Living in the Ruins

Oasis may be re-forming but Britpop isn’t. D:ream’s ‘Things can only get better’ has turned into a nightmare.

Labour’s new miserabilism – “things can only get worse” – is deeply ideological and is foreshadowing the government’s plans. In a speech today Starmer will say his government has inherited “not just an economic black hole but a societal black hole”, adding that “this is why we have to take action and do things differently. Part of that is being honest with people about the choices we face. And how tough this will be.”

Ah, those ‘tough choices’ again.

They’ve adopted a sort of feigned impotence, embracing Osborne economics and are basically saying “the Tories have left us a mess, so we’ve got to impose austerity on you”.

This is continuity politics with different actors.

As the summer fades this is Labour’s moment they’ve been gearing up to. Starmer’s speech today is being billed by Downing Street as “a direct message to the working people across Britain”.

This is a setup for the Autumn statement and the coming cutbacks. It is a framing being put in place to resist demands to ­boost public investment, to end the two-child cap on benefits and to overturn the scrapping of the winter fuel payments.

Now Anas Sarwar is claiming that the budget cuts happening in Scotland are “not related” to the £22billion black hole the UK government is facing. But Sarwar, like Ruth Davidson and Douglas Ross before him will have some difficulty distancing themselves from Westminster austerity policies. They will also have to contend with the problem of Ian Murray being given the budget to undermine the devolution settlement while Sarwar tries to capture it.

Having waited over a decade for power, Labour are saying there’s nothing they can do. But they have a 173 seat majority. Starmer has access to the levers of power and, if he really wanted to, could raise taxes on the rich and fund our public services.

GB energy is nowhere to be seen and last week the head of Ofgem, (which boasts its job is to protect energy customers), explained its increasing bills by 10% because it “has to allow energy companies to make a small profit.” Last year British Gas profits increased 10 fold to £750m.

The same message was being put out by Labour spokesmen. Pat McFadden warned of “more economic pain to come” as the government prepares to restrict public spending in ways MPs and campaigners say could exacerbate the cost of living crisis. McFadden said on Sunday that voters should expect the government to take further difficult decisions, as Keir Starmer prepares to give a speech accusing the Conservatives of leaving the country in “rubble and ruin”.

The new politics is well observed by Peter Geoghegan in the London Review of Books (‘Labour and the Lobbyists‘): “At the party conference last year, Starmer told a ‘business forum’ of more than two hundred executives and lobbyists that ‘if we do come into government, you will be coming into government with us.’ In opposition, shadow ministers with minimal experience of governing worked alongside staff seconded from HSBC, NatWest, PricewaterhouseCoopers and a number of consultancy and advisory firms. In the days before the general election, senior Labour figures reportedly asked various companies – engineering firms, tech companies, management consultancies – to send more staff to help with policy work. Jim Murphy, the former Scottish Labour leader turned lobbyist, has praised Starmer’s ‘openness with the private sector’, predicting that this will be ‘the first private-sector government in Labour’s history’.”

Peter also warns of the role of Alan Milburn and the coming privatisation: “Within days of taking power, Labour briefed that Starmer was considering bringing in Alan Milburn to ‘drive through NHS reform’. As health secretary under Blair, Milburn championed outsourcing and private finance initiative deals that saw even hospital car parks run as for-profit businesses. He is now a senior adviser to PWC’s ‘government and health industries practice’ and an adviser to the private equity group Bridgepoint Capital, which owns one of England’s largest external providers of NHS services, including a chain of care homes.”

Most of this is so ideologically internalised by both the politicians and the media that it is unlikely to have much critical response. But when the effects of these ‘tough choices’ impact it will be on the general public, as the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich continues under a new regime. This entire framing is ideological and an abdication of responsibility. We are trapped in a cycle of misery and hopelessness. Whatever this is, it certainly isn’t ‘CHANGE’. Labour are literally meaningless.

 

 

 

 

Comments (21)

Join the Discussion

Your email address will not be published.

  1. Claire McNab says:

    “Unpopular decisions” is the lesser-known twin of “difficult decisions”, and a close cousin of “hard choices”. These phrases are used by.neoliberals and centrists to justify their choices to starve kids and freeze pensioners rather than tax the rich.

    You never hear the neoliberals saying “times are hard, so we made the difficult decision to impose a wealth tax”, or “There is a huge hole in public finances, so we made the unpopular choice to abolish the loopholes which let the rich avoid inheritance tax”. These hard choices always involve a govt punching down at the weak and poor, rather than striking up against the wealthy.

