New new prime minister Rishi Sunak wants – finally – to impose on us the new round of austerity he was planning to inflict when he became Chancellor in 2020 (but couldn’t because of Covid-19).
There is no economic justification for it because austerity does not achieve anything other than shrinking the state and choking off the supply of money into the economy.
And this is a problem for Sunak, because the people of the United Kingdom have already suffered 12 years of having their money supply choked off.
Sunak’s plan is to further impoverish a nation that is already in poverty – and it is not acceptable.
Here’s Phil Moorhouse to put some flesh on the bones:
If he were to ask his advisers for alternatives that will actually stimulate the economy, they would happily provide some.
What a shame. It seems clear that this is another Tory prime minister for whom our economic well-being means less than a political ideology.
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Austerity boy: Keir Starmer, as prime minister, would impose policies that would shrink the state, restrict the amount of cash flowing through society, make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Here’s a timely reminder that a Labour government under Keir Starmer will follow discredited austerity policies, similar to those of a Conservative administration.
Austerity doesn’t work. It shrinks the state and cuts the amount of money flowing through society, meaning the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Public services suffer, and social mobility withers.
These are not traditional Labour Party policies.
But listen to Keir Starmer admitting they are his policies:
Starmer confirms a Labour government will be an austerity government. ‘Tough choices’. pic.twitter.com/fzShm3MTvy
Liz Truss’s new Chancellor – old Health Secretary Germy C- er, Jeremy Hunt – announced in his very first media interview that he will be imposing further austerity on the UK in order to balance the books after the unforced errors of Kwasi Kwarteng.
Wow.
More austerity, of course, means the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Let’s have some analysis:
We all know this isn’t the first u-turn of the Truss administration.
But do you know the full extent of her dithering?
Here’s a clip that lays out the situation for you:
She has created a huge problem for herself, electorally, with this.
We know that she has thrown away Boris Johnson’s 2019 manifesto; most of the plans in that document won’t materialise now (and that’s a good thing, by and large).
But by announcing policies on the hoof – and then u-turning on them – Truss is leaving the electorate in limbo.
What does she stand for? Does even she know?
Well, if she doesn’t work it out soon, she’ll self-destruct because the public won’t support a politician with no policies.
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This Writer was away from his desk yesterday (Wednesday, September 7, 2022) because I was on a mercy mission – taking a family member to hospital.
So I’m relying on this video and BBC News (heaven help me!) for my information:
Interesting stuff.
So Liz Truss actually bothered to answer the questions. Was this because she doesn’t have the imagination to distract us with nonsense or divert us onto another subject? I find the latter likely but the former incredible, considering the amount of nonsense with which she regaled us all during her Tory leadership election campaign.
Ah, but her answers were useless. That’s more familiar ground. In fact, it seems clear that if the energy generation companies aren’t going to be made to subsidise our increased bills with their profits (which would be an excellent way of ‘chilling’ them – discouraging them from charging so much in the first place), the onus will fall to the general public.
This seems likely to take the form of a loan scheme, under which households will be forced to pay back the extra cost of their energy bills over a longer period of time, alongside whatever their energy will cost at that time.
This has the potential to put us all in perpetual debt. It reminds This Writer of an idea called the zombie economy, in which the working classes are kept in perpetual slavery to the business owners and politicians because they are forced to keep working in order to service ever-increasing debts that have been foisted on them, along with high government taxes.
Doesn’t that seem to be what’s happening?
Truss contradicted herself somewhat by saying she wants a high-wage economy. That would undermine the zombie plan – if it were true – but, as Phil Moorhouse points out, Boris Johnson said he wanted a high-wage economy too – and then told everybody to get back to work, the instant they started demanding it.
She said her energy plan would help business – so now we all want to know how. If she doesn’t help businesses, they’ll go under, and that’s a bad thing.
There’s a good sideswipe in the clip at the idiot Austerity policy of David Cameron and George Osborne: cut spending and you shrink the economy. The more they cut government expenditure, the lower tax receipts fell – because the money the government had been spending generated growth. And what did they do in response? They repeated the same mistake, expecting a different result (which is now a well-known definition of madness).
It seems tax-cutter Truss wants to repeat the mistake again – this time by cutting tax receipts first and claiming there isn’t the money to carry on spending on public services (the infamous Starve The Beast policy).
Truss said she would publish her energy plans today (Thursday) – meaning she’ll face a full week of debate in Parliament. That could be embarrassing – unless she merely announces aims.
And it seems she wanted to launch a catchphrase: “You can’t tax a country to growth, you know!” Except you can. History shows a clear correlation between GDP and tax revenues.
