt they would be willing to listen.
Thanks Bob
You are not alone in being worried
Here’s an idea, and forgive the lack of economic street-creds, why doesn’t the government issue £22bn in 5 year bonds that will be repaid just before the next election? If Labour wins again (how likely is that!) they can reissue or if the Blues win they can sort out there own mess.
Labour can then set to and fund school meals, maintain winter fuel payments without means testing, deal with climate change, re-engage with Europe, filter the water companies, nationalise the rail network, offer incentives to increase productivity and investment.
Or not… In which case Rachel Iron Hands will throttle us into submission.
Great minds….
There is a blog in the morning….
I agree with Starmer he should be judged by his actions. Insisting on freezing grannies to death in quantity is pretty much what we should expect from a man who buddies up to the perpetrators of the Gaza genocide. If he doesn’t care about what happens to Palestinians, we can’t expect him to care about what happens to us. I predict Reeves and Starmer will hang on like grim death to the means testing of Winter Fuel Payments then after apply that same principle to the State Pension and NHS treatment, lamenting all the while it was other boys made them do it. I have no doubt the nation will be left a shell of its former self after Labour have done looting and moved on.
Private Water companies DO NOT want to play ball with Starmer. New houses will not (cannot???) be built.
Starmer is losing any credibility he once had with voters at an alarming rate.
See below from the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/aug/28/water-bills-must-rise-if-labour-is-to-hit-housebuilding-target-industry-claims
You couldn’t make this up….
I strongly agree with Richard’s assessment of Starmer’s speech. What struck me was how obviously, nakedly, Starmer looks like a man completely out of his depth. He does not seem to understand that he could be torn apart by the forces that parted temporarily to allow him access to the top table whenever it becomes expedient. He looks and sounds like a wooden puppet about to be clubbed over the head. To longer term observers, his faltering rise to power, was only ever going to be a continuation of a deeply unimpressive mind allied to an authoritarian bent for ticking boxes. He dare not do anything else because chief among his many flaws is that he is a coward, and a nasty one at that. His speech confirmed all this to me. It was wrong in just about every way I predicted it would be.
Thanks
“…genuine reflection to determine right outcomes on the basis of ethically held values is never easy.”
Starmer has no excuse then, has he? He has no ethically held values other than as a legal hitman for the establishment as DPP.
When politicians speak of difficult choices they mean they are going to stitch-up people who are already hog-tied. Even Weasels have a more compassionate moral compass.
Obviously I haven’t enough rum in my cocoa tonight. 🙂