    So when Starmer makes his big speech on Tuesday, he won’t ralking about reversing the massive flow of wealth to the rich. This will be all about Sir Kid Starver delivering bad news to the have-nots of #TheMadCountry

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/aug/24/keir-starmer-warns-of-tough-times-ahead-to-fix-tory-ruins

  2. Mike Parr says:

    All quite amusing really – UK public being lined up for yet another punishment beating this time by Kid Starver and the imbecile Reeves – no change, no change possible with the tory-continuity party. Of course the meeja is playing their role to make sure UK serfs stay passive. I wonder when “buyers regret” will kick in – one would think once the energy bills with a 10% rise start dropping on dorrmats. LINO is neo-liberal and as such will make sure the UK continues to shuffle slowly towards failed state status – all the while saying “there is nothing we can do”. Pathetic – but hey – people voted for these chimps – they fully deserve what they get.

      1. Anna says:

        Is it Labour in name only?

  3. John Hughes says:

    Reeves can spend anyway. Taxation does NOT fund spending. It’s about time that commentators shared this simple economic truth. As a currency issuer, the U.K. does not have to tax nor borrow to fund govt spending.

    In addition, every £ spent by govt recoups revenue as those down the line spend it. The multiplier effect. Look it up.

    The country’s credit card is not maxed out. Thatcher’s last laugh. The Household budget myth.

    1. Mark Bevis says:

      Well said!

    2. John Monro says:

      The total private wealth in the UK is over £13 trillion. The top 1% of households have wealth starting at £3.5 million for each household. There are 30 million households, so 1% is 300,000. Times that number by say £10 million as a conservative estimate of the mean value of this 1% wealth equals £3 trillion. Taxing this wealth at 2% p.a. equals £60 billion p.a. Tax of accumulated wealth is a no brainer, you could tax such households at 2% for a hundred years, and they’d still have plenty of wealth remaining, and invested in productive assets and the re-industrialisation of the UK for sustainable renewable energy (including energy efficiency in housing and industry) and the repatriation of the manufacture of basic necessities, would transform the country if such policies are continued, along with excessive immigration seriously curtailed.

      There is no hope of a sustainable society or economy with a rapidly growing population and the idea that one can significantly reduce the so-called “burden” of the elderly by immigration is a demographic nonsense – see https://nordregio.org/publications/the-impact-of-migration-on-projected-population-trends-in-denmark-finland-iceland-norway-and-sweden-2015-2080/ where it is stated that immigration rates would have to be fifteen times higher than 1990s levels to make a significant or substantial difference – this is obviously socially and economically unsustainable. A similar study in Australia some years ago said much the same thing. . . .

  4. Paddy Farrington says:

    A striking contrast with what the left in France are proposing, with the New Popular Front which came out top in the recent parliamentary elections. The left in Scotland should take note.

    1. Graeme Purves says:

      Yes indeed!

  5. Graham Kerr says:

    Apart from in Scotland, there wasn’t really a rush towards Labour it was more a rush away from the conservatives, to reform and to a lesser extent Lib Dems and Greens. Despite the thumping majority, they aren’t a popular party and the argument that they are more competent and have fresh ideas aren’t going to reassure folks if it’s just to find new ways to do austerity and punish the poor and avoid any impacts on the rich.

    So where will the disaffected and vulnerable turn to when the party of the people has abandoned them.

    1. John says:

      Graham – while agreeing there was no rush to Labour in Scotland they actually got a slightly higher percentage of vote in Scotland than elsewhere.
      The most significant change in 2024 GE in Scotland was drop in SNP vote. The major reason for this was the voters giving the SNP the bums rush and staying at home. I get no pleasure in writing this but you cannot avoid the truth painful as it might be.
      It will be interesting to see how the current ‘things can only get worse’ message will impact the Labour vote at 2026 Holyrood election.

      1. Graham Kerr says:

        Hi John… yes I was meaning labour did have a surge of votes in Scotland…but in the UK it wasn’t really very strong compared to the last election

        1. John says:

          Graham – overall Labour vote was I think marginally higher than in 2019 but lower than 2017 throughout UK.
          They have a large but shallow majority on 34% of votes due to gaming the FPTP system.

    2. Alasdair Macdonald says:

      This is reminiscent of a statement by John Major after another series of maulings from his own right wing ‘bastards’ (as he allegedly called them) and middle class voters were leaching away from the Tories, that, ‘the bastards (i. e. relatively affluent people) have no-one else to vote for.’

