Macroeconomist Simon Wren-Lewis may have hit the nail on the head by saying Starmer and Reeves are making Labour unpopular when they don’t have to.

In his latest Mainly Macro article, Professor Wren-Lewis contrasts what today’s Labour government is doing with attempts by the Coalition government of 2010 onwards to blame Labour for the austerity cuts it brought in (when those cuts were nothing to do with anything Labour had done).

His claim is that, while both governments sought to blame their immediate predecessors for what have come to be called “tough” decisions, the Tories (and their Liberal Democrat Coalition counterparts) succeeded because the Tories had been pushing their “It’s all Labour’s fault” narrative for years and had the media on their side.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves don’t have the media on their side – and don’t deserve it when their decisions attack the elderly and/or the poor.

Professor Wren-Lewis points out that while Reeves has been trying to blame the Tories for the decisions she is making now, her actions do not tally with her words – and her words do not even tally with the reason Labour was elected in July.

He says she would have fared better if she had reversed Tory tax cuts rather than hitting pensioners, because this would have presented a clear association with past actions of the previous government. She didn’t, because her government is now in close collusion with the businesspeople and asset-owners who have benefited from those cuts.

And he says her party is trying to tell us Labour was elected “first and foremost to sort the public finances” when it was actually elected to restore public services – most particularly the National Health Service.

It occurs to This Writer that Labour has therefore also failed to capitalise on its successes in ending strike action by NHS employees like junior doctors. All Reeves had to do was say (repeatedly) that this was the first step towards restoring the NHS to its rightful position as the world’s top health service and she could have done Labour a world of good. Her problem is that she has tunnel vision and can’t see these opportunities as they arise.

So Reeves blathers on about a “black hole” in the public finances as though anybody in the real world cares. We don’t.

Prof Wren-Lewis states,

The term black hole is mediamacro for a gap between a forecast for the government’s deficit and what the government’s chosen fiscal rule says that number should be.

So it is a problem that Reeves and her advisors have created in their heads, rather than a real-world problem like the 7.6 million-strong waiting list for NHS services.

Prof Wren-Lewis says the media have latched onto the “black hole” term in order to scaremonger – to make us think the issue is very important and potentially dangerous. In reality, it is neither important nor dangerous. It is an attempt to distract us; a “dead cat” – to quote a catchphrase from the last few years.

And we know it.

We also know that cutting spending – and therefore services – in order to fill an unexpectedly high in-year deficit is economic nonsense. The correct course of action is investment in the economy in order to boost growth, and a large increase in taxation of the very rich who will benefit most from such growth and who can afford the hit anyway (as was stated most recently at the Trades Union Congress conference).

Prof Wren-Lewis concludes:

Taxes are bound to rise in October’s budget, and the Conservative opposition will say I told you so. The way to respond to that is not to talk about black holes that Labour inherited, but talk about the woeful state of public services Labour inherited, how Labour are beginning the long process to restore those services, and that this process requires those with broader shoulders to contribute more to enable that to happen. That is what Labour governments are elected to do, and they are popular when they do it.

But we do not have a Labour government. We have a continuity-Tory government wearing a Labour hat, headed by public-relations dimwits who don’t have the wit to say the right thing. No wonder they are plummeting in the polls.

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