Rachel Reeves' "new approach" is just "more of the same"

In her latest economic speech Rachel Reeves claimed that "at the election people voted for a whole new approach". That’s possibly true, although a more realistic interpretation could be that Labour won by default because the Tories imploded, and millions stayed at home in despair at the lack of alternatives to the failing status quo.

Even if we accept Reeves’ interpretation of the election result at face value, it’s still deeply problematic.

If people "voted for a whole new approach" then where are the new ideas? Where are the policies designed to make life better for ordinary people? And why does Rachel Reeves’ economic rhetoric sound indistinguishable from the succession of Tory Chancellors who preceded her?

Let’s look at some of the Labour government core positions under Keir Starmer’s leadership.

Austerity

One of the first things Rachel Reeves did was to launch another economically debilitating round of austerity cutbacks, pinning blame on the previous government for her actions.

That’s pretty much identical to George Osborne’s strategy in 2010, of blaming Labour’s supposed economic mismanagement for his ruinous programme of austerity cuts.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Privatisation profiteering

Starmer’s Labour outright refuses to countenance taking vital services and infrastructure away from parasitical privatisation profiteers to run them as not-for-profit public services.

In fact Starmer’s health secretary Wes Streeting is salivating at the mouth at the prospect of carving the NHS open for even more private profiteering, to the benefit of several private health figures who have donated hefty sums to Starmer’s front bench.

Even Labour’s renationalisation of the railways is a sham which keeps the trains and freight services under the control of greedy private profiteers.

Labour are on the side of the privatisation profiteers, just like the Tories before them.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Wittering on about "growth"

Rachel Reeves keeps going on and on about creating "growth" but without setting out any kind of realistic framework to get the economy growing in real terms, and without defining any redistribution strategy to ensure that any additional growth isn’t simply hoovered up by greedy corporations, exploitative landlords, financial speculators, and the tax-dodger brigade, leaving the rest of us even deeper in the mire of inequality.

Without redistribution policies Reeves’ "growth agenda" amounts to the same old trickle down economic bunk that neoliberal political grifters have been spouting for decades.

’Just let the rich get richer, and eventually some of it will trickle down to plebs like you’ - It didn’t work in the 1980s, it didn’t work in the Tory austerity years, and it’s not going to work now.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Child impoverishment

One of Keir Starmer’s first acts as Prime Minister was to purge seven Labour MPs from the parliamentary party for the crime of voting to scrap the Tories’ diabolical poverty-spreading Two Child Policy.

Recent research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that child poverty is due to rise in England and Wales under Starmer’s leadership, due to Labour’s draconian welfare policies.

Meanwhile in Scotland, child poverty rates are set to fall as the SNP government works to mitigate the terrible consequences of Reeves’ poverty-spreading agenda.

If Labour were to follow the SNP example and scrap the Two Child policy, it’d raise 800,000 kids out of poverty, but they don’t want to do that because they’re too busy pandering to the rich.

Labour aren’t just sticking with Tory child-impoverishment policies, they’re wittering on about how growth is magically going to fix everything while a third of all British kids grown up in poverty.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Welfare scapegoating

One of the most depraved things about the 2010-2024 Tory governments was the way they continually attacked the most vulnerable people in society. Not just whipping up public hate against the poor, the unemployed, and the disabled, but implementing cruel and draconian policies to drive the most vulnerable people in society deeper into destitution (Bedroom Tax, Two Child Policy, Benefit Sanctions, "Fit For Work" assessments …).

Rachel Reeves has been copying from the same Tory playbook by distracting from her own economic failings by whipping public resentment against disabled people, and pledging yet another round of austerity cuts to the disability welfare system.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

The panacea of deregulation

Reeves bangs on and on about deregulation, as if giving powerful corporations even more leeway to do whatever they like is magically going to result in prosperity for the rest of us.

Look at the Grenfell tragedy. Look at our rivers and coastal waters full of raw sewage. Look at the life-ruining Post Office Horizon scandal. Look at the outrageous P&O sackings. Look at the collapse of Carillion. Look at the orgy of corruption going on in Teesside.

Who on earth thinks that any of these things would be have been made better by even less regulation than there was?

And who can forget David Cameron endlessly fulminating against "red tape" and promising a "bonfire of regulations".

How is Reeves’ anti-regulation rhetoric any different from what came before?

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Brexit

Reeves only mentions Brexit once in her speech to say "we are pragmatic about the challenges that we have inherited from the last government’s failed Brexit deal".

But what does this even mean?

Keir Starmer whipped Labour MPs into backing Boris Johnson’s Brexit shambles, and he’s repeatedly insisted that the country is stuck with it now, and there’s nothing to be done to try and mitigate the damage.

How can anyone give a speech on "growth" without acknowledging the diabolical impact that Brexit has had on the British economy?

