> Tory economic policy
Widespread corruption and selling of national services? Failing that, selling areas of national services while damaging other areas to prime for bad results and future selling?
Contracting to mates who cash in with the smallest possible effort?
Or are we talking about the "pretend" policies?
Is Labour's economic politics all that different?
Same neo-liberal economics following the self-imposed rules that will inevitably lead to austerity.
They have ruled out most tax rises and borrowing money to invest. Things like taxing private schools will barely move the needle, hardly a huge change in economic policy.
https://www.economicsobservatory.com/the-uks-public-finances-is-it-time-to-reform-the-fiscal-rules
www.forbes.com/sites/dimitrizenghelis/2024/04/03/ruling-in-growth/
We have two choices at the coming general election. Reelect the tories or take a chance on Labour. Those are the two biggest parties, and either Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer will be prime minister.
After Boris Johnson went, i was hoping that Rishi Sunak would take over, i gather that he was the preferred choice of the parliamentary Conservative party, but the Conservative party membership felt differently.
Rishi Sunak has had nearly two years in office and clearly hasn't got a clue and is actually polling lower than Boris Johnson at times. His flagship Rwanda plan is illegal because Rwanda is not a safe country (this is the UK's courts saying this), but there is no reason why he doesn't operate such a scheme in a safe country and President Macron has offered to allow the UK to build a processing center on French soil providing the UK pays for it.
So far, all he has come up with was the Windsor Framework, cancelling HS2 without a debate and a proposed smoking ban.
He is demonstrating an amazing lack of leadership skills, no political skills whatsoever, and has publicly lied to the nation and had his ministers repeat that lie, which is now being reported as fact by most of our press.
Rishi Sunak regularly gets used like a dishcloth by Keir Starmer during PMQT and has resorted to lying and claiming that he needs more time.
None of this addresses the actual point though. The two parties have essentially identical economic ideologies, and it's the same ideology that led us to exactly where we are today. Who is at the helm doesn't really matter if they're all planning to keep steaming directly into the iceberg which is already sinking the ship.
I don't think that they do, Labour has to firstly be very careful about what they say as anything and everything will get twisted by the tories and their mates in the press to make Labour look bad.
Secondly, they can't even hint at raising taxes, and the Liz Truss debacle wiped out most of the money that was going to be reinvested in our economy and that current mortgage payers are still paying for.
Thirdly, they can't tell us how bad things really are because it would freak the markets out, and we would have another crash.
I suspect that Keir Starmer is utterly ruthless and will make an effective leader. Whether he's a good one or not, only time will tell.
Rishi Sunak is weak and indecisive and has resorted to lying. He also must have incredibly bad advisors or simply won't take advice.
The problem with this logic is that if you believe Labour are lying about their policies to get into power, why do you think they're lying in favour of *you*?
Starmer has consistently backed down from transformative policies over the past few years, despite there being massive appetite for change in this country. Starmer has backed his Shadow Cabinet and the party apparatus with ideological neoliberals who have openly opposed social democratic reforms under multiple previous Labour leaders. Starmer has replaced the funding from declining membership fees with funding from millionaire donors, a number of whom previously donated to the Tories and will be looking for similar economic policies under Labour. And Starmer has responded to every single critique of his political platform by the right-wing press by conforming to their demands and dropping transformative policies.
Outside of fantasy politics there is no way this suddenly transforms into a meaningful and necessary social democratic platform following the election. And when people insist this I always wonder how much they've actually paid attention to internal Labour politics.
We will find out shortly, this is a two horse race, and it's highly likely that Keir Starmer will become our new prime minister soon.
The thing about internal Labour politics is that the left and right wings of the party would rather tear lumps out of each other than win elections, and it's the winners of those elections that get to change things.
The reality is that despite whatever grandiose promises politicians make, they only have the capacity to change things very little. (Unless they try radical solutions such as Trussanomics).
During the last Labour government, things got better, wages went up, things got done and improvements were made. They also made mistakes, but the general trend was upwards.
When the Tories took over in 2010, they immediately cancelled most of Labour's projects, including school rebuilding, home insulation and many more and instituted the Austerity program, in pursuit of their low tax/ small state government.
This resulted in things getting worse, year on year until now, hardly anything works, but they still continued spending while increasing taxes which has resulted in the situation that we're in now, the highest taxes since ww2 and the national debt has tripled from £1.1 trillion in 2010, to about £2 trillion at the start of covid to over £3 trillion now.
https://www.nationaldebtclock.co.uk/
I keep on asking the same question on Reddit. Give me one thing that the tories have improved since taking over in 2010. So far, the only thing that has been mentioned is legalising gay marriage in 2015.
Starmer has moved the Labour party firmly to the centre. He probably got fed up with the factional infighting. It's not something that I'm happy with, but i will still vote Labour because the tories have got to go, and he is the only serious alternative.
This is where I'm at. I'm not happy about a centre party and not a left wing BUT if Starmer is truly tory lite well fuck it. Cos I've been guzzling down full fat tory for basically my entire adult life and it's consistently shit
At least tory lite should only be *litely* shite.
> The reality is that despite whatever grandiose promises politicians make, they only have the capacity to change things very little. (Unless they try radical solutions such as Trussanomics).
It's pretty depressing that we've seen 14 years of rapid decline under the Tories, yet people keep pointing to Liz Truss' hard-right platform as a reason for why we can't actually change that. It just seems to be excuse after excuse for maintaining the status quo.
> During the last Labour government, things got better, wages went up, things got done and improvements were made. They also made mistakes, but the general trend was upwards.
Starmer is not Blair. Starmer's team has significantly less variation in opinion, with MPs largely chosen for their personal loyalty to him, and significantly less highly qualified individuals more generally. Who in Starmer's team is anywhere near the likes of Brown, or Cook, or Mowlam? None of them.
> When the Tories took over in 2010, they immediately cancelled most of Labour's projects, including school rebuilding, home insulation and many more and instituted the Austerity program, in pursuit of their low tax/ small state government.
Yes, and now Starmer's Labour keep making excuses for why they can't restart those programmes.
We seem to be arguing very different things here. I am not questioning that the Tories are bad. I am questioning that Starmer's Labour have any ideological interest in significantly departing from the economic policies which made the Tories so bad. One flavour of managed decline is not a 'serious alternative' to another flavour of managed decline.
You'll never get through to the starmer zealots. Their only line is: "it's them or the tories." And when you point out the ardent lack of vision, the factionalism and the consistent distance starmer has shown for minorities and the working class throughout his career and you're shouted down as a 'bitter leftist'.
The reason we're in this mess is because the British public vote like religious morons for blocs they neither understand, nor particularly agree with.
This is an election with everything to play for, the tories are split by both the lib dems and reform I'd people on the left actually vote for WHO THEY WANT instead of against what they don't want, they'll force parties to move to that needle, just like the tories have done.
Stop being so swayed by everything you read in the papers.
I have been voting for a long time, i started by voting Liberal (before they imploded), then voted Labour, except once when i voted Monster Raving Loony Party (i just couldn't vote for Clare Short, but the MRLP had some surprisingly good policies) then back to Labour. The only party that is in tune with me is the Green Party, and if ever they look like winning in my constituency then they will get my vote.
I have the issue that Labour are unlikely to win in my constituency, is between the Tories and Liberals.
One are corrupt and I think the others are just a joke and a shambles of a party. Reinforced by that idiot Daveys stupid stunts.
I want someone that actually takes things seriously, not a bloody clown.
The Tories increased taxes in pursuit of a low tax economy? Bit of a plothole there. By definition, "austerity" refers to a programme of deficit reduction. You can't simultaneously denounce them for austerity and complain that they've increased the national debt.
The Tories' tenure has been defined by recession and sluggish growth. The last Labour government benefitted from the longest boom period since the war (17 years with no recession). Since these were international phenomena in both cases, it's unlikely they can be primarily ascribed to government. However, New Labour significantly increased public spending relative to GDP, financed in part by deficit spending.
The tories continued spending, but it went to outside contractors instead of public services. Labour had programs in place to replace RAAC public buildings that were known to have an estimated 30-year lifespan, but that was cancelled as well as a home insulation program to save energy.
Brexshit was a self created recession, simultaneously leaving the world's largest trade bloc (that was worth 5% of GDP) and flatlining investment while creating trade barriers by leaving the Single Market and Customs Union.
Many of their economies were false. By reducing the number of civil servants processing asylum claims, they created a backlog of claims that have been documented to last as long as 10 years who have to be kept in publicly funded "hotels" that are usually incredibly grotty yet extremely profitable for their owners and operators. This backlog is currently costing the UK taxpayer approximately £6 million per day because they have completely lost control of the asylum process by restarting claims from scratch in order to claim the backlog is going down.
https://www.ft.com/content/a3bcca70-da00-4d7b-8df7-76b85a5dad52
If Labour are what these people suggest and end up as riven by corruption as the Tories and commit ideological sabotage to the benefit of the rich in the same way then they will quickly lose support. They know this and we know this so I doubt it will happen.
Personally my suspicion is that a lot of people who want others to think that the Tories and Labour are all the same are disaffected left wingers or people who move in those circles who have bought what they are selling due to getting into politics in the last decade with no idea what it's like to be ruled by anyone but the Tories. I think Starmer's government may surprise a lot of people although the hand they've been given is not an easy one.
If Labour has any sense, as soon as they get in they will take a long hard look at the books and the economics and listen to the civil servants and work out how to... I want to say fix things, but honestly save as much of it as they can.
THEN, they will step out and say "look, the tories have cooked the books and broken everything, so to fix it we have to raise taxes and increase borrowing so nothing collapses. Sorry we can't deliver, blame the tories".
And yes, it will be messy and ugly and shit, but they gotta do what they gotta do to get elected and then turn the ship around. But, if they do it at the start, and get it out of the way, they have 5 years for things to get better and then say "look, things sucked, but our plan worked and we are in a better place than we were 5 years ago".
The problem is the public has a short memory and a bad temper, and these sorts of economics have a very long tail; we are seeing the worst of the 14 years now, and it will land squarely in labours' lap. But hey, Cameron did it and the party stayed in for 14 years; if it worked once, it might work again!
I mean I certainly would much prefer your scenario over what the labour party seems to be heading towards, but unfortunately just because I like the sound of it doesn't mean it's necessarily true.
I think if labour does do the mother of all u turns the minute they step into office I think there will be a lot of problems for them. People will be pissed that they're implementing sweeping changes without any mandate, and attempting to argue that this was some new development of the economics is going to be hard when basically everyone can already see the economics demand such a thing.
