Why is Starmer using a deception tactic to justify his growth plan?

It’s a simple question, with a simple answer: because his economic growth will not help the majority of the UK’s population.

The tactic he’s using is known as a justification narrative. This is a simple but often inaccurate story designed to popularise complex or unpalatable policies – like when politicians are following a policy that is beneficial to themselves, but has no benefit, or even extremely negative consequences, for the majority of people.

The justification narrative Keir Starmer [pictured] and his government have been using is, of course, the trickle-down effect.

Way back in 2012, Another Angry Voice published this:

A justification narrative with an inexplicably long shelf-life is the trickle down-effect. In the 1970s and early ’80s neoliberal politicians came to power and began a massive transference of wealth to the wealthy establishment elite.

Their justification for this kind of policy was that wealth would then trickle down to wider society.

There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that this effect never happened. A large proportion of the wealthy establishment simply paid tax lawyers to hide their wealth in tax havens, and the gap between rich and poor has grown wider and wider ever since, especially in the UK and the USA.

Even though the trickle down effect has been shown to be an absolute fantasy, the same policy still exists today, just with a slightly altered form of justification narrative.

These days Republican politicians harp on about “job creators” instead. The narrative is that it is important to cut taxes on wealthy “job creators” in order to allow them to create jobs and stimulate the economy.

This “job creator” narrative defends exactly the same policy, and it is equally inaccurate.

The Bush tax cut for the richest 1% of Americans turned out to have one of the lowest fiscal multiplication values in the history of American spending plans (for every $1 given in Bush tax breaks, only 23 cents returned to the economy).

The American venture capitalist Nick Hanauer clearly expressed the economic illiteracy of the trickle down/job creator narrative:

“There’s this idea in our society that rich people are job creators, and  if you tax them more, then they’ll create less jobs. This is simply a  misunderstanding of how the economy works; it’s actually the middle  class that creates the jobs with the demand that forces businesses to increase employment.”

Starmer’s claim is that the benefits of economic growth will somehow ‘trickle down’ to the population at large, even though the direct beneficiaries will be the people who own all of society’s assets – in other words, the very rich people who have been buying up everything in sight, especially former public utilities.

It’s exactly the same story as the Angry Yorkshireman told in the example quoted above: the extra money will be squirrelled away in tax havens and the rest of us won’t see a penny of it.

‘Trickle down’ assumes that at some point the richest will have enough money and will pass some down to the rest of us – but they never have enough. If Keir Starmer was a real Labour politician, he would know that. We have to ask what he expects to get in return for his lie.

Oh, and the other ‘trickle down’ story has also been resurrected; it is being used to put us off taxing the rich for fear they will leave the country.

The justification narrative is that if they leave the country, then the benefit of their money leaves with them, and they won’t create any jobs.

But without demand for products, they won’t create any jobs anyway. And there won’t be much demand for products other than the essentials any more, because most of us – working- and middle-class – won’t have the disposable cash necessary to be able to buy anythng else.

And who owns the essentials – and the means to produce them?

So Labour should go ahead and tax the rich, and if they leave it won’t matter – we’ll be better-off without them. They won’t be parasitising us and we’ll still get the tax on their assets because they can’t take those things with them.

But – again – Starmer and his cronies won’t do it.

How does that old saying go, again? “If he looks like a Tory and acts like a Tory…”?

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