It doesn’t matter how many pensioners, children, and disabled people Reeves drives into destitution in her cruel and counter-productive austerity book-balancing exercises, when the Brexit sanctions we applied on ourselves are such a massive millstone on the UK economy.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

More of the same

In conclusion Reeves is pretending to offer the change that she says the British public wanted, but in reality whole swathes of her speech, and Labour’s policy agenda are indistinguishable from the rhetoric and policies of preceding Tory governments.

And when people are handed the cold gruel of "more of the same" when they’ve been promised that everything will change for the better, that’s the environment of disillusion that the extreme-right absolutely thrive in.

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How to lose support and alienate people: The Progressive Alliance communication strategy

When attempting to build a broad political coalition you've decided to call "The Progressive Alliance", it may be considered wise not to deliberately antagonise pretty much anyone with vaguely progressive or left-leaning views ... but there's no telling liberal capitalist aggro-centrists how to do political communication is there?

• Liberal capitalists laid the groundwork for Brexit by propping up the ruinous Austerity Coalition, which caused the unprecedented wage collapse, failing public services, the housing crisis, and the devastating under-investment that the Brexiteers then cynically weaponised by blaming on immigrants and the EU.

• They delivered their own worst nightmare of Brexit with their condescending and ineffective "jobs for the boys" non-campaign.

• They blew probably the best opportunity ever to hammer the Tories by turning the Brexit referendum result into an excuse to launch a bitter factionalist coup to get rid of Labour's democratically elected leader instead!

• Then they handed the keys of Downing Street to Boris Johnson by turning the 2019 General Election into a rerun of the Brexit referendum they'd already lost. 

If these people has 1% of the strategic capabilities they imagine themselves to have, we wouldn't be in anything like as much of a mess as a nation, but they will keep insisting that tepid, unappealing, liberal capitalist gruel must be the only alternative to radically right-wing conservative capitalist poison.

A lot of the People's Vote campaigners who invested so much work in throwing the 2019 general election have respawned themselves as The Progressive Alliance, which apparently aims to remove the Tories from power by building an astonishingly unlikely political coalition.

I won't spend too much time explaining why it's so unlikely, you just have to consider the vitriolic anti-SNP bile in Keir Starmer's much-lauded Labour conference speech to understand that the Labour right detest the SNP Westminster-outsiders infinitely more than they mildly disapprove of their Tory Westminster brethren.

Anyway. Onto the astonishing infographic in the article header image.

This is a real thing, that was actually designed and approved by Progressive Alliance people, and posted on their social media accounts (here's the link on Facebook, at least until they delete it).

"But The Lib-Dems went into coalition with the Tories"

The Progressive Alliance may try to trivialise this with the misleading claim that it all happened "a decade ago" when the Lib-Dems were still enabling Tory malice will into 2015, and the Brexiteer-style cry of "get over it", but the fact is that the ruinous Austerity Coalition imposed a shocking range of anti-progressive policies that are still causing devastating social and economic consequences today. 

What's more, the Lib-Dems are completely unapologetic about it, to the extent that they picked one of the very worst Tory-collaborators, Ed Davey, as their their new leader, when they had the chance to turn over a new leaf with the much more progressive Layla Moran.

The message here is that if you're horrified by austerity ruination; systematic "fit for work" disability persecution; Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment and the ensuing the Windrush scandal; the worst period of wage repression in recorded history; unlawful Tribunal Fees; the Royal Mail scam and £billions in other privatisation rip-offs; the student loan betrayal; the brutal social security sanctions regime; arms sales to tyrants, despots and war criminals; privatising literally thousands of schools into the hands of unaccountable private profiteers; devastating local government cuts; economically illiterate cuts to the drivers of future economic prosperity (education, infrastructure, R&D); or any of the other profoundly anti-progressive policies enacted between 2010 and 2015, you can just piss off, because this lot don't want your vote.

"Jeremy Corbyn is no longer Labour leader"

The logic of attacking Jeremy Corbyn supporters and socialists in general is unclear.

Apparently sneering at them with the Brexiteer style slogan "he lost, get over it" is going to magically win them over to the Progressive Alliance cause!

Who cares that Corbyn was demonised by the press and repeatedly sabotaged from within his own party, purely for promoting progressive social and economic policies?

If you supported Corbyn's policy platform, you can also piss off, because the so-called Progressive Alliance don't want your vote!

"Blah blah jabber jabber Tony Blair blah blah Iraq"

The UK government ignored the legitimate concerns of millions of British people, illegally invaded another country, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a refugee crisis of millions.

They triggered a cycle of terrorist violence that spread throughout the target country, across the entire region, and eventually culminated in terrorist atrocities across Europe perpetrated by the ISIS fanatics that metastasised out the lawless terrorism breeding grounds that Tony Blair and his ilk created in Iraq.

"Blah blah jabber jabber ... get over it": What an arrogant and offensive way to dismiss legitimate concerns over one of modern Britain's most horrific foreign policy catastrophes! 

If you're the kind of progressively-minded person who opposed the Iraq war, the so-called Progressive Alliance clearly hold your political opinions in the same regard as dog much on their shoes, they simply don't want your vote.

