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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Why does Starmer keep insisting that the public are wrong?

Keir Starmer was elected as Labour leader on the back of 10 pledges, which promises party unity, the continuation of Corbynite policies, and a clear cut commitment to communal ownership of vital infrastructure and services like water, rail, and energy.

Starmer knew he couldn't win the Labour leadership without promising these things, because public ownership is not just overwhelmingly popular with the Labour Party members who were voting, they're popular policies across the entire British public.

Polling consistently demonstrates that overwhelming support for renationalisation of the energy sector, the water supply in England, and the railways.

In the two years after his election as Labour leader circumstances have handed Starmer a series of ideal opportunities to promote these overwhelmingly popular renationalisation policies.

Raw Sewage

In 2021 Johnson's Tory rabble triggered a massive public backlash when they voted to allow privatised water companies to keep artificially inflating their profits by dumping vast quantities of raw sewage into our waterways and coastal waters.

Starmer could easily have used this scandal to promote the popular policy of bringing England's privatised mess of water suppliers back under public ownership.

Instead he sent his subordinates out to argue that the profiteers must stay in charge of the water supply, in order to signal that Labour represents no threat to vested capitalist interests.

Energy Crisis

We've all seen the chaos of massively inflated energy bills, soaring energy producer profits, a sequence of energy suppliers going bust, and the government regulator forcing abandoned customers onto much more expensive tariffs.

Starmer could have highlighted the way the French government imposed a 4% cap on energy bill rises onto their publicly owned energy company (EdF), while the Tory government allowed EdF and other energy companies in the UK market to raise bills by an astonishing 54%.

He could have offered the public the renationalisation policies they want, but instead he decided to once again adopt the position that the public are wrong, and that the private profiteers must stay.

And Starmer didn't just spurn the opportunity to promote the energy renationalisation policies that the public want, and that he pledged in his leadership bid, he even publicly bragged that he lied in his leadership campaign, and insisted that he'd lie to people again to win more power!

Rail Strikes

Labour is supposed to be the party of working people (the clue is in the name), but Keir Starmer has decided to oppose the RMT rail strike against below-inflation pay offers and mandatory redundancies.

He's so vehemently opposed to the strikes that his minions are trying to force Labour MPs to apologise for showing solidarity with striking workers!

It's truly absurd to see Starmer's shadow cabinet team insisting that they won't support the strikes because they don't want to "pick a side".

It's capitalist profiteers and a profoundly malicious Tory transport secretary against ordinary low-paid rail workers (not train drivers).

If Labour won't even pick a side in this scenario, what the hell is the point in them.

And then the polling has come out to show that the British public are overwhelmingly on the side of the rail workers, meaning once again Starmer has positioned himself far to the right of public opinion.

Outflanking the public to the right

Despite pledging popular renationalisation policies in his leadership election, Keir Starmer has deliberately placed the Labour Party well to the right of the British public on water, energy, and now rail.

Instead of offering the public what they want, Starmer is siding with the capitalist profiteers and insisting that the public are wrong to want things to just be a bit better and fairer for British consumers and British workers.

Starmer's dedicated to the protection of vested capitalist interests, so he's going to keep Labour positioned well to the right of public opinion; offer a bland and uninspiring "more of the same" policy platform; and hope that he can win the next election purely by not being quite as repulsive and divisive as Johnson.

It looks a lot like a deliberate attempt to replay Ed Miliband's catastrophically uninspiring 2015 Tory-lite election campaign, in which Labour decided to pathetically imitate Tory austerity ruination, rather than opposing it and pledging to invest for the future instead.

It seems an absurdly inexplicable strategy to repeatedly chide the public that they're wrong to want things to be a bit better, and then expect them to vote for you regardless.

Unless of course Starmer considers the protection of capitalist profiteering to be so important that he'd risk driving millions of traditional Labour voters away, and throwing an election over it.

And if that's the case, what the hell is this absurd person doing as leader of the Labour Party?

 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.

OR

Why is Starmer so intent on reanimating the corpse of late-stage Blairism?

Keir Starmer’s inner circle is heavily dominated by Blairite loyalists. That’s a pretty indisputable assertion right?

Starmer’s Blair-hagiography of a Conference Speech made it absolutely clear that he’s worshipping at the altar of Blairism (to anyone who had the misfortune of actually listening to it at least).

And to match his words with actions, it’s also crystal clear from his strategy of removing and demoting the soft-left, which has followed his purge of all the genuine socialists and social liberals from his so called “unity cabinet” (via his depraved loyalty tests of whipping Labour MPs to abstain on vile Tory stuff like rape cops and war crime impunity, and booting them out of his cabinet if they refused).