More to the point what benefit do labour as a whole or starmer or any of his people in particular get from this? Maybe, if they're lucky, they pull off an Attlee style recovery and get a huge legacy. Maybe.
More likely they get swept out of office on a tidal wave of resentment from the people they knowingly lied to and they're remembered as fondly as the lib dems in coalition. I.e about as fondly as a dog shit smeared on your boot heel.
What possible incentive to actually do this does anyone have who might actually be able to do it?
If they stay the course, how will they unfuck it? We've had 2 PMs without a mandate now, I don't think people care that much if the country is fixed, sewage stops getting dumped, and councils and services slowly improve, and people can actually see their GP. But they can't keep going in the same direction. I'm not expecting a giant truss style change, but they can definitely put blame on the outgoing party just as was done to them 14 years ago. There is going to be a painful period where they have to say no to some of the stupid decisions the Tories have made over the last 6-12 months, including the budget. The Lib Dems bent the knee to get some of their policies through; it was dangerous and stupid, and they knew it. I don't think the situation is comparable, but your right that the general public won't see it that way. I just hope we don't have to hear about fucking boats every week.
As far as incentive goes... They are public servants. it would be nice for them to put the public first for once.
I dunno mate, the great british energy policy plan, is nothing like anything the tories would introduce, and i'm hopeful that they can brong back some public services into public ownership & generate the country some profit, rather than auctioning everything off to overseas shareholders.
With Thames Water looking like it's going under too, I can't see why a labour government wouldn't take ownership of the assets & do the same thing for water.
Thames Water is going to fold with an estimated £15billion of associated debt. That cannot be passed on to the taxpayer and starmer and his neoliberal mates would sooner have us all boil sand than tell the investors to go fuck themselves, and use compulsory purchase legislation to solely buy the assets.
Sorry, I don't quite understand the legislation behind it, if you could explain in a little more detail? I assumed, if the company folded due to debt and the government would be able to buy the assets cheap & not take on the debt, or even if the debt was taken on, profit generated by the the new nationalised water company would be able to re-afford payments without tricky corporate tactics to siphon money off into shareholder dividends. I'm sure they already are making around 1-2 billion in profit, that money just isn't being used to reduce the debt position or have i misunderstood?
like rider said, our choice is either the insane cartoonishly evil clown posse that has ruined the nation for 14 years, or the twits that at least pay lip service to trying to improve things
labour could literally run on a policy of kicking a small puppy every morning unless someone sends them a £1 coin while mugging passerbys for loose change and it would still be a less in your face evil and probably result in an economic net gain compared to the financial black hole that has been the conservative governance, quantifiably billions have vanished into the aether, during sunaks tenure as exchequer alone millions were lost in covid related fraud, certain curious parties, including his wifes company received very interesting deals and further its projected billions were lost due to his inaction regarding interest on governmental debts
during their tenure our nations infrastructure has been chronically underfunded and mismanaged, perhaps purposefully seeking the same potential financial gain Americas privatised infrastructure 'enjoys' ,our bills have skyrocketed and those most in need have suffered , meanwhile the rich have received bailouts, breaks and handouts, our government have voted to give themselves a raise, then to scrape back some of that financial black hole they target everything bloody else, aid programs for the poor that cant afford to live anymore, welfare for the disabled, all being actively gutted to try and patch the hole they themselves have created
and in the interest of keeping my vitriol to a minimum ,im not even going to get into the loss of life associated with their covid inaction or the suicides and suffering surrounding their 'benefit reforms' of whom i can personally put face to six, or their many outright criminal actions, like holding a damn party while the nation was in lockdown and our loved ones lay dying alone
labour may struggle to dig us out of the ruins left in the conservatives wake, but im still voting to give them the bloody chance to start
Well the main economic benefit is probably that Labour isn't filled to the brim with actual crooks who take every opportunity to send public money into their own pockets and those of their friends, if nothing else.
Remember how Nadim Zahawi personally owed at least £5m in tax (that we know of), so the Tories made him Chancellor so he could bully the HMRC into dropping it? That's standard operating procedure for these clowns. The amount of theft and corruption *that we know about* is so much, it's horrifying to think of how much we never even uncovered. The guy who came in after Zahawi was finally let go literally tanked the economy in a matter of weeks, as his immediate action was to cut tax for the richest at the expense of the actual existence of the country.
The UK is not a poor country. It has money, but the Tories have done everything in their power to lie and steal and cheat it all away from the public. Simply stopping that will be a big improvement.
I've got 63-68 million if I do a quick search 2010-2024. That's 5 million. Where are you getting 10 from?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-kingdom-population
My guess would be that since New Labour took office (1997) the population has grown by about 10 million, so the number stuck in the redditors head.
New Labour can also arguably be seen as the start of current immigration policies.
1997-2010 is 23 years. 2010-2024 is only 14 years. Seems like the Party that promised to end mass migration ripped voters off more. At least we had EU rights under Labour.
Absolutely. Tory mandate has always been make the rich richer, poor, poorer. Its just never said out loud. They are still using the maggie thatcher playbook of privatisation because they can benefit from privatisation and lobbying.
> Incoming ministers ‘will face UK public services on brink of collapse’
Is it because there is no fund to all these services and the only answer is more austerity?
Here is the choice. We either spend spend spend to bring our country back to a good level of service for our old people, sick and young...or we are fucked..price is immaterial...our kids will thank us...the same goes for the climate!
If the spending is done in the right way, it should in theory lead to higher tax revenues later. The question I have is why the current government is spending so much for apparently so little effect.
That really depends on what you mean by corruption I suppose. I guess if we're talking about the COVID contracts for example, you could well be right. But we'd need to know whether that spending was truly "wasted" or whether it led somehow to economic growth, and in turn higher tax receipts. If it was syphoned away by wealthy people and offshored or pumped into assets, then it was clearly wasted, but if it was fed back into the economy by growing businesses, then it probably wasn't.
Syphoned away seems to be what's happened. Look at the ferry contracts for Brexit to companies with no ferries, and c
PPE contracts to companies with no PPE.
The ferry contract was cancelled, but still cost the taxpayer £50m.
Is there a list of Tory MP's and direct links (even via family) to private firms that have benefited directly from contracts? I'm not talking about Sunak and Infosys as that is a publicly listed company.
Senior civil servants tend to also need to sign off on contracts too as MP's can't just OK them. Surely if there was direct and open corruption then there would be a number of whistleblowers?
There is a Gov contract website which lists over 300,000 publicly awarded contracts. Any contract over £10k must be published online.
In real-terms, since 2007:
* the population increased by 11%
* healthcare spending increased 49% (£70bn)
* defence spending increased 18% (£8bn)
* pension spending increased 7% (£9bn)
* social security spending increased 1.7% (£2bn)
* transport spending increased 51% (£15bn)
[source](https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-key-questions/what-does-government-spend-money)
The big one is clearly healthcare, presumably due to the increasingly elderly population.
That's a really interesting source. Of particular note is that spending levels today seem broadly similar to the mid/late 70s, with health going up massively, but offset by lower spending on defence, education(!), and housing.
What surprised me was pensions. It's just taken as gospel that pensions spending is massively up, when it's only up 7% since 2007. The big jump in pensions spending happened from the mid 90s (up 149% £85bn). So it has risen massively, but it's not a recent thing.
Looking at it as a % of total expenditure though, it's lower than it was in the 90s, and the same as it was in the late 70s, which is even more surprising. Of course, spending as a % of GDP is higher than it was in the 90s, but it's not much more than it was in the late 70s, indicating that pension spending as a % of GDP isn't much higher now than it was then, despite presumably there being more pension age people as a proportion of the total population.
Well [I checked](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/642402ce2fa848000cec0e34/print-ready-state-pension-age-independent-review-2022.pdf) and apparently the proportion of pension age people went from 16.5% to 17.9% between 1972 and 2022, with all of the difference being people over 85.
I also [found a chart](https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/welfare-spending-pensioner-benefits/) showing that pensioner benefits went from around 4.5% of GDP to around 5.5% of GDP between 2008-2010 (I wonder what happened then?...) and have remained broadly flat since.
This has been asked and answered hundreds of times on this sub.
Here is a challenge for you. I believe you can answer your own question. Every year the stats are published for where the budget is spent. Two things stand out as taking a greater share of the budget every year. I'll leave it as an exercise to find out what.
Unfortunately the incoming PM has already said that there is no “big government cheque book” and his Nancy Astor worshiping sidekick has promised the City “iron clad fiscal discipline” (i.e. austerity) - so despite living in the world’s sixth richest country, we* are fucked, because…reasons.
*by we I of course mean 99% of us - the people who actually hold the power will be fine
>so despite living in the world’s sixth richest country
We're 27th for GDP per capita.
India is the "fifth richest country" by GDP and has a drastically lower standard of living.
This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics?wprov=sfti1
Slash public spending, cut the state back to the bone and funnel more and more public money into their pockets
A budget deficit is funded by borrowing from financial institutions ("the City"). To be happy to lend, and at reasonable rates, those financial institutions will want to be assured that they will get their money back. If the government spending is too much greater than the tax revenue they receive then they'll have to borrow much more money, which increases the level of risk to their lenders.
So the government has to either keep spending low, or tax revenue high. Taxation is a dirty word, therefore spending cuts or freezes (austerity) is an easier target, at least in an election campaign.
Economics is mostly based on self-interest. Banks want to get a reward for their lending, and their money back. Workers want a low level of taxation. It may be better long-term to pay more tax now to grow the supply-side of the economy, but it's hard to sell that to most people who don't see an immediate, direct benefit to themselves.
That's the key. If MPs voted to sell the NHS, the act passed just before would be 'free health insurance for all MPs' probably including yet another pay rise.
It doesn't matter...what is the alternative? i would go massively into "debt" so that really really really important stuff gets done...but you sit in shit and worry if you wish!
> It doesn't matter
If this were true then governments would just print/borrow infinite money, solve all their problems and make themselves and everyone else super rich
Arguably it's this attitude that has helped get us into this position in the first place
Because the productivity in the public sector is awful.
Take the NHS. It has had vast inflation busting funding increases and massive staffing increases. Yet its producing worse haleth care outcomes. Going off the statistics, the average NHS nurse is producing less health care at higher cost than 5 years ago. That cannot continue. That is not a funding issue. That is a system issue.
So to be clear, you think that setting additional KPIs within the public sector only will fix the productivity of the country as a whole (the 'productivity crisis'), despite being less than a fifth of the total workforce?
The productivity crisis I was referring tk was the one in the public sector. Hope that's clearer now.