She said cutting Corporation Tax would lead to more businesses relocating to the UK – but in fact they are leaving, because of Brexit (which Truss used to oppose but now supports because she is in turn supported by the European Research Group loonies).
And Truss thinks the Northern Ireland Protocol contradicts the Good Friday Agreement – when it in fact protects the Good Friday Agreement.
So, Liz Truss actually answered the questions. But considering the nature of her answers, we can make an easy conclusion:
She is out of her depth.
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Steve Baker: the pro-austerity, pro-Brexit High Wycombe MP is claiming surprise that his constituents are starving, and trying to blame it on Covid-19 rather than the policies he wholeheartedly supported.
Tories like Steve Baker, whose High Wycombe constituency has been found to be suffering high levels of poverty-induced hunger, are trying to blame it on Covid-19.
This is not true.
And the falsehood should be pointed out to them.
Yes, the claim that “Mother” puts, below, is correct:
High Wycombe has been identified as being one of the worst constituencies in the country for levels of hunger among its people.
But High Wycome – and Buckinghamshire in general – were identified as suffering from these problems eight years ago. That’s long before anyone ever heard of Covid-19:
I see today’s news outlets are carrying the story the Buckinghamshire is the capital of food poverty in the UK.
This matches research of mine 8 years ago when I built the first UK wide census database of food banks. https://t.co/2boA8b46n8
High Wycombe Tory MP and brexit fan Steve Baker is astonished to find that the austerity and anti-poor measures he has enthusiastically voted for since 2010 have put more people into poverty, and not just in the north and midlands.
It seems some Tories are using the revelation (in fact nothing of the kind, as the information has been available since 2013) to call for the loss of the £20 Universal Credit “uplift” to be rethought.
Doubtless they will want more for their constituencies as well.
But can you see what this means, for austerity-loving economic incompetents like Rishi Sunak?
He’ll say the money will have to come from somewhere else, and will cut vital funding to constituencies that haven’t voted Tory. See if he doesn’t!
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Tweedledum and Tweedledumber: Rishi Sunak wants to cut Covid-19-related spending before the pandemic is over. He’ll cause another huge recession – and more deaths – and Boris Johnson will let it happen because he is too stupid, or too greedy, to care about the harm it will do.
This is worrying from Richard Murphy at Tax Research UK.
He reckons Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak is either so stupid that he wants to kill off even more of us with Covid-19 for the sake of a few extra coppers in cash…
… or he’s so stupid that he thinks the economy will get a huge boost if he puts it into another disastrous recession – possibly even a depression (which is worse).
All the noises Sunak is making at the moment are about stopping Covid-19-related government spending – indicating that he’s putting the Treasury into “full austerity mode”, as Mr Murphy puts it.
He wasn’t calling for a relaxation of Covid-related travel regulations because he thinks the pandemic is over – it clearly isn’t. But he’s indicating that he thinks he is because he wants to stop spending money on it…
… even though all the money he spent on it was specifically created for that purpose and hasn’t done any harm at all as it has washed through the country.
What a strange man.
Mr Murphy continues:
Sunak wants furlough to end, even though he knows this will significantly increase unemployment.
He goes on to say that this is about maintaining ‘The Treasury View’ as put forward by Winston Churchill in 1929 – a false argument that there is only a limited amount of money and if the state uses any of it, then investment – and growth – by the private sector cannot take place.
It is a completely false view to take:
Churchill spoke when we were on the gold standard. But now we have a fiat currency, and the only constraint on the money supply is full employment at a living wage, which we are very far from achieving.
What is more, there is not a shred of evidence that there is any shortage of capital available to business right now. All business is absent of is ideas.
And to suggest the state does not add value in this era is an insult.
Churchill was economically incompetent.
His decision to follow ‘The Treasury View’ drove the UK into the Great Depression of the early 1930s.
Now Sunak wants his own great recession, whether working for Johnson or in his own account, given that his ambitions are so obvious.
And it seems clear that Boris Johnson is going to do everything he can to help. Already travel restrictions are being lifted.
Not only will the economy bomb, but Tweedledum and Tweedledumber are literally inviting more Covid-19 variants through the UK’s front door, and thousands upon thousands of us may suffer and die as a result.
He has provided three examples of his personal political beliefs, within a single day, that show he is a Conservative and is therefore leading the Labour Party under false pretences.
Firstly, there is his decision to return Labour to the Conservative, neoliberal economic policies of the New Labour era, that lost the party two general elections in 2010 and 2015.