One of the most interesting aspects of this Blairite involvement in Starmer’s vapid form of managerialist posture politics is the way they fail to even recognise the way Starmer has been imitating the failing late-stage Blairism that ended up driving millions of traditional Labour voters away, rather than the exciting early Blairism that promised to do away with a shambolic and sleaze ridden Tory government, that should surely have been removed from power at least half a decade previously.

In order to make the case that they’re imitating the wrong kind of Blairism, it’s necessary to admit that Blair and his government actually got some things right, which I’ve always been willing to do.

The increased investment in public services that began in 1997 was a damned-sight better than the privatisation-obsessed Tory shambles that preceded it, or the economically ruinous austerity extremism that succeeded it.

Other positives included The Good Friday Agreement and improved economic freedom for Scotland and Wales. But it’s the economic investment in infrastructure and services and the living standards increases that are most relevant here. We don’t need to talk about their lamentable policy failings here, because everyone who has even read this far should be well aware of where Blairism went badly wrong.

Blair did some things right to win power and then delivered some good policies in the early years in government ,and the parallels with now are pretty damned obvious. Yet for some absurd reason Starmer and his inner circle are intent on bringing back the hectoring and unpopular late-stage Blairism that drove people away instead.

In 1997 Blair absolutely trounced Major’s Tories by giving people a bit of hope, then he cemented his position in power by being seen to deliver: Rising wages, economic growth, resuscitating the UK’s vandalised social safety net, education, and NHS funding.

So if Starmer and the people who surround him idealise Blair so much, and have so much nostalgia for the Blair years, why aren’t they following Blair’s recipe for electoral success, rather than desperately trying to reanimate the risible and unpopular politics that Labour slumped into after they’d been in power for ages, run out of ideas, and complacently imagined themselves invincible after winning a third straight election, even after creating a disaster like the invasion of Iraq?

Why are they like this?

The answer seems to be that most of the architects and big players in the early Blair years are past it, retired, or deceased, leaving a pathetic residue of obsequious yes people, who were parachuted into positions of power and influence by Blair’s inner circle, without ever having learned where the power actually comes from.

The power comes from the people.

Even in a country like the UK that suffers a hopelessly rigged, archaic, unrepresentative, and decaying democratic institution like Westminster, you have to offer people what they want, rather than overtly mocking and ridiculing their desires for policies that would actually make life just a bit better and fairer for ordinary people.

But the Labour right Blair-loyalists who control the party now have no idea how to offer this, because they were raised in an environment in which it was their job to bend public will to fit the objectives of the Labour government, and to castigate anyone who argued that they should actually be doing things better.

How many of the big figures from Blair’s 1997 triumph are still kicking around? Blair retired to his riches a decade and a half ago. Brown only pops up occasionally. Prescott’s long-gone. Darling, Milburn, Straw, Hoon, and Blunkett are dinosaurs. Beckett and Harman are among the last in still serving in the Commons, and they’re both retiring next time around. Robin Cook, Frank Dobson, Tessa Jowell, Mo Mowlam, and Donald Dewar are all dead. And long-standing Labour Chief Whip Nick Brown has recently been kicked to the sidelines by Starmer.

What’s left of Blairism now is a profoundly unpleasant residue of arrogant and complacent career politicians who mainly got their positions through privilege and patronage, without ever having put in the the hard work of creating genuine public appeal.

Between 2015 and 2019 these second generation Blairites saw Corbyn trying to offer hope, But they clearly thought that he was ‘doing politics wrong’ by trying to appeal to the public, especially his efforts to woo young voters and new demographics who had rarely or never voted before.

As far as they were concerned he should have been offering uninspiring neoliberal gruel,  performing parlour tricks for the media, rehashing the arrogant “this is all you’re getting” stance they cut their political teeth on, and bitterly chastising any objectors for the impertinence of suggesting politicians could and should be doing better.

They were so convinced that Corbyn was wrong, that once they took control of the Labour Party again, they even made it an immediate party priority to  kill off public hopes and aspirations by systematically salting Corbyn’s allotment of policies, and deliberately driving away the hundreds of thousands of politically engaged and active supporters he’d attracted to the cause.

Rather than picking the best and most popular of Corbyn’s policy crop for their own use (investment economics, public ownership of essential infrastructure and services, workers’ rights, higher wages, better education, mass party membership rather than reliance on mega-rich donors ...) and discarding anything they really disliked, they decided to salt the lot, and revert to the only kind of politics they’re familiar with:

Telling people what to think, playing parlour tricks for the media, and chastising the public for daring to want any better from them.

