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November 1, 2024 - 4:45pm
It must, if you’re Labour, feel cosmically unjust. For years, you endured the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats successfully trashing your record to justify the Coalition’s austerity programme — a double injustice if you think Gordon Brown was a good prime minister.
Then, at last, the boot was on the other foot. In a mere 50 days, Liz Truss nuked the Tories’ reputation for economic competence. Surely, they would never live it down; some excitable commentators predicted that Labour would dine out on the mini-Budget for as long as the Conservatives did on the Winter of Discontent.
Yet the Labour attacks aren’t sticking. While it’s still too early to even think about whether the Tories are meaningfully recovering, the blame game isn’t protecting the new government’s standing with the public.
Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones today became the latest minister to dutifully invoke the spectre of Truss — to no avail. Meanwhile, voters’ patience with the line about a “black hole” in the public finances was finite even before the OBR basically scotched the claim on Wednesday. The markets are still reacting badly to the Budget, as are the voters; just as worryingly for Labour, its fig leaf of a City support network has folded.
The Starmer government’s decision to try and make hay out of Truss is perfectly understandable. The mini-Budget was a self-inflicted disaster by someone who was fundamentally bad at politics: £40 billion of deficit-financed tax cuts that panicked the markets, which were then hurriedly balanced by the promise of £40 billion in spending cuts she could never have delivered.
Yet it clearly isn’t the load-bearing argument Labour thought it was. The most important reason for this is that it is possible to make too much of a good thing, and the present government is making far too much of the mini-Budget. Yes, the markets reacted badly and mortgage rates went up. But the idea that it is the root of all our current economic woes — and the difficult decisions the Government is having to make — is self-evidently ridiculous.
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Subscribe“…a double injustice if you think Gordon Brown was a good prime minister…”
Why on earth would anyone think Gordon Brown was a good prime minister?
Go on a BBC HYS and you’ll see plenty of upvotes for comments such as ‘Gordon Brown saved the world during the banking crisis’. Utter madness, but there it is.
There’s even more that think he was a good Chancellor, staggering though that may seem.
It was meant to be witty, not literal. Have a coffee.
He was a better Prime Minister than Chancellor – but only because his time at the Treasury was catastrophic.
I think something that the media are underestimating is the way that 1p off beer is being perceived as pure trolling by Reeves, and it’s adding to the scorn being poured on the budget.
It’s like Tuco giving the liquor bottle to the gun shop owner at the end. To understand what I’m waffling on about, just squint a bit and imagine Rachel Reeves in dirty spurred cowboy boots and a stubble, and watch this to the end.
https://youtu.be/4zc0r-gTxNw?si=wX0uYz5pCbGCaRxX
In the same vein, this is the Labour Party having discovered the nirvana of getting into power (the scene is a great tour de force of music and cinematography). That’s the ‘Ming Vase’ that Tuco is throwing away once he gets to the cemetery.
https://youtu.be/ubVc2MQwMkg?si=asseLF2cxFmePu8R
Sadly the premise of the article is incorrect – large numbers of people will believe guff about black holes, Truss crashing the economy, the Tories trebling the national debt etc., at least for some time. The level of understanding in the general population is that low, the media they read won’t attempt to explain to them and, in all likelihood, they don’t want it explained anyway.
Labour politics from the 1970s spun as something new; it was never going to impress anyone. Been there; got the T-shirt!
It’s actually not! But the success of the Labour project will depend on whether they have the guts and nouse to bring about the reforms that are necessary. If so, good for them. The country is in a bad way. If not, then it’s a lot of wasted money, probably with significant collateral damage.
No, of course Labour doesn’t have the guts-, or nouse, to bring about the necessary reforms.
In fact, under Starmer, and as demonstrated by the Budget, it is still stuck on dividing the cake, not increasing it so everyone gets more.
Bring back Mandelson with “we don’t care about people getting filthy rich, provided they pay their taxes..”. Starmer Labour just wants to tax people so they can’t get filthy rich…never mind that everyone gets poor because the cake is getting smaller because nobody has the incentive to “get on” and make money.
As for “the people”, they probably can “handle the truth”…provided they can keep more of their own money to look after themselves, with a fair contribution to those who can’t…not those who won’t.
We’ve now had decades of that, and it’s not ended very well. As for nobody having an incentive to make money – we live in an age of widening inequality! And while at street level things are bad, for the producers of luxury goods for the rich we are living in a golden age.