"The Lib-Dems will just flounce off with the Tories"

They want to re-argue point one over again, just to make their list look longer, but the essence of their case is that we should just trust the Lib-Dems this time, despite them being led by one of the worst Lib-Dem ministers in the ruinous Austerity Coalition!

This is less an effort to tell potential voters to piss off, more of a desperate appeal to the astonishingly gullible!

"But Keith ... [insert politically illiterate rant here]"

Ah right.

listen up!

Anyone who has any concerns whatever about Keir Starmer's pathetic abstention of a leadership so far; his broken pledges; his obsession with factionalist infighting; his campaign of abuse against left-wing and socially progressive Jews; his repeated purges of left-wing and progressive voices out of his shadow cabinet; his abject failure to hold the Tory government to account; his repeated abstentions on sickeningly anti-progressive pieces of Tory legislation like the Rape Cops Bill; or even just his robotic lack of charisma.

You can all piss off too!

"I will always vote for [party] out of loyalty"

Nobody doubts that tribal voters exist, but has anyone ever uttered such an unconvincing phrase to say that they won't tactically vote to get the Tories out?

I guess if we're expected to believe that people said "blah blah jabber jabber Tony Blair jabber jabber Iraq". we're expected to believe anything!

And as for pointless tribally motivated voting, what about all the liberal capitalist dweebs who went out and belligerently voted Lib-Dem and Green in ultra tight Labour-Tory marginals in 2019, despite Labour caving in and offering them the sore loser referendum they said they wanted?

Loads of these people, who helped create a Tory mega-majority, have now quietly thrown away their "People's Vote" outfits, and come back wearing "Progressive Alliance" garb, to tell other people how to vote!

Conclusion

Given the shockingly outdated and unrepresentative Westminster voting system, I tend to agree with tactical voting, and have voted tactically myself in the past.

People like me should be the natural target audience for a campaign like The Progressive Alliance, but for whatever reason they've decided to tell me to "piss off" four different ways, taken me for a gullible idiot, and insulted my intelligence, all in a single infographic!

They're clearly more concerned with laundering the reputations of their liberal capitalist idols like Tory Blair, the Lib-Dem austerity enablers, the right-wing Labour saboteurs, and the democracy-defying CUK squatters, who all helped turn people away from progressive politics in different ways. and installed Boris Johnson in Downing Street, than in actually building a broad coalition of progressive and left-wing people.

If our hopes of a better future rely on the strategic capabilities of this lot, we're clearly doomed to Tory rule forever!

 

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Analysing the Daily Express budget analysis

These days the Daily Express is basically nothing more than a pravda propaganda rag for the Tory party, so you'd have to be pretty naïve to expect anything other than heavy pro-Tory bias in their Budget analysis, but in 2021 they went the extra mile with a quite astonishing front page.

Rishi Sunak has just raised the UK tax burden to the highest level since the post-WWII recovery period in the 1950s!

He even admitted it in his budget speech, using the passive voice to say that  "taxes are rising to the highest level of GDP since the 1950s", as if the taxes are somehow rising of their own accord, rather than him being the person who is raising them!

Yet the front page of the Express blares Cheers! Rishi On A Mission To Cut Taxes

He's just raised taxes to the highest rate in over half a century, but hooray for his future ambition to cut taxes!

The disjunct between the reality and the presentation is absolutely laughable.

There are an awful lot more issues in the small print too (too many for me even to fit into the article header infographic!).

2 Billion extra for schools This might sound great if you've been living in a sensory deprivation chamber for the last 11 years, but in reality it's not enough to even return per-pupil funding back above 2010 levels this year, next year, or the year after. 

It'll finally catch up in 2024/25, meaning that an entire generation of school kids will have had their education hindered by massive budget cuts for no discernible reason whatever. Yet the Express somehow consider this decade and a half of wanton destruction of our nation's future economic potential as a cause for celebration!

£150 billion spending spree Hang on. We just suffered a decade of austerity cuts because public spending in the wake of a crisis was supposedly terribly bad, yet the debt's gone up dramatically since 2010, and now we're supposed to celebrate £150 billion in post-crisis spending as if the last 11 years simply didn't happen?

If spending in the wake of a crisis is good, then that obviously means a decade of Tory austerity extremism was pointless, ruinous self-harming, economically illiterate, and extremely bad, doesn't it?

Business Rates Boost For High Street  Everyone knows that tax-dodging online retailers have been dramatically undercutting High Street outlets for the last decade, and that giant out-of-town supermarkets are now soaking up entire family shopping budgets that used to be divided amongst perhaps a dozen different small independent High Street businesses.

Nothing's been done about this until it's far too late, and now High Streets across Britain have been reduced to derelict ghostly shadows of their former glories, occupied mainly by boarded up premises, thrift stores, gambling outlets, and charity shops.

There's some limited help on the table now, especially for the likes of pubs, restaurants, and tea rooms, but it's far too little, far too late.  The lockdown measures have absolutely hammered the majority of the retail economy by forcing them to close their doors, while online retailers and supermarket giants were allowed to continue operating, soaking up £billions in artificially inflated profits. 