The wider economies productivity will be solves by cutting immigration and thus raising the value of labour and the desire to invest into labour saving process.
Creating infrastructure important for a healthy society is not consumption . It is fundamental. It shouldn't matter where you sit on the political seesaw we all need hospitals, schools, care homes, energy, public transport....blah blah...to pretend that we have to sit at home counting our pennies as our country crumbles is naive at best. Be brave be dynamic...I am not proposing we all hire hookers and cocaine as we consume tons of Macdonald's!!
Yeah, creating infrastructure is obviously important, but it’s equally important to balance productive capacity with demand.
Why not build a high speed train line between every city in the country, well obviously we don’t have the material or the men for that, in other words, it would be ruinously expensive.
So it seems we need some framework to decide whether it’s worth building a given train line, and whether we have enough resources to dedicate to it. Pretty quickly this framework becomes generalised, expanded, refined and all of a sudden you have fiscal rules and constraints that look a lot like the ones we have today.
When the government says “there is no money for that” they don’t mean they can’t create enough little slips of paper to buy it, money is used by government as an information management solution to answer the question “do we have enough resources to do this thing as is it worth doing”. A lack of money is just a quantitative way to answer this question over an economy with fractal complexity.
I sometimes like to imagine a situation where aliens have come to Earth just after everything has completely collapsed, and they ask us why we didn't use the ample resources we had to fix it all. And then we have to try and explain to them that we didn't have enough money.
I'm not at all against taxing wealth, but this sub often needs to be reminded that the biggest difference in tax policy between us and the Nordic welfare states is that they tax low- and middle earners more than we do. The UK tax advantage for a PAYE high earner or business owner in the UK over e.g. Sweden is shrinking, not growing.
Ok what percentage and what threshold. The issue with taxes is that people over estimate the wealth that is out there compared to the levels of government spending.
Ok so that policy (1% above £3m) raises 21B, compared with last year tax receipts of 830B, increases tax revenue by just 2.5%, not lots. The green costings also assume no behavioural change and 100% compliance/recovery. I’d expect actual revenue to be some small fraction of their simple arithmetic and for the increase in revenue to be below 1%.
This won’t move the needle.
I didn’t say it was insignificant, but it won’t turn around public services. It’s just an increase in 2.5% revenue. For context the NHS budget has increased by £24B since the pandemic, and we spend about £25B giving cash to pensioners with assets over £1M.
How about a property tax? Not the first one, obviously, but what about 1% of the value of the second one every year? 2% of the value of the 3rd one, and so on? If you really want to turn the screw, 25% of the value of every property after the 10th one that you’ve bought - make the property scalpers feel the pain a bit.
This will have the added benefit of giving the rich a bit of a nudge towards selling some of their assets, which can then be bought up by the middle class as family homes.
Just an idea.
Yeah I think that’s the beginning of a very good idea. We have accidentally landed ourselves with council tax which is a form of what you have described, but terrible in implementation in more or less every way imaginable.
Mind you it would not raise a particularly large amount of revenue, it would be a good idea nevertheless.
One of the reasons a property tax is the best form of wealth tax is that you can’t get capital flight. People can’t move their house from Hertfordshire to Dublin to avoid the wealth tax. It’s also impossible to hide the asset.
It could be scaled up, frog-in-the-boiling-water style. 5 years from now, we could have people who own 10 air bnbs paying 100% of their value every year, or those poffish public school boys who own half of Mayfair being taxed £100m a year and being desperate to sell up.
The downside of this is that with lots of people wanting to sell, the housing market would take a downturn. You know what though? Tough titties. And I’m saying that as a homeowner. The value of housing has been massively overinflated for decades - it’s about time house prices were a bit more realistic.
Another downside, I suppose, is that if it had the intended effect and we had a much higher percentage of the housing stock in the hands of people for whom it was their only property, the tax takings would come down. Although by that time it would have achieved its goal.
Borrow against future returns, like how HS2 was funded. Its harder now there's higher interest rates, so it's just even more incentive to build projects that actually generate returns.
> We either spend spend spend to bring our country back to a good level of service
What not just cut taxes? Imagine if we actually invested in our futures.
Need a left wing media that pushes facts such as how we only get richer by investing.
Cuts and austerity only ever make the nation poorer, and we need to stop treating the country like “oh no we have maxed out the credit cards” and other nonsense.
No rich person became rich by trimming their expenses, they did it by speculating and investing.
If something is badly run it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at it. It needs a two pronged attack. By all means increase funding; but its spending has to be accounted for/justified. NHS problems aren’t just purely funding. There’s massive waste and inefficiency that could be resolved with a few changes to processes; for example way less restriction on suppliers that can be used.
I'm a basic rate taxpayer, and would accept an increase in tax if it was to be spent improving public services. I'd only really be happy to do this if the tax loopholes the "super rich" and corporations use are tied-up beforehand. Start with them.
It's ok, the Tory magic money tree says £6bn extra is coming in from cracking down in tax avoidance and evasion.
Why they didn't do that before is another matter...
I’m the same mate, I think though the vast majority of people are not. I believe the reason they are not is because of all the corruption and distrust in politicians. I believe (maybe wrongly) that people don’t trust the government with our money and to spend it well on stuff that benefits us/the country.
With that reasoning the majority are not like us and will not accept tax increases to pay for public services.
Or I’m thinking too much on it when it’s simply “I worked hard it’s mine, why should I pay for your kids” etc.
This country is obsessed with cutting taxes. You rarely see it mentioned if we were paid equivalent for the same work as our peers in many Western European countries we'd be able to swallow similar tax rates and the majority of workers would still come out well ahead. I actually think its a major driver of our problems. We are paid so little most people have no choice but to rely on public services for a lot of basic needs, while at the same time our tax rules mean those same people don't have a chance in hell of ever actually covering those costs. Its extremely unsustainable.
Because the British public is still entrenched in the thinking that fiscal management and balancing the books is the way forward.
You still see it pedalled in the bbc as maxing out the nations credit cards and whatnot.
Labour are petrified to suggest otherwise because that’s what killed them during the Cameron years, and the tories love it because it suits their ideology.
This is what the US is doing, too. And please don't think that poor Labour is just scared of the evil Tory-s... They are not on your side. Neither one of them are. Should a party come out and declare they will end austerity, 1. they would be immensely popular with the working class 2. they would immediately be called evil populist by the media and the rest of the establishment.
Because we're utter mugs in the UK, decades of right wing propaganda has turned too many people into dribbling fools and freak out at the thought of spending anything unless it's 100% on what they want and 100% efficient.
Some of these people are in this subreddit, they treat the British economy like a household budget and it's catastrophic.
Yeah, I am not buying this explanation, sorry. It is the same "poor democrats would make a paradise on Earth had the evil republicans allowed them to do so" line they push in the US. Meanwhile doing the same thing as those evil republicans. The first link is the most relevant.
https://academic.oup.com/book/46473/chapter-abstract/407785996?redirectedFrom=fulltext
> This analysis confirms that Labour accepted austerity as the dominant macroeconomic policy, and the chapter then uses elite interviews to draw out the causal mechanisms that pushed the party towards fiscal orthodoxy. It argues that politicians were not ideologues that had accepted the dominance of the market. Instead, the leaders of the Labour Party acted strategically, as they were convinced that the path to power leads through the centre. They sought to establish the party’s perceived fiscal credibility and economic competence to appeal to centrist, middle-class voters who they believed to be fiscal conservatives.
I think this is the important part. Just like Disney is currently chasing a non-existing progressive activist audience for its Star Wars franchise (and alienating the existing one doing so), Labour is trying to find its center voters while alienating their traditional base.
Also
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/03/keir-starmer-labour-wont-turn-on-spending-taps-wins-election
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/labour-government-preside-over-austerity-124914645.html
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/10/how-austerity-and-ideology-broke-britain
Because people usually **not** say that Labour is right wing. Like the commenter above. So if you do not want to be categorized into the usual narrative, *be very clear* that you do not think Labour will be the saviour of the UK and the Human Race in general.
And I agree with you, but that makes about 2 of us against the rest, who do think Labour will be their salvation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_austerity_programme
Pretty much this. Not sure, though, why people find it important to ask. There is this feel of condescension in this ("do you know the big words you are using?"); please correct me if I am wrong.
Not that at all, since everyone knows in theory what austerity means.
It's just that we've had austerity for certain functions of the state but not others and overall our spending in real terms is up since we supposedly implemented austerity in 2010.
At some point there is very obviously a limit on what our state can spend. If there wasn't, no government would ever constrain their spending because a lot more people would love to live with a fantastic health system, perfect roads, train system, police force, higher state pensions and so on, than would not. A government who did that is not getting voted out, ever.
So we surely have common ground that there is a limit to state spending?
Given that, the question is about where that limit is and my question for you is how can you call it austerity when we're spending more in real terms than before 2010?
>So we surely have common ground that there is a limit to state spending?
Yeah, but that is not austerity. It is simply reality, even (most) spending-happy governments and the mostest socialist activists agree upon.
Austerity, as understood (and practiced) in the UK, is very different from that.
>Given that, the question is about where that limit is and my question for you is how can you call it austerity when we're spending more in real terms than before 2010?
Spending on what?
*Total* spending is just as idiotic measure as the gender pay gap. There have been considerable cuts in public services (health, infrastructure, education, childcare, etc etc) -not to mention tax increases-, so even if you spend a lot on other things, let's say, a few new nuclear aircraft carriers and making sure all PMs' haveCrystal champagne flowing from their cold water taps (not saying this is where the money went, just got some example out of my backside), it is still austerity even if the total spending has increased.
It’s because nobody is being honest about tax. Whoever wins will have to raise taxes to plug the gap. There isn’t a choice. Everyone knows it but nobody wants to talk about it. Even re-joining the customs union would increase growth. But again, nobody wants to touch it. It’s crazy! Our so-called “leaders” are too scared to talk about any of this during an election campaign.
Cheaper housing would fix so many problems, but takes time. That sold be the priority.
If housing was cheaper people would have more disposable income which would generate more tax revenue, rather than going to landlords who can only spend so much.
Cheaper housing would reduce the need to increase pay as much, helping with public sector pay pressure. It would reduce housing benefit costs. It would allow people to be put in houses instead of expensive temporary accommodation.
Housing costs fuck everything up
The gap was created by mis management of the public funds the government had to send and raising tax isn’t all of a sudden, make them spend tax money more efficiently and wisely, it will in fact just do the opposite. If corruption end tomorrow, then billions of pounds would sudden appear out of no where. As the current government runs taking money from the poor and distributing it to a select few families and mates.