      There is a strong whiff of this in Starmer’s government and spokespersons with regard to poorer people, and ‘poorer people’ includes the many working poor and their children.

      Shortly after the election, the privatising-inclined Secretary of State for Health, Wes Streeting said, ‘If we do not deliver then the right will take power’. Initially, I thought that this was intended as a warning to his fellow Labour MPs, but I now realise that he was stating what Labour’s intention is – do not deliver redistributive policies so that we and our business cronies can make a lot of money and former Tory voters will turn to Labour as the right wing party.

  6. Helen Burns says:

    Scottish Labour MPs. Standing up for the people of Scotland. Aye right. Standing up for seats in the House of Lords and 350 quid a day expenses more like.

  7. Richard says:

    Something which I will be looking out for in the Autumn Statement is Inome Tax thresholds, which were frozen by the previous government from 2022 until 2027. To my mind, the freezing of the Basic Rate threshold in particular, and in a period of high inflation, disproportionately impacts on those on lower earnings and is cruel to the point of vindictiveness. If Reeves choses to continue to freeze them at current levels, that will be very telling, I think.

    I’m alo wondering what the Starmer government intends to do about the freeport zones which the Tories announced. Freeports are a new idea, and been around for years. Most countries are moving away from the freeport model, because of serious issues over traceability of goods, money laundering, and other criminality. Additionally, they seem to facilitate the offshoring of profits without any revenue benefit to the host state.

    1. Richard says:

      My post should read “Freeports are not a new idea…”. Apologies.

      1. Graeme Purves says:

        Aye. In the UK, Freeport thinking goes back at least as far back as Nicholas Ridley’s ‘Enterprise Zones’ in the 1980s.

    2. Mark Bevis says:

      There is an astonishing statistic from government data last year.
      There are 45 million working people in the UK. Of these, a massive 22 million don’t pay income tax. Not because they are on some dodgy tax-evasion scheme or in the black economy – they simply don’t earn £12.5K a year, me included. Whilst a lot of these are part-time jobs, and some people just choosing part-time work, in the grand scheme of things it is indicative of the levels of poverty in the UK. Messing with the tax thresholds won’t affect ~45% of the work force. That’s massive.

  8. Satan says:

    The usual ‘everything will be fine as long as the government taxes someone who isn’t me’.

  9. John Monro says:

    Much the same in neoliberal poodle New Zealand – health system, education all under severe stress, underinvestment in water, sewage, education, etc for years now means 20% rates rises in councils, food prices appalling – unsustainable levels of immigration, horrible inflation in food and energy, education and health in dire straits, house prices still near record highs compared with income. Privatised power increases with an ineffectual oversight, though here we’re going to solve our problems with a right wing political merger of a Tory like National, a libertarian right Act, and a populist NZ First. – a three headed monster. But more pure neoliberalism with austerity, tax cuts for the better off, mortgage interest relief for house speculators than in Starmer’s UK, as he will have to increase taxes willy-nilly. etc etc.

    But it doesn’t matter now where you live, our hyper-capitalist, corporatist and globalised economic system is bringing societies and the very planet itself to ruin. Yet capitalism is nothing if not a religion, a creed, a dogma, no less so than any communism or socialism and treats any threat to its status with the same vigour as any Spanish Inquisition. . Without severe pruning, or decapitation, of capitalism’s excesses, and of its accumulated private wealth, we cannot make progress – the riots, whatever underlying causes one likes to argue, are a symptoms of social unease and a harbinger of things to come .

    I have recently learned the song “Money”- music by Michael Head, poetry by William H Davies (worth a read of his wiki biography if you don’t know him – he is most famous for his poem “Leisure” – What is this life if full of care……).

    “When I had money, money O!, I knew no joy ’till I went poor, For many a false man as a friend Came knocking all day at my door………So when I hear those poor ones laugh, And see the rich ones coldly frown, Poor men, think I, need not go up, So much as rich men should come down”

    I’d suggest this as a good starting point for any discussion and action to dealing with our present economic and social travails.

Help keep our journalism independent

We don’t take any advertising, we don’t hide behind a pay wall and we don’t keep harassing you for crowd-funding. We’re entirely dependent on our readers to support us.

Subscribe to regular bella in your inbox

Don’t miss a single article. Enter your email address on our subscribe page by clicking the button below. It is completely free and you can easily unsubscribe at any time.