There's no effort to rake any of these artificial gains back, and nor will there ever be with a Tory rich-boy like Sunak running the show.

Universal Credit Giveaway The framing here is absolutely insidious. What Sunak's actually done is ever-so-slightly reduced the amount that the state confiscates out of low-earners' wages through reduced social security payments.

Under the Tory-designed Universal Credit system the government used to confiscate 63p in every additional pound a low income worker earns, but Sunak's reduced the confiscation rate to 55p in the pound (which is obviously still more than half!). 

Somehow confiscating a tiny bit less of low-income workers' wages is a giveaway, but the £billions he's handed to bankers by cutting the Surcharge Tax to 3% isn't a giveaway.

In fact it somehow doesn't even warrant a mention!

"By the end of this parliament I want taxes going down, not up" Somehow the Express is celebrating this statement from Rishi Sunak as if it's some almost divine political objective, rather than one of the key strategies of Tory electoral politics:

Front-load all the tax-hikes and attacks on people's incomes into the years after winning power, then ease the boot of people's necks a little bit prior to the next election so they feel like things are getting better and vote Tory, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

It's an expression of standard, cynical, short-term electoral political strategy, not some kind of saintly moral mission!

Cheers! Rishi The main headline, and the picture of Johnson and Sunak (who doesn't even drink) holding pints are an example of the oldest trick in the budget book.

Place a slight cut in the price of a pint at the forefront of the budget, in order to distract the plebs from the horrifying details you don't really want them thinking about:

• Highest tax rate in seven decades
• Massive tax break for bankers
  
• Cutting tax on short-haul flights (just days before hosting a climate conference!)
• Implicit admission that austerity was a huge mistake
  
• National Insurance hike for millions of ordinary workers
• Insufficient help for High Streets
  
• School funding still below 2010 level
• No windfall tax for pandemic profiteers

Unrivalled coverage This is just about the only thing they managed to get right on their entire front page. It's so laughably bad that not even the Daily Mail or S*n managed to do worse!

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Squid Game and the steel industry

In the mid-20th Century South Korea was an economic minnow. It was a war-ravaged country with a largely pre-industrial economy.

In 1960, if you divided the total economic activity of South Korea by its population (GDP per capita) it amounted to just $79 per person, but within sixty years, this figure has multiplied to over $47,000 per person, which makes it one of the most prosperous large economies on earth, above large developed nations like Japan, Italy, Spain, Argentina, and Russia.

This remarkable period of economic growth in South Korea is known as the Miracle on the Han River, and it started off in the early 1960s when their government initiated the first of the country's 5 year economic plans.

The objective was to modernise the South Korean economy through full employment, and strategic investment across numerous sectors, including infrastructure (roads, rail, ports), core industries (steel, fertilizer, cement, petrochemicals ...), science, and technology.

South Korea's rapid climb up the world development rankings is proof  of how astonishingly successful their strategic investment agenda has been.

Steel industry

When South Korea set about building their first modern steel production plant they were derided by the so-called experts. Why would a country like South Korea make their own steel, when they could just import it from countries with established steel industries?

Well, South Korea ignored the heckling and derision, invested in their own steel industry, and rose from absolutely nowhere in steel production, to become the 6th largest steel producer in the entire world in 2020. 

From having no modern steel industry at all half a century ago, they've soared past countries with long-established steel industries like Germany, France, and the UK.

In 2020 South Korea produced almost ten times as much steel as the United Kingdom! 

A country with a population of just 51 million people produced almost as much steel as economic giants like Russia (146 million), Japan (125 million), and the United States (331 million).

Not bad for a country that were laughed at when they first proposed developing their own steel industry eh?

Having their own government-owned steel industry gave South Korea a huge economic advantage, allowing them to provide cheap steel to other industrial sectors they wanted to develop, especially ship building, electronics, civil engineering, and road vehicle production.

This ready supply of cheap steel helped turn small South Korean firms like Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, and LG into globally recognised brands.

Thanks in a large part to the development of their own steel industry, South Korea is now the world's largest ship-builder, with 40% of the global ship-building market!

Only China even comes remotely close to the shipbuilding power of the South Koreans.

Strategic investment, and the deliberate nurturing of core industries turned South Korea from an economic backwater into an absolute powerhouse over the course of just a few decades.

While developed countries like the UK were deliberately de-industrialising their economies and outsourcing production overseas, South Korea rocketed past them by modernising their core industries and establishing themselves as the premier high-tech, high-skill, hyper-productive economic workshop of the world.

Creative industries

Having learned from their strategic investment in core industries, the South Koreans have recently begun investing in their cultural industries too, with the objective of establishing their nation as one of the creative powerhouses of the world.

The results have already been spectacular:

You'd have to have been living in a box for the last few weeks to have not heard of the South Korean survival drama Squid Game, that's absolutely smashing streaming records across the world.

But the hit Netflix show Squid Game is far from the first massive South Korean cultural export. 