Secondly,
Is Keir Starmer *really* going to have a weekly column in the Daily Torygraph?
The only reason I can see now for people to vote for him or the party he is defiling with his presence is, they think the only choice is between him and the Conservatives. These are the people whose argument is, “What, you think the Tories are better?”
It seems we all have to take a broader perspective.
If Labour is now the same as the Tories, we’ll have to find someone else to support.
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Annaliese Dodds: do you really think you could trust this woman with the economy?
Keir Starmer’s Labour has announced that its new economic policy is to copy the Conservatives. Why not? Starmer’s copying the Tories in everything else!
Starmer, now well on his way to infamy as the worst leader in the more-than-100-year history of the Labour Party, may have turned the announcement over to his shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, but it has his naive pawprints all over it.
Because it’s yet another example of an inexperienced politician, who doesn’t stand for anything apart from grabbing power for himself, blowing in the wind.
The Financial Times gave the game away.
Shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds will signal on Wednesday that the Labour party is backing away from the hard-left economic policies of former leader Jeremy Corbyn
Sorry, what? “Hard-left” policies?
Corbyn was never hard-left and the author of the FT piece – Chris Giles, whose criticism of the Tories over the number of people dying due to Covid-19 has been exemplary – should know better. Perhaps he is being led by his ideological nose.
If Corbyn had been hard-left, he would have been demanding the nationalisation of everything and the end of individual property ownership. Hard-left policies require everything to be owned by the state and he never advocated that.
Corbyn’s policies were most similar to those of the Scandinavian countries – and anybody with an eye on international affairs will know that, economically, those nations are much more stable than the UK; their people far more prosperous. The UK would have been better-off under Corbyn’s economic policies.
But Starmer wants to turn his back on them because he is a Conservative at heart.
The trouble is, we already have a Conservative Party in the UK. Returning to the policies that lost Labour two elections (in 2010 and 2015 respectively) will not help a Labour leader who has failed to win a single victory against Boris Johnson’s inept and imbecilic Conservatives.
But that is exactly what Dodd’s is announcing.
In the annual Mais Lecture, she will cloak Labour’s strategy to become the UK’s next government in the latest thinking from international organisations such as the IMF, which recommends waiting until unemployment falls and the recovery is complete before thinking about the sustainability of public finances.
So, it’s back to austerity for Labour. That will be a long wait.
The best way to increase employment is to invest in it – not to leave everything to the market. That is hard-right neoliberalism and Labour should not have anything to do with it. Sadly, Labour members elected a Conservative as their party leader and he is imposing hard-right Conservative policies on them whether they want them or not.
When a party is both socially conservative and fiscally conservative, you have to start asking in which sense it isn't a conservative party, full stop
The fact that he lied, lied, and lied again to get himself elected only partially excuses them (as it was clear that he was lying).
Strangely, in her speech, Dodds will distance herself from the economic programme Labour put forward in the run-up to the 2019 general election, that offered spending increases of £83 billion – a modest amount in comparison with the hundreds of billions splurged by Boris Johnson in the last year.
Instead, she will align Labour’s economic policy with that of the Tories, while referring to “responsible” policies no fewer than 23 times. There is nothing “responsible” about Conservative economic policy, or about aligning with them.
There’s an easy test for this. Conservative neoliberalism has been the dominant economic policy in the UK since 1979, when Margaret Thatcher was first elected into office.
At that time, a family of four could afford to pay the mortgage on their house together with all household bills including groceries and vehicle running costs, from the wages of just one parent – and still had enough left over for a holiday away from home during the summer.
Is that possible now?
No, it isn’t. Most of us are much worse-off after 41 years of this nonsense – apart from people in positions of extreme power, including MPs like Starmer and Dodds.
So perhaps there is an intention to help in this policy change. Starmer and Dodds are planning to help themselves.
Their predictable lapse into neoliberalism has been greeted with a chorus of derision from everybody who understands what it means:
At the moment it looks like a Starmer government will do the same things as this government, but before Marcus Rashford shames them into it.
Oh, 'responsible'. Because socialism isn't 'responsible', is it, and the 40% who voted for socialism in 2017 weren't 'responsible', were they, and the left who promote it aren't 'responsible'. Not like 'responsible' Sir Keir… https://t.co/g9S8VpGIVS via @financialtimes
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… and now we can add “the victims of Covid-19” because he dismantled the systems that had been in place to handle a pandemic infection of this kind. He has come out from under his rock to try to make you think he did some good. Don’t believe a word of it!
Can somebody please put David Cameron back in his box?