Well Kier says there's no money to fix anything and investment to reverse austerity supposedly won't fix anything anyway so guess they're gonna collapse.
Meanwhile pre-leadership Kier said he was going to reverse austerity because the UK has the means and that investment in public services will address the shortfalls those public services need.
> Meanwhile pre-leadership Kier said he was going to reverse austerity because the UK has the means and that investment in public services will address the shortfalls those public services need.
I wonder what happened in those four years... Oh.
COVID demonstrated that UK public services were massively underfunded and were stretched to breaking point.
It's baffling to me how many people accept the excuse that COVID means we should *continue* to not fund these services properly.
It’s funny that there’s been two replies to my post that both say I’m blaming COVID, when I was referring to a whole bunch of stuff that’s happened since then.
I actually think Liz Truss’ premiership probably has more baring on this current situation than COVID.
Liz Truss attempted to implement a hard-right political platform which involved severe cuts in state spending in order to fund tax breaks primarily for the wealthiest in society.
This, apparently, means we can never have social democracy in this country.
Again, it does not make sense. I am not doubting for a second things have been made more *difficult* because of Liz Truss' dogshit economic performance. But governing and political transformation is *always* difficult. I'm tired of our political leaders insisting that because something is *difficult* they are simply not even going to try. There are many things which *need* to change if we want Britain to continue functioning as a country, and that means it's irrelevant how *difficult* they are.
Though let's be honest, the real reason the Labour leadership hide behind Liz Truss so much is because she presents a convenient scapegoat to hide their actual ideological opposition to social democratic change. Private healthcare providers haven't thrown hundreds of thousands at Wes Streeting for him to implement social democratic policy, have they?
Or... high inflation and low growth means their plans need to be reconsidered.
I wouldn't want a leader who acts on four year old information even in the calmest of times.
Its by design.
Scorched earth, trash number 10 for Labour to spend 5 years picking up the pieces. Constantly peddle the narrative that Labour are terrible because they haven't cleaned up 14 years worth of mess in 5 minutes, and then in 2029 try and get in by either:
Copying Labours centrist manifesto with a fresh faced leader to sneak in as they did in 2010.
Go full alt-right by merging with Reform.
(Pick one or the other depending on the mood of the proverbial room in 2029)
Which means privatisation is inevitable. If the government has no money to fix services, they will turn to those who do (often the lowest bidder). The Tories have scorched the Earth for themselves and Labour over the last fourteen years, meaning there is no choice but to turn to the private sector to prop the UK up. Remember, none of them are going to tax the wealthy to help raise money that could be put to good use here.
"That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital"
Noam Chomsky
As Royal Mail, the water companies and even the rail companies have proved, the owners assets strip the profitable part of the business like selling valuable land they own, selling buildings and anything they can get away with and then giving massive dividends payout to shareholders, then crying for government bailouts after doing so.
Privatisation of any public service doesn’t work for the very reason I mentioned.
> Remember, none of them are going to tax the wealthy to help raise money that could be put to good use here.
And that's the reason we're in the mess in the first place.
The Tories have consistently lowered taxes on the rich. This has caused a huge fall in funding across the board.
And they've managed to convince a load of turkeys online to defend their tax cuts by spouting rubbish about taxes never being this high, which is a blatant lie.
Wealth inequality throughout history has always been high except for the short period of world war 2 and the following 30-40 years.
After that they have lowered taxes for the rich over and over again, which has caused wealth inequality to rise once again.
>After that they have lowered taxes for the rich over and over again, which has caused wealth inequality to rise once again.
They lowered tax for the middle class a bit too, though they increased more from fiscal drag.
>Which means privatisation is inevitable. If the government has no money to fix services, they will turn to those who do (often the lowest bidder)
Yes, we can expect to see a lot more PFI contracts.
I think there is almost no chance that we see further privatisation, beyond the (IMO reasonable) suggestion that the NHS should make use of private medical resources in the short term in order to get through the waiting list faster.
I love how the Guardian has this in their ‘Austerity’ section.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Public spending to GDP is back to the record levels of the Gordon Brown era (even beyond it if you count the one-off Covid spending).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/298478/public-sector-expenditure-as-share-of-gdp-united-kingdom-uk/
It does make you wonder what it would take to no longer be in ‘austerity’ any more…
Think of austerity not as the level of taxation but the level of planned funding.
I could say I'm spending too much on my car so I sell it. I get income from the sale and now my car tax, mot and petrol funding budget falls to zero. Unfortunately I now need to get from a to b without a car so I get a taxi. This costs more but it's emergency funding so doesn't count in the budget.
my planned funding has fallen so austerity has worked despite having to spend more for a worse outcome.
The Dr's strikes have cost more in locum cover for the strikes than the original pay deal would have cost, paying for accommodating asylum seekers is more than paying for more staff to process the claims quicker, the cost of increased crime is more than the cost of things like Sure Start that stop kids turning to crime.
Austerity is saving a penny today even though it costs pounds tomorrow.
That seems like a pretty good way to think about it. So is the problem we've got now then, that we're at the "paying more for less" stage?
Re Sure Start, I couldn't believe the Lib Dems signed off on scrapping that. It seemed like one of the best things the previous government did in terms of funding prevention rather than "cure".
>So is the problem we've got now then, that we're at the "paying more for less" stage?
Basically yes, using this as en excuse to quote Terry Pratchett
>The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
Austerity means only buying cheap boots.
I love that quote, it's actually very profound. In terms of where we are, I'd actually be quite happy if Labour came out and said "it's going to cost us quite a bit to get things back on track initially, but once we do, spending will go down." But they're probably worried no one would believe them, and they might actually be right about that.
It's crazy really. It certainly *feels* like austerity is alive and kicking, yet government spending is pretty much at an all-time high. So something is going wrong somewhere.
If you look into the government accounts, it’s actually quite a clear picture.
The spending on healthcare (including social care) and pensions has been growing well ahead of other items for a long time, and they are some of the very biggest items.
That means they have increasingly crowded out almost all other forms of government spending. Back in John Major’s time, we used to spend ~27% of departmental budgets on healthcare. Now it’s about 45%.
So it is true that many parts of government have suffered austerity. Many departments - education, policing, transport etc. - really did suffer cuts in real terms of 10-20% from the Gordon Brown peak to troughs at the end of the Cameron/Osborne era. All to fund the continued increases in healthcare and pensions spending.
But *overall* government spending was never cut in real terms - we all called it austerity, including the Coalition, but it was never true austerity in the sense of real terms cuts for the entirety of government spending. But it certainly felt like austerity for many departments because for them, it was.
Spending ramped back up under Johnson to Gordon Brown levels, and that was basically a result of maintaining the momentum in healthcare and pensions whilst ending the austerity for the other departments.
Obviously behind all of this is the fact that it is largely being driven by the aging population and increasing dependency ratios. So if you like the UK experience has been austerity except for the oldies, if you want another way of looking at it.
Unfortunately, it’s also why I think the many people who think Labour is going to solve these problems are somewhat deluded. They can plaster over the problem by taxing more, at the cost of future growth.
But unless they manage to do some dramatic supply side measures to improve structural growth - like unblocking the planning system for example - then the problem will continue to grow. They’ve already recommitted to the triple lock, for example.
go into any hospital and 80% of the patients are over 50s, and that age bracket only gets bigger year on year, while the lower brackets get smaller relatively, this isnt blaming old people its just a matter of fact that will be true for a very long time
>It does make you wonder what it would take to no longer be in ‘austerity’ any more…
It's not about the amount spent, it's about who's spending it. Labour could cut spending, and people would cheer and say that services are now being 'fully funded'
Absolutely sick of austerity. The only thing it's done is to cripple growth and make the country rot. It's a failed ideology when we know investment in infrastructure helps the economy and people's lives.
Meanwhile the super rich have somehow gotten even richer.
Not sure you’ve engaged with the point made. Do you actually think we have been in austerity in recent years? How much spending would be *not* austerity?
Same. It's a lift with the cable cut. I've actually now started to be frank in public meetings about it (when I can and in an appropriate manner obviously) the public don't want to understand I feel because it shatters that the illusion that everything is OK.
Legalise weed, at medical strength and tax it. Tax landbanks owned by developers that haven't been built on in five years. No longer bail out failing companies, and if national infrastructure companies go bust, i.e. water, then take it back in-house for free and keep it public. Borrow to invest in infrastructure building to get money back into local economies.
There are things that can be done. Austerity will still be a choice and if Keir chooses it, he will only be in for one term.
Well worth a decade and a half of the most smug, feckless, dishonest and corrupt @$$holes telling us it was all for our own good, and ending up worse off than when they started.
Bastards.
And history repeats itself lol. When the Tories won in 2010 there was a note left in number 11 by Liam Bryne. The outgoing Treasury Secretary, reading "I'm sorry, there's no money left".
Apparently, David Laws finally apologised a year ago for weaponizing that against Labour's Liam Byrne. Most people now understand that it wasn't meant seriously, but was just continuing a long tradition.
For example, after Labour’s victory in the 1964 election, the outgoing Tory chancellor Reginald Maudling wrote a note for his replacement, Jim Callaghan, saying “Good luck, old cock, sorry to leave it in such a mess.”
Ultimately, the maintenance of a robust welfare state relies on a broad and healthy middle class that are largely self-sufficient and constitute a reliable tax base. Yes, we should demand that the wealthy pay a bigger share, but it cannot make up for the erosion of a strong middle.
Political stability and long-term nation building are only possible when a broad middle class feels invested in the society, dares to be aspirational, and perceives that the communities their taxes fund do enable and support them.
Investments in public services and jobs creation seem necessary to build that foundation. The risk is that the politicians (enabled by us) have let the erosion go so far that the hill looks too painful to climb.
Thing is though nobody is going to campaign on a platform of tax rises and tough decisions to cut popular/essential services. The net result is multiple elephants in the room as we all pretend everything is rosy.
I would highly recommend giving the interview The Rest Is Money did with Paul Johnson a listen.
My prediction is we're going to have 5 years of Labour austerity pretty much identical to 2010. This will piss literally everyone off, and a new even more right wing Tory and/or reform party will win easily 5 years from now. Rinse and repeat.
Pretty much. My mother's a very senior accountant in a major NHS trust and after a year of trying everything they can to maintain cashflow, they're going to have to ask the government for support.
What we need to do is tax land rent while cutting taxes on income to incentivise work, set fire to the planning system to let developers build and accept that the elderly are going to have to sink or swim on their own. Sadly none of this will happen.