In 2020 the South Korean boy band BTS absolutely dominated global music sales, securing first and second place in the IFPI album sales chart.

Then there's Bong Joon-ho's black comedy thriller Parasite, which became the first non-English language film ever to win the Oscar for best picture in 2019.

Either it's a massive coincidence that South Korea has come from nowhere to suddenly deliver worldwide smash hits in television, music, and cinema, or maybe could have something to do with their deliberate policy of investing in their cultural industries?

Investment vs Austerity

South Korea have proven twice over that strategic investment is the key to delivering future economic prosperity, but certain western nations seem determined not to learn this lesson, especially the increasingly-parochial United Kingdom.

The UK was home to the industrial revolution, and pioneered all kinds of industries from steel foundries, through railways, to ship building.

It's all gone now, thanks to the deliberate neoliberal policy of de-industrialisation that's been pursued for the last four decades.

• The country that invented the modern steel industry is no longer even in the top 20 world steel producers, and the remnants of its privatisation-wracked steel sector is now owned by Jingye Group, which is a state-owned Chinese regional bank.

• The country that invented the railways no longer has a single train manufacturer.

• The country that once "ruled the waves" deliberately tore down its own ship-building industry as part of a demented radical-right war on trade unionism (destroy the entire industry and the trade union dies with it).

As South Korea has stormed up the world rankings thanks to their strategic investment policy, the United Kingdom is falling away thanks to policies like de-industrialisation, under-investment, and austerity.

And there's a big danger of the same kind of sectoral decline happening in the UK cultural industries.

The UK is still an undisputed world leader in the creative industries, punching miles above its small island status in music, film, television, sport, and arts, but the process of decline is already underway.

• A decade of austerity cuts to the education budget has seen art, sports, and music cast aside in the public education system.

• Small theatres, galleries, arts centres, museums, and music venues across the country have been shut down in their hundreds as a result of absolutely ruinous Tory austerity cuts to local government budgets.

• Government funding of adult education has been halved since 2010.

• Profiteering private owners have flogged off hundreds of school playing fields as a result of the mass school privatisation programme the Tory government has been implementing since 2010.

• The BBC has had its funding repeatedly cut since 2010, and there are even more budget cuts in the pipeline.

• The Tory government has just announced a whopping 49% cut in funding for university arts courses.

• Direct funding for the cultural industries has also been annihilated, with the Department of Culture, Media, and Sports suffering massive austerity-driven budget cuts.

• Brexit is playing absolute havoc with the UK cultural industries by imposing expensive and time-eroding bureaucratic burdens on UK creatives touring across Europe, and on UK venues hosting creatives from elsewhere in Europe.

• And just to make his utter contempt for the wellbeing of Britain's £111 billion cultural industries unmistakable, Boris Johnson has recently appointed the notoriously thick, radically right-wing, culture war grifter Nadine Dorries as Britain's culture minister!

South Korea showed the UK the way on industrial strategy, but the Brits ignored it and did the polar opposite, which means South Korea is now an industrial powerhouse, and the UK seems locked into in terminal industrial decline.

South Korea is busy showing the UK the way on cultural strategy too, but once again the British government is doing the opposite, slashing away at cultural funding, when strategic investment is obviously the key to success.

The UK has already reduced itself from industrial pioneer to absolute minnows in industrial sectors that they themselves invented, and if there's not a rapid change in direction, the UK is going to see its position as cultural world leaders eroded away by the same myopic agenda of austerity cuts, and radical-right 'leave it to market forces' ideology, while other countries like South Korea surge ahead by actually investing for the future.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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Why you'd have to be an idiot to oppose wage rises when the cost of living is soaring

Wes Streeting is Labour's Shadow Secretary for Child Poverty. Today he's been on the television to agree with the radically right-wing Adam Smith institute that rising wages would be a bad thing because they would cause a "wage price spiral".

Just a Labour Party shadow minister agreeing with a radically right-wing think tank that rising wages would be awful.

Starmer's Labour is an absolute shamblespic.twitter.com/puiw9wg0St

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) October 7, 2021

There are very many reasons that this is a profoundly stupid position for a Labour Party minister to take.

Labour is supposed to be the party of the workers (the clue is in the name), so spouting radically right-wing rhetoric against wage rises is a completely extraordinary thing for a Labour minister to be doing.

Streeting was obviously attracted to the Adam Smith propaganda because it used the term "economically illiterate" to chastise Boris Johnson's Tory conference speech.

But for years people on the left have been using the phrase "economically illiterate" to describe economy-strangling idiocy of 'lets cut our way to prosperity' austerity ruination, but Wes never really had a problem with austerity (he abstained on George Osborne's brutal austerity cut in 2015), but suddenly he's enamoured with the phrase, because a radically right wing think tank pinched it to attack wage rises!

Anyone with any sense knows that Johnson's rhetoric about rising wages is pure bluster. He's been in a party that's overseen the worst decade of wage stagnation in economic history. But it's unbelievable strategic ineptitude for an opposition MP to adopt the position that Johnson's blustering that wage growth is good, so I'll say it's bad.