So here’s the challenge for any Blairites who have managed to read this far without suffering fits of rage at the “thoughtcrime” of believing that Labour actually needs to be doing miles better at the moment:

Can you offer a better explanation than mine for why Starmer and his supporters have failed to adopt the positive, vibrant, hope-inspiring and ultimately winning version of Blairism, in favour of trying to reanimate the rotting corpse of late-stage Blairism that the electorate had already had more than enough of 12 years ago?

And more importantly, do you think it’s even possible to make them change course now, after watching them try to flog the same rotting corpse into action for two interminable years?

I mean these are people who steadfastly refused to learn or utilise the power-winning tactics of their own political figurehead before they resumed control over the Labour Party, so what would it actually take to make such a bunch of nitwits suddenly and dramatically improve their game now, after two years of this mind-numbing inertia?

Essays and video clips from from the likes of Another Angry Voice, Novara Media, and Owen Jones certainly aren’t going to wake them up to what they’re doing wrong.

So unless you’re going to sit there and actually try to convince people, including yourself, that these hopelessly inept people aren’t asleep at the wheel, what is it that you need to do to wake them up?

And I say “you do” because they’re only ever going to listen to it from their supporters, if they listen to it from anyone at all. Never from anyone like me.

Do you guys want to wake the sleeping driver? Or do you want to just sit tight, pretend they're doing an excellent job, and hope that everything’s somehow going to work out fine through pure luck?

It’s clearly up to you lot if you want to save your own project from itself, isn’t it?

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OR

Seven reasons Rishi Sunak's energy bill mini-loan policy is an insulting joke

Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced that the energy price cap is going to rise by an astonishing 54%, meaning a £694 hike in the energy bills of ordinary households.

In order to pretend that he's doing something to help, he's announced that energy consumers will be automatically enrolled in £200 mini-loans, which will be subtracted from their inflated bills, but then be paid back in £40 energy bill additions over the next five years.

In this article I'm going to briefly explain why Sunak's absurd energy bill mini-loans are dishonest, inadequate, over-optimistic, complacent, ineffective, economically illiterate, and driven by hard-right capitalist ideology.

1. Dishonest 

Sunak's mini-loans are being presented as a "rebate". This is astonishingly dishonest because rebates (like the massive UK rebate on EU membership fees before the big flounce) are discounts that do not have to be paid back at a future date.

If it has to be paid back at a future date, like Sunak's deluded nonsense, then it's not a rebate at all, it's a loan.

So when the Chancellor of the Exchequer; and a load of Tory MPs; and Britain's woefully biased media hacks keep describing these loans as "rebates", they're being profoundly dishonest.

2. Inadequate

You don't have to be any kind of maths genius to figure out that a £200 loan is insufficient to cover a £694 price hike.

3. Over-optimistic 

Sunak's decision to force a "borrow now, pay later" strategy on all UK energy consumers relies on the very big assumption that energy prices will quickly fall back to lower levels by next year.

But what happens if they don't fall back, and remain high, or even continue inflating even further?

The answer of course is that UK energy consumers would then be facing sky-high energy bills, with repayments on Sunak's mandatory loans piled on the top.

4. Complacent 

Sunak's complacency is obvious if you just care to look at what other European nations are doing in the face of inflating energy prices.

The left-leaning Spanish government have temporarily scrapped energy taxes, banned energy suppliers from cutting off non-paying customers, and introduced windfall taxes on energy company profits.

Meanwhile in France the liberal-capitalist Macron government have imposed energy windfall taxes and limited energy bill rises to 4%.

If the Spanish or French governments had allowed prices to soar by 54% and offered anything as pathetically inadequate as Sunak's mini-loans, there'd be massive public protests, especially in France.

But Sunak complacently expects the British public to just quietly suck it up like good, obedient little plebs.

5. Ineffective

Sunak's shoddy little mini-loans are a spectacularly ineffective sticking plaster on a severed limb sized economic problem.

What's needed is serious consumer protections, and urgent reforms to the UK's absolute shambles of an energy sector.

Here are a few ideas:

• The Energy Price cap should only have only been increased at the rate of inflation, if at all.
• There should be new legislation to protect non-paying customers from being cut off.
• Windfall taxes to be levied on the obscene profits of private energy companies.
• Energy suppliers that go bust should be renationalised.
• Energy infrastructure should be brought back under public ownership in order to put the energy needs of the nation above the profit-seeking behaviour of private businesses.
• The government should implement a Green New Deal to speed up adoption of renewable energy, in order to end the UK's dangerous over-reliance on expensive imported gas.

But instead of any real action to combat the current crisis, or to protect the UKs energy security in the future, all we get is Sunak's insultingly inadequate energy bill mini-loans.

6. Economically illiterate

Anyone who has ever run a business will know that there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking out loans in order to make investments, in things like property, machinery, or training. 