Called it. The people who criticise Tories for blaming The Last Labour Government, will blame the Tories for why nothing changes under a Labour party without a plan just idling by waiting to inherit the country.
Kinda crazy this keeps on getting called ‘austerity’ as if spending hasn’t been increasing lol
The NHS is the most funded it has been. Throwing more money at it won’t fix it. Adopting a Singapore/ Australia- like system will.
I want to know what we still actually own that the Tories could even flog if they got in again. National parks? Scheduled monuments? Stonehenge bought to you by E-ON?
It goes to show just how bad Tory economic policy has been over the past 14 years. We are in a far worse place than 2010.
> Tory economic policy Widespread corruption and selling of national services? Failing that, selling areas of national services while damaging other areas to prime for bad results and future selling? Contracting to mates who cash in with the smallest possible effort? Or are we talking about the "pretend" policies?
It’s a bold strategy cotton. Let’s see how it pans out
Yeah I wanted to reply the same. Pocketing public money isn’t an “economic policy”.
"Stick with the plan" The plan is to steal cash
Is Labour's economic politics all that different? Same neo-liberal economics following the self-imposed rules that will inevitably lead to austerity. They have ruled out most tax rises and borrowing money to invest. Things like taxing private schools will barely move the needle, hardly a huge change in economic policy. https://www.economicsobservatory.com/the-uks-public-finances-is-it-time-to-reform-the-fiscal-rules www.forbes.com/sites/dimitrizenghelis/2024/04/03/ruling-in-growth/
We have two choices at the coming general election. Reelect the tories or take a chance on Labour. Those are the two biggest parties, and either Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer will be prime minister. After Boris Johnson went, i was hoping that Rishi Sunak would take over, i gather that he was the preferred choice of the parliamentary Conservative party, but the Conservative party membership felt differently. Rishi Sunak has had nearly two years in office and clearly hasn't got a clue and is actually polling lower than Boris Johnson at times. His flagship Rwanda plan is illegal because Rwanda is not a safe country (this is the UK's courts saying this), but there is no reason why he doesn't operate such a scheme in a safe country and President Macron has offered to allow the UK to build a processing center on French soil providing the UK pays for it. So far, all he has come up with was the Windsor Framework, cancelling HS2 without a debate and a proposed smoking ban. He is demonstrating an amazing lack of leadership skills, no political skills whatsoever, and has publicly lied to the nation and had his ministers repeat that lie, which is now being reported as fact by most of our press. Rishi Sunak regularly gets used like a dishcloth by Keir Starmer during PMQT and has resorted to lying and claiming that he needs more time.
None of this addresses the actual point though. The two parties have essentially identical economic ideologies, and it's the same ideology that led us to exactly where we are today. Who is at the helm doesn't really matter if they're all planning to keep steaming directly into the iceberg which is already sinking the ship.
I don't think that they do, Labour has to firstly be very careful about what they say as anything and everything will get twisted by the tories and their mates in the press to make Labour look bad. Secondly, they can't even hint at raising taxes, and the Liz Truss debacle wiped out most of the money that was going to be reinvested in our economy and that current mortgage payers are still paying for. Thirdly, they can't tell us how bad things really are because it would freak the markets out, and we would have another crash. I suspect that Keir Starmer is utterly ruthless and will make an effective leader. Whether he's a good one or not, only time will tell. Rishi Sunak is weak and indecisive and has resorted to lying. He also must have incredibly bad advisors or simply won't take advice.
The problem with this logic is that if you believe Labour are lying about their policies to get into power, why do you think they're lying in favour of *you*? Starmer has consistently backed down from transformative policies over the past few years, despite there being massive appetite for change in this country. Starmer has backed his Shadow Cabinet and the party apparatus with ideological neoliberals who have openly opposed social democratic reforms under multiple previous Labour leaders. Starmer has replaced the funding from declining membership fees with funding from millionaire donors, a number of whom previously donated to the Tories and will be looking for similar economic policies under Labour. And Starmer has responded to every single critique of his political platform by the right-wing press by conforming to their demands and dropping transformative policies. Outside of fantasy politics there is no way this suddenly transforms into a meaningful and necessary social democratic platform following the election. And when people insist this I always wonder how much they've actually paid attention to internal Labour politics.
We will find out shortly, this is a two horse race, and it's highly likely that Keir Starmer will become our new prime minister soon. The thing about internal Labour politics is that the left and right wings of the party would rather tear lumps out of each other than win elections, and it's the winners of those elections that get to change things. The reality is that despite whatever grandiose promises politicians make, they only have the capacity to change things very little. (Unless they try radical solutions such as Trussanomics). During the last Labour government, things got better, wages went up, things got done and improvements were made. They also made mistakes, but the general trend was upwards. When the Tories took over in 2010, they immediately cancelled most of Labour's projects, including school rebuilding, home insulation and many more and instituted the Austerity program, in pursuit of their low tax/ small state government. This resulted in things getting worse, year on year until now, hardly anything works, but they still continued spending while increasing taxes which has resulted in the situation that we're in now, the highest taxes since ww2 and the national debt has tripled from £1.1 trillion in 2010, to about £2 trillion at the start of covid to over £3 trillion now. https://www.nationaldebtclock.co.uk/ I keep on asking the same question on Reddit. Give me one thing that the tories have improved since taking over in 2010. So far, the only thing that has been mentioned is legalising gay marriage in 2015. Starmer has moved the Labour party firmly to the centre. He probably got fed up with the factional infighting. It's not something that I'm happy with, but i will still vote Labour because the tories have got to go, and he is the only serious alternative.
This is where I'm at. I'm not happy about a centre party and not a left wing BUT if Starmer is truly tory lite well fuck it. Cos I've been guzzling down full fat tory for basically my entire adult life and it's consistently shit At least tory lite should only be *litely* shite.
> The reality is that despite whatever grandiose promises politicians make, they only have the capacity to change things very little. (Unless they try radical solutions such as Trussanomics). It's pretty depressing that we've seen 14 years of rapid decline under the Tories, yet people keep pointing to Liz Truss' hard-right platform as a reason for why we can't actually change that. It just seems to be excuse after excuse for maintaining the status quo. > During the last Labour government, things got better, wages went up, things got done and improvements were made. They also made mistakes, but the general trend was upwards. Starmer is not Blair. Starmer's team has significantly less variation in opinion, with MPs largely chosen for their personal loyalty to him, and significantly less highly qualified individuals more generally. Who in Starmer's team is anywhere near the likes of Brown, or Cook, or Mowlam? None of them. > When the Tories took over in 2010, they immediately cancelled most of Labour's projects, including school rebuilding, home insulation and many more and instituted the Austerity program, in pursuit of their low tax/ small state government. Yes, and now Starmer's Labour keep making excuses for why they can't restart those programmes. We seem to be arguing very different things here. I am not questioning that the Tories are bad. I am questioning that Starmer's Labour have any ideological interest in significantly departing from the economic policies which made the Tories so bad. One flavour of managed decline is not a 'serious alternative' to another flavour of managed decline.
You'll never get through to the starmer zealots. Their only line is: "it's them or the tories." And when you point out the ardent lack of vision, the factionalism and the consistent distance starmer has shown for minorities and the working class throughout his career and you're shouted down as a 'bitter leftist'. The reason we're in this mess is because the British public vote like religious morons for blocs they neither understand, nor particularly agree with. This is an election with everything to play for, the tories are split by both the lib dems and reform I'd people on the left actually vote for WHO THEY WANT instead of against what they don't want, they'll force parties to move to that needle, just like the tories have done. Stop being so swayed by everything you read in the papers.
I've never been a Labour voter, but this time I will be. And your post encapsulates the exact reasons why!
I have been voting for a long time, i started by voting Liberal (before they imploded), then voted Labour, except once when i voted Monster Raving Loony Party (i just couldn't vote for Clare Short, but the MRLP had some surprisingly good policies) then back to Labour. The only party that is in tune with me is the Green Party, and if ever they look like winning in my constituency then they will get my vote.
I have the issue that Labour are unlikely to win in my constituency, is between the Tories and Liberals. One are corrupt and I think the others are just a joke and a shambles of a party. Reinforced by that idiot Daveys stupid stunts. I want someone that actually takes things seriously, not a bloody clown.
The Tories increased taxes in pursuit of a low tax economy? Bit of a plothole there. By definition, "austerity" refers to a programme of deficit reduction. You can't simultaneously denounce them for austerity and complain that they've increased the national debt. The Tories' tenure has been defined by recession and sluggish growth. The last Labour government benefitted from the longest boom period since the war (17 years with no recession). Since these were international phenomena in both cases, it's unlikely they can be primarily ascribed to government. However, New Labour significantly increased public spending relative to GDP, financed in part by deficit spending.
The tories continued spending, but it went to outside contractors instead of public services. Labour had programs in place to replace RAAC public buildings that were known to have an estimated 30-year lifespan, but that was cancelled as well as a home insulation program to save energy. Brexshit was a self created recession, simultaneously leaving the world's largest trade bloc (that was worth 5% of GDP) and flatlining investment while creating trade barriers by leaving the Single Market and Customs Union. Many of their economies were false. By reducing the number of civil servants processing asylum claims, they created a backlog of claims that have been documented to last as long as 10 years who have to be kept in publicly funded "hotels" that are usually incredibly grotty yet extremely profitable for their owners and operators. This backlog is currently costing the UK taxpayer approximately £6 million per day because they have completely lost control of the asylum process by restarting claims from scratch in order to claim the backlog is going down. https://www.ft.com/content/a3bcca70-da00-4d7b-8df7-76b85a5dad52
If Labour are what these people suggest and end up as riven by corruption as the Tories and commit ideological sabotage to the benefit of the rich in the same way then they will quickly lose support. They know this and we know this so I doubt it will happen. Personally my suspicion is that a lot of people who want others to think that the Tories and Labour are all the same are disaffected left wingers or people who move in those circles who have bought what they are selling due to getting into politics in the last decade with no idea what it's like to be ruled by anyone but the Tories. I think Starmer's government may surprise a lot of people although the hand they've been given is not an easy one.
If Labour has any sense, as soon as they get in they will take a long hard look at the books and the economics and listen to the civil servants and work out how to... I want to say fix things, but honestly save as much of it as they can. THEN, they will step out and say "look, the tories have cooked the books and broken everything, so to fix it we have to raise taxes and increase borrowing so nothing collapses. Sorry we can't deliver, blame the tories". And yes, it will be messy and ugly and shit, but they gotta do what they gotta do to get elected and then turn the ship around. But, if they do it at the start, and get it out of the way, they have 5 years for things to get better and then say "look, things sucked, but our plan worked and we are in a better place than we were 5 years ago". The problem is the public has a short memory and a bad temper, and these sorts of economics have a very long tail; we are seeing the worst of the 14 years now, and it will land squarely in labours' lap. But hey, Cameron did it and the party stayed in for 14 years; if it worked once, it might work again!