The supposed justification for opposing wage growth is that it would cause inflation, but this is utterly backwards. The inflation is already happening, largely because of Brexit, so keeping wages repressed at this moment would actually create wage deflation (real terms income cuts).

Imagine being such an economically clueless dweeb that you put the effect before cause like this, and end up calling for wage devaluation, just as the prices of energy, food, and housing are spiralling out of control.

'Derp, the opaquely funded and radically right wing pressure group say Boris Johnson is wrong to say wage rises are good, so I'll argue that wage rises are bad!' - this actually appears to be the way Streeting thinks!

I know thinking is a wildly over-generous description of whatever's going on in Streeting's head, but the thinking seems to be that Corbyn and the Labour left would have supported wage rises for ordinary workers while prices are soaring out of control, so it's the duty of Labour's much-vaunted "new management" to oppose them!

A few months ago the junior Labour minister Alex Sobel criticised capitalism over climate change, and Starmer reacted with indignant fury, forcing him to issue a grovelling apology for offending capitalists!

Today another Labour minister is parroting ultra right-wing rhetoric in order to attack the interests of UK workers, and Starmer says nothing!

In the raging battle between workers and the capitalists who exploit them, Starmer's clearly on the side of the capitalists, even though he's supposed to be the leader of the party of the workers!

Starmer's surrounded himself with such idiots that Johnson doesn't even have to do anything to outflank Labour to the left, and appeal to British workers.

All the Bodger has to do is issue absolute platitudes like 'wage rises are good' (even if he doesn't actually believe it himself) and then watch on passively as the strategically incompetent divs in Starmer's top team rush out to argue that 'wage rises are bad actually', and that what British workers really need is another punishing dose of wage stagnation, supposedly in order to prevent the inflation that's already happened!

This short clip perfectly illustrates the problem with liberal capitalist 'centrism'. These people don't actually stand for anything at all.

They've got no convictions; no firmly held beliefs; no understanding of political or economic history; no empathy for other people; no point that they wouldn't argue with equal vehemence for or against, depending on the circumstances; no reason behind anything they do besides self-advancement and political point scoring.

If Johnson had said 'wage rises are bad', the likes of Wes Streeting, Neil Coyle, David Lammy, and Jess Phillips, would have argued that 'wage rises are good actually'.

David Lammy was on the telly the other day using his oratory skills to attack the idea of transitioning towards a £15 per hour minimum wage, but everyone watching surely knew perfectly well that had he been ordered to argue in favour of the policy, he'd have summoned up the exact same faux passion to say what a fabulous idea it is.

These people believe in nothing.

If their party leader tells them to abstain on Theresa May's unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment", or George Osborne's brutal austerity cuts, or Priti Patel's despicable legislation to allow undercover cops to rape women with impunity, then that's exactly what the Labour right-wingers will do, because they don't believe in anything.

That's why they hated Corbyn so much, and worked tirelessly to sabotage Labour from within between 2015 and 2019, and keep the Tories in power.

They hate people with actual principles with a burning rage, and use the word "ideological" as a slur, as if it's some kind of sickening aberration to actually believe in anything, and have a principle that can't be bought.

They knew that having a principled person lead the Labour Party meant their career advancement options were curtailed, so they burned the Labour house down from within to get rid of him.

They put their own narrow self-interest above the unspeakable agonies of millions of others who were suffering under Tory austerity, Tory wage repression, Tory public service cuts, Tory disability persecution, Tory welfare vandalism ... and now they've succeeded in getting rid of Corbyn, we're stuck with a truly horrific Tory government, and an opposition composed almost exclusively of these dreadful people.

So this is why we're witnessing the strategic stupidity of a Labour minister attacking the interests of workers.

He doesn't know anything; or believe in anything; or care about the history and traditions of the labour movement; or have any strategic plan for winning power and making the nation a better place.

He was simply bewitched by a load of radically right wing nonsense, and then mindlessly regurgitated it for the cameras, without even giving a moment's thought to what he was actually saying.

 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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Once again the Tories are hiding their own culpability behind vapid 'culture war' nonsense

Boris Johnson's Tory government have opened up a new front in their nauseating culture war, by trying to blame the term "white privilege" for catastrophic failings in the educations system, that leave working class kids (white and non-white alike) at huge disadvantages in comparison to kids from wealthier backgrounds.

I'm going to give a non-exhaustive list of other factors that are infinitely more damaging to the prospects of working class kids than this term, but first I'll briefly explain what "white privilege" actually means.

The term certainly doesn't mean that all white people are wealthy and privileged, only a fool or someone who is trying to fool you would try to argue that.

It means that in a still-racist society there are advantages to being white.

White people are obviously less likely to suffer institutional racism like being harassed by the police or denied painkillers when seriously ill; we're less likely to have our CVs immediately thrown in the bin for having non-white sounding names; and we don't have to face disgusting examples of inter-personal racism like the majority of non-white people have experienced in their lifetimes.