But if you're taking out loans to cover the cost of your day-to-day expenses, like payroll, materials, or bills, then you're in really serious trouble and veering towards insolvency.

Rishi Sunak is so economically illiterate that he thinks that loans to cover expenses are such a good idea that he's going to forcibly sign every energy customer in the UK up to them!

Surely now it's time to turn the persistent myth of Tory economic competence into the joke it should have been ever since they started enforcing their ludicrous and economically illiterate "let's cut our way to prosperity" austerity ruination agenda in 2010?

7. Ideological

Sunak is allowing profiteering energy companies to keep their unearned gains, while insulting the British public with the fake-help of these ludicrously inadequate mini-loans.

His decision to protect capitalist interests while throwing insulting crumbs at the public in order to pretend he's helping is a product of his hard-right capitalist ideology.

The entire purpose of the modern day Tory party is to prioritise the interests of capital above what's best for the British people and the British economy.

Just look at who bankrolls the Tory party operation, and look at all the multi-millionaires in Johnson's cabinet of hard-right ghouls, topped by Sunak himself.

You'd have to be hopelessly naive to expect the Tories not to side with capital, and against ordinary British people, which is why some of us have been consistent in our advice to "Never Trust a Tory".

Conclusion

Sunak's energy bill mini-loans are clearly dishonest, inadequate, over-optimistic, complacent, ineffective, economically illiterate, and driven by hard-right capitalist ideology.

But the Tories firmly believe they can get away with offering nothing but this insultingly inadequate fake-help in the midst of the worst living standards collapse in decades.

After all, the British public have let the Tories get away with an entire decade of economically illiterate austerity ruination, so why on earth would they suddenly rise up and demand change over soaring energy bills and Sunak's woefully inadequate insult of a response?
 

 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.

OR

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!

 

 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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Spot the Difference

In 2019 voters in the Don Valley constituency in South Yorkshire elected their first ever Tory MP, a private landlord by the name of Nick Fletcher.

It's absolutely astonishing that people in a poverty-stricken post-industrial part of South Yorkshire would wilfully elect a member of the Tory party as their MP, but political memories are clearly incredibly short, and it seems like people have already forgotten the horrific Tory de-industrialisation policies of the 1980s and 90s that annihilated local economies across the north of England.

They've forgotten the disastrous de-industrialisation policies; they've forgotten the demented Tory "leave it to market forces" fanaticism of just leaving entire towns to rot, so that younger generations had no choice but to leave for more affluent areas where they could actually find decent well-paid jobs; and they've forgotten the Tory austerity ruination that siphoned £billions out of local government budgets as they were simultaneously lavishing tax cuts and handouts on corporations and the mega-rich!

It's bad enough that people in a left-behind former coal mining area elected any Tory to represent them on the political stage, but it's especially galling that he's a property-hoarder who profiteers off parasites like him buying up all of the affordable housing, so that ordinary people are forced into paying off his mortgages, rather than buying houses of their own.

He's not just an economically unproductive exploiter representing a party that inflicted ruination on the area he represents, he's also ridiculously dishonest, to the extent of taking people for absolute mugs.

On December 21st 2020 he posted a Facebook selfie, taken in the town of Thorne.

On September 20th 2021 he posted the exact same selfie, with Christmas trees still visible in the background.

And on November 10th he posted the same selfie again claiming to have visited the town, and seen it "thriving again after a tough year".

Of course using the same photo over and again isn't even remotely on the same scale of dishonesty and corruption that Johnson's Tory party is absolutely mired in (dodgy PPE contracts, the Owen Paterson scandal, Geoffrey Cox skiving parliament to earn £hundreds per hour representing a tax haven; Tory donors apparently buying peerages at £3 million a pop; MPs accepting freebies from gambling companies then lobbying for them in parliament; David Cameron lobbying for Greensill to get £350 million in Covid loans just before they went bankrupt; Rishi Sunak's wife investing in a firm just weeks before her husband gave them a massive loan ...), but misleadingly posting the same photo multiple times is the kind of dishonest behaviour ordinary people would call their friends out for, isn't it?

It's similar to Tory liar Lucy Allan's bizarrely staged election pictures in 2017.

Of course her mendacious lie about not being invited to remembrance day events (when she actually had her constituency manager reject both invitations) is worse, as is the way she fabricated a death threat in order to smear a constituent who wrote to her in 2015 urging her to oppose David Cameron's war-mongering in Syria, but the fact these people resort to deception, when it would almost certainly be easier to just tell the truth is illustrative of their characters, isn't it?

It absolutely boggles the mind that people wilfully vote to put charlatans like this in parliament, especially when it's people in deprived former coal mining areas like the Don Valley.
 

 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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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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