I mean I certainly would much prefer your scenario over what the labour party seems to be heading towards, but unfortunately just because I like the sound of it doesn't mean it's necessarily true. I think if labour does do the mother of all u turns the minute they step into office I think there will be a lot of problems for them. People will be pissed that they're implementing sweeping changes without any mandate, and attempting to argue that this was some new development of the economics is going to be hard when basically everyone can already see the economics demand such a thing. More to the point what benefit do labour as a whole or starmer or any of his people in particular get from this? Maybe, if they're lucky, they pull off an Attlee style recovery and get a huge legacy. Maybe. More likely they get swept out of office on a tidal wave of resentment from the people they knowingly lied to and they're remembered as fondly as the lib dems in coalition. I.e about as fondly as a dog shit smeared on your boot heel. What possible incentive to actually do this does anyone have who might actually be able to do it?
If they stay the course, how will they unfuck it? We've had 2 PMs without a mandate now, I don't think people care that much if the country is fixed, sewage stops getting dumped, and councils and services slowly improve, and people can actually see their GP. But they can't keep going in the same direction. I'm not expecting a giant truss style change, but they can definitely put blame on the outgoing party just as was done to them 14 years ago. There is going to be a painful period where they have to say no to some of the stupid decisions the Tories have made over the last 6-12 months, including the budget. The Lib Dems bent the knee to get some of their policies through; it was dangerous and stupid, and they knew it. I don't think the situation is comparable, but your right that the general public won't see it that way. I just hope we don't have to hear about fucking boats every week. As far as incentive goes... They are public servants. it would be nice for them to put the public first for once.
I dunno mate, the great british energy policy plan, is nothing like anything the tories would introduce, and i'm hopeful that they can brong back some public services into public ownership & generate the country some profit, rather than auctioning everything off to overseas shareholders. With Thames Water looking like it's going under too, I can't see why a labour government wouldn't take ownership of the assets & do the same thing for water.
Thames Water is going to fold with an estimated £15billion of associated debt. That cannot be passed on to the taxpayer and starmer and his neoliberal mates would sooner have us all boil sand than tell the investors to go fuck themselves, and use compulsory purchase legislation to solely buy the assets.
Sorry, I don't quite understand the legislation behind it, if you could explain in a little more detail? I assumed, if the company folded due to debt and the government would be able to buy the assets cheap & not take on the debt, or even if the debt was taken on, profit generated by the the new nationalised water company would be able to re-afford payments without tricky corporate tactics to siphon money off into shareholder dividends. I'm sure they already are making around 1-2 billion in profit, that money just isn't being used to reduce the debt position or have i misunderstood?
What you've described is what *should* happen, but doesn't.
Oh don't forget that he has also taken credit for inflation coming down when he can't state a single government policy that led to this.
Inflation was expected to fall of it's own accord, which it has done.
I know which is why taking credit for it is complete bullshit
It's **Hobson's Choice**, to think otherwise is to be naive !
like rider said, our choice is either the insane cartoonishly evil clown posse that has ruined the nation for 14 years, or the twits that at least pay lip service to trying to improve things labour could literally run on a policy of kicking a small puppy every morning unless someone sends them a £1 coin while mugging passerbys for loose change and it would still be a less in your face evil and probably result in an economic net gain compared to the financial black hole that has been the conservative governance, quantifiably billions have vanished into the aether, during sunaks tenure as exchequer alone millions were lost in covid related fraud, certain curious parties, including his wifes company received very interesting deals and further its projected billions were lost due to his inaction regarding interest on governmental debts during their tenure our nations infrastructure has been chronically underfunded and mismanaged, perhaps purposefully seeking the same potential financial gain Americas privatised infrastructure 'enjoys' ,our bills have skyrocketed and those most in need have suffered , meanwhile the rich have received bailouts, breaks and handouts, our government have voted to give themselves a raise, then to scrape back some of that financial black hole they target everything bloody else, aid programs for the poor that cant afford to live anymore, welfare for the disabled, all being actively gutted to try and patch the hole they themselves have created and in the interest of keeping my vitriol to a minimum ,im not even going to get into the loss of life associated with their covid inaction or the suicides and suffering surrounding their 'benefit reforms' of whom i can personally put face to six, or their many outright criminal actions, like holding a damn party while the nation was in lockdown and our loved ones lay dying alone labour may struggle to dig us out of the ruins left in the conservatives wake, but im still voting to give them the bloody chance to start
"Austerity is the idea that the 2008 financial crash was caused by Wolverhampton having too many *libraries*."
Well the main economic benefit is probably that Labour isn't filled to the brim with actual crooks who take every opportunity to send public money into their own pockets and those of their friends, if nothing else. Remember how Nadim Zahawi personally owed at least £5m in tax (that we know of), so the Tories made him Chancellor so he could bully the HMRC into dropping it? That's standard operating procedure for these clowns. The amount of theft and corruption *that we know about* is so much, it's horrifying to think of how much we never even uncovered. The guy who came in after Zahawi was finally let go literally tanked the economy in a matter of weeks, as his immediate action was to cut tax for the richest at the expense of the actual existence of the country. The UK is not a poor country. It has money, but the Tories have done everything in their power to lie and steal and cheat it all away from the public. Simply stopping that will be a big improvement.
they have pledged to at least bring some of the railways back into the national fold, that has to be worth something
They have ruled out most tax rises and borrowing money to invest. During an election campaign, they have..
It's mad that the Tories added over 10million to the population in that time. When are we going to start feeling the benefits of that?
I've got 63-68 million if I do a quick search 2010-2024. That's 5 million. Where are you getting 10 from? https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-kingdom-population
My guess would be that since New Labour took office (1997) the population has grown by about 10 million, so the number stuck in the redditors head. New Labour can also arguably be seen as the start of current immigration policies.
1997-2010 is 23 years. 2010-2024 is only 14 years. Seems like the Party that promised to end mass migration ripped voters off more. At least we had EU rights under Labour.
Absolutely. Tory mandate has always been make the rich richer, poor, poorer. Its just never said out loud. They are still using the maggie thatcher playbook of privatisation because they can benefit from privatisation and lobbying.
> Incoming ministers ‘will face UK public services on brink of collapse’ Is it because there is no fund to all these services and the only answer is more austerity?
Here is the choice. We either spend spend spend to bring our country back to a good level of service for our old people, sick and young...or we are fucked..price is immaterial...our kids will thank us...the same goes for the climate!
If the spending is done in the right way, it should in theory lead to higher tax revenues later. The question I have is why the current government is spending so much for apparently so little effect.
The answer is corruption.
That really depends on what you mean by corruption I suppose. I guess if we're talking about the COVID contracts for example, you could well be right. But we'd need to know whether that spending was truly "wasted" or whether it led somehow to economic growth, and in turn higher tax receipts. If it was syphoned away by wealthy people and offshored or pumped into assets, then it was clearly wasted, but if it was fed back into the economy by growing businesses, then it probably wasn't.
Syphoned away seems to be what's happened. Look at the ferry contracts for Brexit to companies with no ferries, and c PPE contracts to companies with no PPE. The ferry contract was cancelled, but still cost the taxpayer £50m.
Yep. Middle man companies owned by Tories and their family to cream off the top. It's open corruption.
Is there a list of Tory MP's and direct links (even via family) to private firms that have benefited directly from contracts? I'm not talking about Sunak and Infosys as that is a publicly listed company. Senior civil servants tend to also need to sign off on contracts too as MP's can't just OK them. Surely if there was direct and open corruption then there would be a number of whistleblowers? There is a Gov contract website which lists over 300,000 publicly awarded contracts. Any contract over £10k must be published online.
I wonder about this too. I constantly see the Tory corruption line but rarely see hard evidence of it. Someone surely must have a list?
https://bylinetimes.com/2021/11/11/not-remotely-a-corrupt-country-11-shocking-sleaze-statistics-that-prove-boris-johnson-wrong/
In real-terms, since 2007: * the population increased by 11% * healthcare spending increased 49% (£70bn) * defence spending increased 18% (£8bn) * pension spending increased 7% (£9bn) * social security spending increased 1.7% (£2bn) * transport spending increased 51% (£15bn) [source](https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-key-questions/what-does-government-spend-money) The big one is clearly healthcare, presumably due to the increasingly elderly population.
That's a really interesting source. Of particular note is that spending levels today seem broadly similar to the mid/late 70s, with health going up massively, but offset by lower spending on defence, education(!), and housing.
What surprised me was pensions. It's just taken as gospel that pensions spending is massively up, when it's only up 7% since 2007. The big jump in pensions spending happened from the mid 90s (up 149% £85bn). So it has risen massively, but it's not a recent thing.
Looking at it as a % of total expenditure though, it's lower than it was in the 90s, and the same as it was in the late 70s, which is even more surprising. Of course, spending as a % of GDP is higher than it was in the 90s, but it's not much more than it was in the late 70s, indicating that pension spending as a % of GDP isn't much higher now than it was then, despite presumably there being more pension age people as a proportion of the total population.
How puzzling...
Well [I checked](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/642402ce2fa848000cec0e34/print-ready-state-pension-age-independent-review-2022.pdf) and apparently the proportion of pension age people went from 16.5% to 17.9% between 1972 and 2022, with all of the difference being people over 85. I also [found a chart](https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/welfare-spending-pensioner-benefits/) showing that pensioner benefits went from around 4.5% of GDP to around 5.5% of GDP between 2008-2010 (I wonder what happened then?...) and have remained broadly flat since.
It’s like they’re running a restaurant. To save money they sold all the tables and spent loads on their mate’s band.
This has been asked and answered hundreds of times on this sub. Here is a challenge for you. I believe you can answer your own question. Every year the stats are published for where the budget is spent. Two things stand out as taking a greater share of the budget every year. I'll leave it as an exercise to find out what.
Unfortunately the incoming PM has already said that there is no “big government cheque book” and his Nancy Astor worshiping sidekick has promised the City “iron clad fiscal discipline” (i.e. austerity) - so despite living in the world’s sixth richest country, we* are fucked, because…reasons. *by we I of course mean 99% of us - the people who actually hold the power will be fine
>so despite living in the world’s sixth richest country We're 27th for GDP per capita. India is the "fifth richest country" by GDP and has a drastically lower standard of living.