This obviously doesn't mean that life is a bed of roses for all white people, because there are all kinds of other forms of discrimination such as classism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of anti-queer bigotry, ageism, persecution of the disabled, persecution of the neurodiverse ...

Only those with malicious intentions would even try to portray recognising that whiteness is an advantage in a racist society as some kind of attack on poor white people, which brings us to the Tory government, and their woeful efforts to hide their own catastrophic failings behind yet more culture war bollocks.

So here are eleven things that are infinitely more damaging to the prospects of working class kids than the existence of the term "white privilege".

1. Education cuts

Ever since the Lib-Dems enabled them back into power in 2010, the Tories have been inflicting brutal cuts on England's education budget, with the worst cuts of all concentrated in the poorest areas of the country. This means that working class kids have borne the brunt of this deliberate Tory strategy of under-funding the education system, and trashing the nation's future economic potential.

How dare they pretend to give a damn about the prospects of working class kids, when their own longstanding policy is to systematically underfund the schools these working class kids attend?

2. Tuition fees

When the Tories and Lib-Dems colluded to triple university tuition fees, and bring in rip-off new repayment terms (inflation +3%) they ensured that kids from poor and ordinary backgrounds would need to drive themselves tens of thousands of pounds into debt just to get their degrees, and that the vast majority of post-2012 graduates (83%) would never be able to pay these debts off despite making entire working lifetimes of repayments.

Is it even possible to think of a better way of putting working class kids off academic attainment, than telling them they'll have to suffer an entire lifetime of unpayable debt if they aspire to go to university?

3. Youth service cuts

Anyone who claims to give the slightest damn about kids in deprived working class communities should be championing youth services aimed at honing kids' talents, giving them social skills, and keeping them away from crime and drugs.

The Tory government has been relentlessly slashing youth services budgets to the bone (70% cut in less than a decade).

4. Sure Start

If you want to give kids the best possible opportunities in life, it's crucial to begin the positive impact as soon as possible, which is why, despite their many other faults, the 1997-2010 Labour government did a great job in setting up Sure Start.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that Sure Start is extremely beneficial to kids' prospects, the Tories have slashed it to pieces since 2010, resulting in 500+ closures, and once again, the worst cuts have been reserved for the most disadvantaged areas.

5. Free School meals

Anyone who claims to care about the prospects of working class kids wouldn't hesitate for a second over providing free school meals during a global pandemic, because there's mountains of evidence that well-fed kids concentrate better and get better grades, while starving hungry and malnourished kids often fail to live up to their academic potential.

But we've all seen how the Tory government repeatedly voted against providing free school meals during the coronavirus pandemic, and had to be shamed into action by the footballer Marcus Rashford, on more than one occasion.

6. Social security cuts

Since 2010 the Tory government has implemented round after round of savage social security cuts. It hardly takes a genius to understand that policies like slashing working tax credits and cutting entitlement to child tax credits and child benefit would end up having profoundly negative consequences for children in the poorest families.

But there's just something in the Tory mentality that gives them a perverse sense of pleasure at the idea of punishing the poor for their poverty, and ensuring that their kids grow up even poorer too.

7. Adult education cuts

Since 2010 the Tories have relentlessly attacked adult education spending, even though any sane government would be investing in adult education in order to ensure that the economy has a skilled and flexible workforce, and so that workers have the means and ability to retrain should they lose their jobs.

The Tories clearly don't want a modern, flexible, highly-skilled workforce, they want to minimise retraining opportunities, and ensure working class people who lose their jobs end up languishing in exploitative low-pay gig economy jobs, working for capitalist mega-corporations, because their retraining options are so severely limited.

And to make things even worse, despite all of his cheery rhetoric about investment and upskilling, Johnson's government is pressing ahead with yet another round of cuts to adult education spending.

8. Wage repression

After the Tories came to power in 2010 they imposed the longest sustained period of wage repression since records began. 

There's basically no better strategy to erode the prospects of working class kids, than to spend the best part of a decade systematically eroding the real value of their parents' wages, and ensuring that when these kids do eventually enter the workforce, they'll be earning less in real terms than those who were entering the workforce a decade previously!

9. School privatisation

Since 2010 the Tories have been overseeing an extraordinary programme of school privatisation in England, to such an extent that 75% of English secondary schools are now controlled by private profiteering pseudo-charities called "Academy Chains" (many of them owned and operated by major Tory party donors).

These profiteers aren't allowed to leech profits out of the education system in shareholder dividends because of their so-called charitable status, but there are loads of other ways of soaking cash out of our kids' education budgets into private pockets, not least vastly inflated six figure salaries for profiteering academy chain directors and their cronies, and endless tides of massive untendered supply contracts handed out to their friends and family.

If you think that the existence of the term "white privilege" has more to do with working class academic under-achievement than this widespread looting of education budgets by Tory party donors and assorted other spivs and profiteers, there's something seriously wrong with the way you're looking at the world.