He turned up out of nowhere to criticise Boris Johnson for planning to break international law – something that Cameron himself did on a regular basis – and now he seems to think he can run around pronouncing judgements on all and sundry as if he still matters.
He wants us to think that his austerity policies made us better-prepared to tackle Covid-19, when in fact they crippled the UK’s response.
Worse still, he personally presided over the dismantling of all the contingency plans and teams that had been set up to cope with a pandemic disease of exactly this kind.
According to The Mirror:
Mr Cameron argues that cuts introduced when he came to power in 2010 did “fix the roof when the sun was shining”.
He added: “Covid-19 was the rainy day we had been saving for.
“Our actions meant that the next but one administration was able to offer an unprecedented package of measures to prop up the economy.
“I sat watching Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s press conferences thinking how vital it was that we had taken those difficult decisions when we did”
Experts… have said that budget cutbacks left parts of the Government – including the NHS, under prepared for the crisis.
Mr Cameron also rejected the idea that the UK was unprepared for a pandemic, claiming that as a PM the prospect of a disastrous event like a pandemic “is never far from your mind”.
He added: “I knew a pandemic would come one day, possibly sooner rather than later.
“That’s why I made it a ‘tier one risk’ at the National Security Council.
“We also established a sub-committee to deal with Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingencies.
“The accusation – which is partly accurate – is that subsequently not enough was done to prepare specifically for what followed.
“But this is what strategists mean when they talk about ‘known unknowns’.
What arrogant nonsense.
In fact, Cameron deliberately dismantled the UK’s capability of handling Covid-19 – as I pointed out back in March:
“The government has devised strategies to deal with such a threat. The problem is, they are all out of date.
“The last strategy written specifically to deal with pandemic flu was published in 2011 – the same year David Cameron’s Conservative-led Coalition government closed the dedicated government Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Team based in the Department of Health, which was tasked with tackling this type of crisis.
“It may explain much that the government’s UK Pandemic Influenza Communications Strategy, the crucial document for getting the right messages across to the public, was written in 2012 and is now wildly inaccurate in its assumptions about how and where people get their information.
“In October 2016, David Cameron’s now wholly-Conservative government carried out an exercise to estimate the impact of a hypothetical influenza pandemic on the United Kingdom. Exercise Cygnus showed that such a pandemic would cause the country’s health system to collapse, due to a lack of resources.
“The Chief Medical Officer of the time said that a lack of medical ventilators was a serious problem that should be rectified, but in 2017 this advice was ignored by the Department of Health under Jeremy Hunt – because it would cost too much. The government was committed to austerity policies, remember.”
That is the legacy of Cameron’s austerity.
It seems clear that he has only come back in a vain attempt to whitewash himself after the facts were publicised.
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Of course austerity contributed to the fact that the coronavirus pandemic found the UK’s Tory government sitting on its collective thumbs.
Professor Sir Michael Marmot, director of University College London’s Institute of Health Equity, said that the lack of financial support given to the health and social care systems during the 2010s is partly to blame for the overwhelming issues now facing the country.
I’ve got an infographic about that. Let’s see…
Sir Michael was particularly sharp about the cuts to social care:
“We’re terribly worried about the health of workers in social care. The reduction in adult social care spending over the last decade was 7 per cent in real terms. But in the most deprived 20 per cent of areas the reduction was 16 per cent. In the least deprived 20 per cent the reduction was 3 per cent.”
And of course the coronavirus has hit the most deprived areas the hardest. You see how this ties together?
“So there’s a clear line between our lack of preparedness in the healthcare system, in the social care system and in community resources more generally – the decline of support for the voluntary sector – a clear line between austerity and our lack of preparedness to cope with this pandemic.”
Sir Michael went on to say that rather than being “the great leveller”, as some have described the coronavirus pandemic, he believed it had instead exposed “underlying health inequalities” and amplified them.
He’s saying that, since they came into office in 2010, the Tories have been using well-known funding inequalities to make deprived areas less able to cope with a crisis like Covid-19.
They may not have had a pandemic in mind (although that’s debatable) but the result is the same:
His comments followed a report by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) that found that people living in the most deprived areas of England have experienced coronavirus mortality rates more than double those living in the least deprived areas.
For those deaths involving Covid-19 that took place between March 1 and April 17, the mortality rate in the most deprived areas was 55.1 deaths per 100,000 population.
By contrast, the rate was 25.3 deaths per 100,000 in the least deprived areas.
So there’s a clear link: more than twice as many people have died in deprived areas than in affluent places – because of Tory austerity policies that hit the poorest much harder than the rich.
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