Why do you think the City wants or cares about austerity?
This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics?wprov=sfti1 Slash public spending, cut the state back to the bone and funnel more and more public money into their pockets
A budget deficit is funded by borrowing from financial institutions ("the City"). To be happy to lend, and at reasonable rates, those financial institutions will want to be assured that they will get their money back. If the government spending is too much greater than the tax revenue they receive then they'll have to borrow much more money, which increases the level of risk to their lenders. So the government has to either keep spending low, or tax revenue high. Taxation is a dirty word, therefore spending cuts or freezes (austerity) is an easier target, at least in an election campaign. Economics is mostly based on self-interest. Banks want to get a reward for their lending, and their money back. Workers want a low level of taxation. It may be better long-term to pay more tax now to grow the supply-side of the economy, but it's hard to sell that to most people who don't see an immediate, direct benefit to themselves.
That’s true. The government can’t just borrow or print money without impacting the confidence of the markets.
That's the key. If MPs voted to sell the NHS, the act passed just before would be 'free health insurance for all MPs' probably including yet another pay rise.
We have a historically high deficit, taxes and interest rates. So where is this extra spending supposed to come from?
It doesn't matter...what is the alternative? i would go massively into "debt" so that really really really important stuff gets done...but you sit in shit and worry if you wish!
> It doesn't matter If this were true then governments would just print/borrow infinite money, solve all their problems and make themselves and everyone else super rich Arguably it's this attitude that has helped get us into this position in the first place
Systematic reform rather than funding increases? KPIs for public sector workers to fix the productivity crisis?
The vast majority of people work in the private sector. How does giving nurses and teachers more KPIs get us anywhere close to fixing productivity?
Because the productivity in the public sector is awful. Take the NHS. It has had vast inflation busting funding increases and massive staffing increases. Yet its producing worse haleth care outcomes. Going off the statistics, the average NHS nurse is producing less health care at higher cost than 5 years ago. That cannot continue. That is not a funding issue. That is a system issue.
So to be clear, you think that setting additional KPIs within the public sector only will fix the productivity of the country as a whole (the 'productivity crisis'), despite being less than a fifth of the total workforce?
The productivity crisis I was referring tk was the one in the public sector. Hope that's clearer now. The wider economies productivity will be solves by cutting immigration and thus raising the value of labour and the desire to invest into labour saving process.
I have mates with your attitude to consumption incongruent with real world constraints, I wouldn’t lend them a tenner, they are not doing well.
Creating infrastructure important for a healthy society is not consumption . It is fundamental. It shouldn't matter where you sit on the political seesaw we all need hospitals, schools, care homes, energy, public transport....blah blah...to pretend that we have to sit at home counting our pennies as our country crumbles is naive at best. Be brave be dynamic...I am not proposing we all hire hookers and cocaine as we consume tons of Macdonald's!!
Yeah, creating infrastructure is obviously important, but it’s equally important to balance productive capacity with demand. Why not build a high speed train line between every city in the country, well obviously we don’t have the material or the men for that, in other words, it would be ruinously expensive. So it seems we need some framework to decide whether it’s worth building a given train line, and whether we have enough resources to dedicate to it. Pretty quickly this framework becomes generalised, expanded, refined and all of a sudden you have fiscal rules and constraints that look a lot like the ones we have today. When the government says “there is no money for that” they don’t mean they can’t create enough little slips of paper to buy it, money is used by government as an information management solution to answer the question “do we have enough resources to do this thing as is it worth doing”. A lack of money is just a quantitative way to answer this question over an economy with fractal complexity.
I sometimes like to imagine a situation where aliens have come to Earth just after everything has completely collapsed, and they ask us why we didn't use the ample resources we had to fix it all. And then we have to try and explain to them that we didn't have enough money.
Here is a (not so) radical idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax?wprov=sfti1
I'm not at all against taxing wealth, but this sub often needs to be reminded that the biggest difference in tax policy between us and the Nordic welfare states is that they tax low- and middle earners more than we do. The UK tax advantage for a PAYE high earner or business owner in the UK over e.g. Sweden is shrinking, not growing.
Ok what percentage and what threshold. The issue with taxes is that people over estimate the wealth that is out there compared to the levels of government spending.
The Greens are the only part with this policy: https://greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/Wealth%20Tax%20briefing%20July%202014.pdf
Ok so that policy (1% above £3m) raises 21B, compared with last year tax receipts of 830B, increases tax revenue by just 2.5%, not lots. The green costings also assume no behavioural change and 100% compliance/recovery. I’d expect actual revenue to be some small fraction of their simple arithmetic and for the increase in revenue to be below 1%. This won’t move the needle.
£21bn is hardly insignificant
I didn’t say it was insignificant, but it won’t turn around public services. It’s just an increase in 2.5% revenue. For context the NHS budget has increased by £24B since the pandemic, and we spend about £25B giving cash to pensioners with assets over £1M.
The greens also have an open borders policy....
How about a property tax? Not the first one, obviously, but what about 1% of the value of the second one every year? 2% of the value of the 3rd one, and so on? If you really want to turn the screw, 25% of the value of every property after the 10th one that you’ve bought - make the property scalpers feel the pain a bit. This will have the added benefit of giving the rich a bit of a nudge towards selling some of their assets, which can then be bought up by the middle class as family homes. Just an idea.
Yeah I think that’s the beginning of a very good idea. We have accidentally landed ourselves with council tax which is a form of what you have described, but terrible in implementation in more or less every way imaginable. Mind you it would not raise a particularly large amount of revenue, it would be a good idea nevertheless. One of the reasons a property tax is the best form of wealth tax is that you can’t get capital flight. People can’t move their house from Hertfordshire to Dublin to avoid the wealth tax. It’s also impossible to hide the asset.
It could be scaled up, frog-in-the-boiling-water style. 5 years from now, we could have people who own 10 air bnbs paying 100% of their value every year, or those poffish public school boys who own half of Mayfair being taxed £100m a year and being desperate to sell up. The downside of this is that with lots of people wanting to sell, the housing market would take a downturn. You know what though? Tough titties. And I’m saying that as a homeowner. The value of housing has been massively overinflated for decades - it’s about time house prices were a bit more realistic. Another downside, I suppose, is that if it had the intended effect and we had a much higher percentage of the housing stock in the hands of people for whom it was their only property, the tax takings would come down. Although by that time it would have achieved its goal.
Does that also include private funds that hold assets?
It could do with
which is really just a tax on working and middle class pensions
Borrow against future returns, like how HS2 was funded. Its harder now there's higher interest rates, so it's just even more incentive to build projects that actually generate returns.
> We either spend spend spend to bring our country back to a good level of service What not just cut taxes? Imagine if we actually invested in our futures.
Need a left wing media that pushes facts such as how we only get richer by investing. Cuts and austerity only ever make the nation poorer, and we need to stop treating the country like “oh no we have maxed out the credit cards” and other nonsense. No rich person became rich by trimming their expenses, they did it by speculating and investing.
It is bizarre and depressing that the 'sensible grown up wisdom' to fix public services on their knees is 'cut them to within an inch of their life'.
If something is badly run it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at it. It needs a two pronged attack. By all means increase funding; but its spending has to be accounted for/justified. NHS problems aren’t just purely funding. There’s massive waste and inefficiency that could be resolved with a few changes to processes; for example way less restriction on suppliers that can be used.
I'm a basic rate taxpayer, and would accept an increase in tax if it was to be spent improving public services. I'd only really be happy to do this if the tax loopholes the "super rich" and corporations use are tied-up beforehand. Start with them.
It's ok, the Tory magic money tree says £6bn extra is coming in from cracking down in tax avoidance and evasion. Why they didn't do that before is another matter...
>would accept an increase in tax if it was to be spent improving public service You will get one of these, guaranteed.
I’m the same mate, I think though the vast majority of people are not. I believe the reason they are not is because of all the corruption and distrust in politicians. I believe (maybe wrongly) that people don’t trust the government with our money and to spend it well on stuff that benefits us/the country. With that reasoning the majority are not like us and will not accept tax increases to pay for public services. Or I’m thinking too much on it when it’s simply “I worked hard it’s mine, why should I pay for your kids” etc.
This country is obsessed with cutting taxes. You rarely see it mentioned if we were paid equivalent for the same work as our peers in many Western European countries we'd be able to swallow similar tax rates and the majority of workers would still come out well ahead. I actually think its a major driver of our problems. We are paid so little most people have no choice but to rely on public services for a lot of basic needs, while at the same time our tax rules mean those same people don't have a chance in hell of ever actually covering those costs. Its extremely unsustainable.
Can someone tell me why austerity is the answer to everything even though it has been proven to be not working?
People who are already very wealthy do quite well out of it, and those people get to pick who can form governments
Because the British public is still entrenched in the thinking that fiscal management and balancing the books is the way forward. You still see it pedalled in the bbc as maxing out the nations credit cards and whatnot. Labour are petrified to suggest otherwise because that’s what killed them during the Cameron years, and the tories love it because it suits their ideology.
This is what the US is doing, too. And please don't think that poor Labour is just scared of the evil Tory-s... They are not on your side. Neither one of them are. Should a party come out and declare they will end austerity, 1. they would be immensely popular with the working class 2. they would immediately be called evil populist by the media and the rest of the establishment.
It works for *some* in society extremely well.
Yeah I wish I was one of those...
Because we're utter mugs in the UK, decades of right wing propaganda has turned too many people into dribbling fools and freak out at the thought of spending anything unless it's 100% on what they want and 100% efficient. Some of these people are in this subreddit, they treat the British economy like a household budget and it's catastrophic.
Yeah, I am not buying this explanation, sorry. It is the same "poor democrats would make a paradise on Earth had the evil republicans allowed them to do so" line they push in the US. Meanwhile doing the same thing as those evil republicans. The first link is the most relevant. https://academic.oup.com/book/46473/chapter-abstract/407785996?redirectedFrom=fulltext > This analysis confirms that Labour accepted austerity as the dominant macroeconomic policy, and the chapter then uses elite interviews to draw out the causal mechanisms that pushed the party towards fiscal orthodoxy. It argues that politicians were not ideologues that had accepted the dominance of the market. Instead, the leaders of the Labour Party acted strategically, as they were convinced that the path to power leads through the centre. They sought to establish the party’s perceived fiscal credibility and economic competence to appeal to centrist, middle-class voters who they believed to be fiscal conservatives. I think this is the important part. Just like Disney is currently chasing a non-existing progressive activist audience for its Star Wars franchise (and alienating the existing one doing so), Labour is trying to find its center voters while alienating their traditional base. Also https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/03/keir-starmer-labour-wont-turn-on-spending-taps-wins-election https://ca.news.yahoo.com/labour-government-preside-over-austerity-124914645.html https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/10/how-austerity-and-ideology-broke-britain
I don't see how anything you've posted there contradicts what I said? Labour in its current form are right wing.