10. Soaring child poverty

Several of the aforementioned issues, like social security cuts and Tory wage repression have combined to drive half a million more kids into poverty over the last five years, with a shocking 75% of all the kids in poverty, now living in a household where at least one adult works.

It's utterly obscene for the Tories to pretend that they give a damn about working class kids, when their own policies have resulted in hundreds of thousands more kids growing up in dire poverty, and literally millions of kids learning the very early life lesson that 'work doesn't pay', because they see their parents struggling in destitution, despite having jobs.

11. Classism

Britain has one of the most rigid and persistent class hierarchies in the world. The wealthy privately-educated 7% minority are vastly over-represented in politics, corporate media, the judiciary, corporate boardrooms, and the top-paying public service jobs.

Two of our last three Prime Ministers went to the exact same elitist private school, which charges vastly more than the average annual salary in yearly fees.

People still use ludicrous anachronistic terms like lord, baroness, and sir in all seriousness, and we've still got unelected hereditary peers in the House of Lords for pity's sake.

The evidence shows that people from working class backgrounds, with regional accents, are routinely paid thousands of pounds per year less than the posh, for doing exactly the same work.

And the current Prime Minister is a hateful elitist, who used incredibly derogatory language to attack working class children as "ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive, and illegitimate" in a disgusting tirade in which he also derided working class men as "drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless, and hopeless".

Is it any wonder at all that society is geared to fail working class kids, when we insist on picking sneering elitists like Johnson to run the show?

Conclusion

If you look at their actual track record in government, it's obvious that the Tories have been conducting class warfare against the working class. 

They've slashed education budgets, handed control of schools to a bunch of sleazy profiteers, gutted youth services, ruined sure start, smashed the adult education system to pieces, and imposed rip-off unpayable student debts.

Beyond their outright vandalism of the social ladder, to make it so much harder for working class kids to escape poverty, they've also been actively making the poverty worse with their twin agenda of wage repression and social security cuts.

And these Tory vermin think that they can just hide this dreadful and downright malicious track record behind a smokescreen of vapid and divisive culture war bollocks about the term "white privilege".

The reason they think they can get away with pushing this absolute gibberish is that they're confident that the majority of the lower orders (as they see us) have been leaving the education system with such under-developed critical thinking skills, that we won't even notice that we're being duped into blaming "woke teachers" or whatever, rather than the powerful elitists who actually run the country, and are obviously to blame.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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Why Clement Attlee was the greatest PM of the 20th Century

Clement Attlee was born on January 3rd 1883 and served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between July 1945 and October 1951. He was, in my view, by far the best UK Prime Minister of the 20th Century and his government was an inspiration to the developed world.

When Attlee's Labour government came to power in 1945 the UK was a blitzed-out and war fatigued nation with the biggest national debt in its entire history (more than 237% of GDP). Attlee's government rapidly reconstructed and restructured the UK economy to avoid a post-war crisis, founded the NHS, improved pensions, introduced Legal Aid, nationalised core industries, improved workers' rights and built hundreds of thousands of decent houses a year to replace the appalling slums that George Orwell wrote about in The Road To Wigan Pier.

The really incredible thing is that this amazing post-war government reconstruction and investment frenzy actually resulted in a huge drop in the national debt.

Attlee's government took on a massively complex post-war reconstruction project; lifted millions of people out of dire poverty, ill-health and slum dwellings at the same time; and they did it in such a way that he actually ended up significantly reducing the national debt in the process.

In light of all of his incredible achievements, not least the foundation of the NHS during his tenure, I have no hesitation in saying that Attlee was the best Prime Minister of the 20th Century.

It's very interesting to contrast the 40%+ drop in the national debt Attlee's government achieved between 1945 and 1951 through their investment and reconstruction agenda with the massive increase in the scale of UK public debt after a decade of this ruinous Tory austerity agenda.

After a decade of being continually blitzed with Tory austerity propaganda lies that public debts can be reduced by slashing wages, public services, education, and investment, it may seem somewhat surprising that the national debt fell dramatically despite all of Attlee's spending and investment.

The reality of course is that all of the Tory austerity propaganda has always been economically illiterate nonsense designed to dupe the gullible into supporting the radically right-wing Tory agenda of massively enriching the tiny mega-rich minority, whilst making the rest of us pay the tab with an unprecedented period of wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, and ideologically driven vandalism of the social safety net.

Attlee proved the correct way to reduce debts and dramatically increase prosperity is through infrastructure investment, decent wages, education, public ownership, social housing, and the development of advanced public services.

History is shouting us a clear message that strategic investment is the key to recovery, not some ludicrous economic fairy tale that there is no alternative to a load of endlessly repeated Tory "let's cut our way to growth" austerity nonsense.

Clement Attlee proved that it is absolutely possible to make life better for all sectors of society through strategic investment, whilst actually reducing the national debt in the process.

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic the Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak is proposing to let whole sectors of the UK economy simply die off, and threatening the most savage package of cuts to the social safety net in history, proving the Tory determination to do the precise opposite. 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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