I seem to remember that in the run up to the election Wes Streeting was spouting off about how the NHS did not need any extra cash ..just reforms …what happened to that !
In short, the public do in fact think there is a magic money tree. They expect services which they are not prepared to pay for.
Am I the only one who finds the most apt description for this kind of thinking to be “childish”. It is quite literally to think like a child.
Yes, illusion; eventually to be followed by disillusion.
I think the starting point to the frustration is that people expect to get some sort of service for the money that is currently taken from them now.
When I donate to charity I try to find out how much of my donation gets to the nominal target of the charity and how much is swallowed by the salaries and costs of the administrators.
Now look at public services – I suspect that many people are now wondering what benefit they get for their taxes and how much is absorbed by the salaries and costs of the administrators.
So I would expect (a triumph of hope over past experience) that a new government would start by introducing a reasonable recruitment ban on the administrators’ jobs delivering services under government control. As far as I can recall few governments have tried this with any conviction.
Yes – that’s the other side of the story – reforming public services. That’s a lot tougher than simply increasing taxes. Even if they tackled this in the nhs alone it would be an enormous achievement.
And yet she still has her fans! Sadly, for her book sales, not that many of them can read.
The tragedy is that, had she got the presentation right, her growth policies would have been much more likely to succeed than Reeves’ hopeless effort.
To be honest it was just austerity policy but based on borrowing money, rather than cutting services, in order to cut tax. These policies haven’t worked in the way they are supposed to, and the whole theory is now in question.
Perhaps we should have been suspicious. If the rich tell you that the only way to help the poor is by helping the rich and making the poor suffer – then it’s time to check your wallet is where you left it!
All this stuff about the ‘rich’ that you and J.Watson go in for is just a smokescreen.
Here’s a question for you: if Labour were to recover just the increase in property wealth that there has been since the start of the pandemic they could double spending on the NHS, pay off half the national debt and cut taxes. So why don’t they? Because the people who hold that wealth also control the media and the universities. The problem is not the ‘rich’ per se, but you and me.
When thinking of our current economic woes and the seeming ineptitude of serial chancellors I can’t but wish they and their advisors had all taken Hayek a little more seriously. The Road to Serfdom, published 1944, did try to warn “ of the dangers of government control of economic decision-making. Hayek argues that the abandonment of individualism and classical liberalism leads to oppression, tyranny, and the loss of freedom. He also challenges the view that fascism was a capitalist reaction against”
We did. Or at least our representatives did. It’s called neoliberalism. It’s made the rich richer, the poor less so. And the kind of serfdom we are heading for is one in which landlords take an increasing slice of everyone’s wages. Perhaps even a bigger slice than is taken by taxation.
Not sure of the wisdom of some of the measures in Reeves budget – you wonder how much certain scenarios were really played out in advance – but the market reaction tiny compared to Mad Liz’s folly. The issue is we are all so much more sensitised now to Bond market reactions.
Alone though the measures don’t appear to have a sufficient growth accelerator and it’ll take the other things Labour is promising to generate that, plus, critically, some luck.
Author touches on potentially the key issue for both main Parties – ‘Voters Cakeism’. Are politicians creating this or powerlessly following? Labour’s payslip tax promises clearly followed, but some rhetoric now has been a little more honest. They still tread too carefully in my view. Could understand if an election a year away, but it’s not. As for the Right it has the same problem and continues to lack honesty on choices. We’ll start to see whether this will fundamentally change once new leader confirmed today.
Good. The cracks are beginning to appear in your hitherto uncritical support for the party of the parasite class. Hopefully Reeves’ attack on the farmers, people who actually create wealth, in order to reward Labour’s freeloading metropolitan constituents with yet more handouts, will awaken some others as well.
The BoE, revelling in its independence, announced it was going to start selling off £Bs of the gilts it had acquired through QE just two days before the mini-Budget announced the need to issue a lot more gilts to fund tax cuts.
That element of the Truss plan was no secret, so why did the Bank do this?
Ineptitude or sabotage? You decide.
It’s Bailey in charge, so I would say ineptitude is the more likely.
The country’s economy is in a baf way for 2 reasons, both of which would be relatively straightforward to fix, but would take politically will and courage.
Self-inflicted high energy costs.
Over-regulation.