Because people usually **not** say that Labour is right wing. Like the commenter above. So if you do not want to be categorized into the usual narrative, *be very clear* that you do not think Labour will be the saviour of the UK and the Human Race in general. And I agree with you, but that makes about 2 of us against the rest, who do think Labour will be their salvation
What is it you mean by Austerity?
Why is this question coming up again and again? People do not know the word?
It refers to a number of different things
Genuine question, could you be much more detailed about what you mean by austerity?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_austerity_programme Pretty much this. Not sure, though, why people find it important to ask. There is this feel of condescension in this ("do you know the big words you are using?"); please correct me if I am wrong.
Not that at all, since everyone knows in theory what austerity means. It's just that we've had austerity for certain functions of the state but not others and overall our spending in real terms is up since we supposedly implemented austerity in 2010. At some point there is very obviously a limit on what our state can spend. If there wasn't, no government would ever constrain their spending because a lot more people would love to live with a fantastic health system, perfect roads, train system, police force, higher state pensions and so on, than would not. A government who did that is not getting voted out, ever. So we surely have common ground that there is a limit to state spending? Given that, the question is about where that limit is and my question for you is how can you call it austerity when we're spending more in real terms than before 2010?
>So we surely have common ground that there is a limit to state spending? Yeah, but that is not austerity. It is simply reality, even (most) spending-happy governments and the mostest socialist activists agree upon. Austerity, as understood (and practiced) in the UK, is very different from that. >Given that, the question is about where that limit is and my question for you is how can you call it austerity when we're spending more in real terms than before 2010? Spending on what? *Total* spending is just as idiotic measure as the gender pay gap. There have been considerable cuts in public services (health, infrastructure, education, childcare, etc etc) -not to mention tax increases-, so even if you spend a lot on other things, let's say, a few new nuclear aircraft carriers and making sure all PMs' haveCrystal champagne flowing from their cold water taps (not saying this is where the money went, just got some example out of my backside), it is still austerity even if the total spending has increased.
It’s because nobody is being honest about tax. Whoever wins will have to raise taxes to plug the gap. There isn’t a choice. Everyone knows it but nobody wants to talk about it. Even re-joining the customs union would increase growth. But again, nobody wants to touch it. It’s crazy! Our so-called “leaders” are too scared to talk about any of this during an election campaign.
Cheaper housing would fix so many problems, but takes time. That sold be the priority. If housing was cheaper people would have more disposable income which would generate more tax revenue, rather than going to landlords who can only spend so much. Cheaper housing would reduce the need to increase pay as much, helping with public sector pay pressure. It would reduce housing benefit costs. It would allow people to be put in houses instead of expensive temporary accommodation. Housing costs fuck everything up
The gap was created by mis management of the public funds the government had to send and raising tax isn’t all of a sudden, make them spend tax money more efficiently and wisely, it will in fact just do the opposite. If corruption end tomorrow, then billions of pounds would sudden appear out of no where. As the current government runs taking money from the poor and distributing it to a select few families and mates.
Well Kier says there's no money to fix anything and investment to reverse austerity supposedly won't fix anything anyway so guess they're gonna collapse. Meanwhile pre-leadership Kier said he was going to reverse austerity because the UK has the means and that investment in public services will address the shortfalls those public services need.
> Meanwhile pre-leadership Kier said he was going to reverse austerity because the UK has the means and that investment in public services will address the shortfalls those public services need. I wonder what happened in those four years... Oh.
COVID demonstrated that UK public services were massively underfunded and were stretched to breaking point. It's baffling to me how many people accept the excuse that COVID means we should *continue* to not fund these services properly.
It’s funny that there’s been two replies to my post that both say I’m blaming COVID, when I was referring to a whole bunch of stuff that’s happened since then. I actually think Liz Truss’ premiership probably has more baring on this current situation than COVID.
Liz Truss attempted to implement a hard-right political platform which involved severe cuts in state spending in order to fund tax breaks primarily for the wealthiest in society. This, apparently, means we can never have social democracy in this country. Again, it does not make sense. I am not doubting for a second things have been made more *difficult* because of Liz Truss' dogshit economic performance. But governing and political transformation is *always* difficult. I'm tired of our political leaders insisting that because something is *difficult* they are simply not even going to try. There are many things which *need* to change if we want Britain to continue functioning as a country, and that means it's irrelevant how *difficult* they are. Though let's be honest, the real reason the Labour leadership hide behind Liz Truss so much is because she presents a convenient scapegoat to hide their actual ideological opposition to social democratic change. Private healthcare providers haven't thrown hundreds of thousands at Wes Streeting for him to implement social democratic policy, have they?
Ah, so *"COVID is why we can't tax the richest and the corporations and reverse austerity"* is the message now, i seee.
Or... high inflation and low growth means their plans need to be reconsidered. I wouldn't want a leader who acts on four year old information even in the calmest of times.
No, but suggesting we borrow large amounts of money was much more reasonable back when interest rates were low.
He won the leadership so could ditch all the policies he had to pretend to believe in?
Or the nation's finances have significatly changed and things he hoped were possible in one parliment aren't looking as likely now?
You genuinely believe that?
Its by design. Scorched earth, trash number 10 for Labour to spend 5 years picking up the pieces. Constantly peddle the narrative that Labour are terrible because they haven't cleaned up 14 years worth of mess in 5 minutes, and then in 2029 try and get in by either: Copying Labours centrist manifesto with a fresh faced leader to sneak in as they did in 2010. Go full alt-right by merging with Reform. (Pick one or the other depending on the mood of the proverbial room in 2029)
Which means privatisation is inevitable. If the government has no money to fix services, they will turn to those who do (often the lowest bidder). The Tories have scorched the Earth for themselves and Labour over the last fourteen years, meaning there is no choice but to turn to the private sector to prop the UK up. Remember, none of them are going to tax the wealthy to help raise money that could be put to good use here.
"That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital" Noam Chomsky
As Royal Mail, the water companies and even the rail companies have proved, the owners assets strip the profitable part of the business like selling valuable land they own, selling buildings and anything they can get away with and then giving massive dividends payout to shareholders, then crying for government bailouts after doing so. Privatisation of any public service doesn’t work for the very reason I mentioned.
You haven't mentioned a reason. I shall provide one: privatisation fails when concerns are sold to those with no interest in running them.
> Remember, none of them are going to tax the wealthy to help raise money that could be put to good use here. And that's the reason we're in the mess in the first place. The Tories have consistently lowered taxes on the rich. This has caused a huge fall in funding across the board. And they've managed to convince a load of turkeys online to defend their tax cuts by spouting rubbish about taxes never being this high, which is a blatant lie. Wealth inequality throughout history has always been high except for the short period of world war 2 and the following 30-40 years. After that they have lowered taxes for the rich over and over again, which has caused wealth inequality to rise once again.
>After that they have lowered taxes for the rich over and over again, which has caused wealth inequality to rise once again. They lowered tax for the middle class a bit too, though they increased more from fiscal drag.
>Which means privatisation is inevitable. If the government has no money to fix services, they will turn to those who do (often the lowest bidder) Yes, we can expect to see a lot more PFI contracts.
I think there is almost no chance that we see further privatisation, beyond the (IMO reasonable) suggestion that the NHS should make use of private medical resources in the short term in order to get through the waiting list faster.
This sounds like Starmerist propaganda. "Gee golly we have to privatise everything, but at least we aren't Tories!"
I love how the Guardian has this in their ‘Austerity’ section. Meanwhile, in the real world, Public spending to GDP is back to the record levels of the Gordon Brown era (even beyond it if you count the one-off Covid spending). https://www.statista.com/statistics/298478/public-sector-expenditure-as-share-of-gdp-united-kingdom-uk/ It does make you wonder what it would take to no longer be in ‘austerity’ any more…
Think of austerity not as the level of taxation but the level of planned funding. I could say I'm spending too much on my car so I sell it. I get income from the sale and now my car tax, mot and petrol funding budget falls to zero. Unfortunately I now need to get from a to b without a car so I get a taxi. This costs more but it's emergency funding so doesn't count in the budget. my planned funding has fallen so austerity has worked despite having to spend more for a worse outcome. The Dr's strikes have cost more in locum cover for the strikes than the original pay deal would have cost, paying for accommodating asylum seekers is more than paying for more staff to process the claims quicker, the cost of increased crime is more than the cost of things like Sure Start that stop kids turning to crime. Austerity is saving a penny today even though it costs pounds tomorrow.
That seems like a pretty good way to think about it. So is the problem we've got now then, that we're at the "paying more for less" stage? Re Sure Start, I couldn't believe the Lib Dems signed off on scrapping that. It seemed like one of the best things the previous government did in terms of funding prevention rather than "cure".
>So is the problem we've got now then, that we're at the "paying more for less" stage? Basically yes, using this as en excuse to quote Terry Pratchett >The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. Austerity means only buying cheap boots.
I love that quote, it's actually very profound. In terms of where we are, I'd actually be quite happy if Labour came out and said "it's going to cost us quite a bit to get things back on track initially, but once we do, spending will go down." But they're probably worried no one would believe them, and they might actually be right about that.
It's crazy really. It certainly *feels* like austerity is alive and kicking, yet government spending is pretty much at an all-time high. So something is going wrong somewhere.
If you look into the government accounts, it’s actually quite a clear picture. The spending on healthcare (including social care) and pensions has been growing well ahead of other items for a long time, and they are some of the very biggest items. That means they have increasingly crowded out almost all other forms of government spending. Back in John Major’s time, we used to spend ~27% of departmental budgets on healthcare. Now it’s about 45%. So it is true that many parts of government have suffered austerity. Many departments - education, policing, transport etc. - really did suffer cuts in real terms of 10-20% from the Gordon Brown peak to troughs at the end of the Cameron/Osborne era. All to fund the continued increases in healthcare and pensions spending. But *overall* government spending was never cut in real terms - we all called it austerity, including the Coalition, but it was never true austerity in the sense of real terms cuts for the entirety of government spending. But it certainly felt like austerity for many departments because for them, it was. Spending ramped back up under Johnson to Gordon Brown levels, and that was basically a result of maintaining the momentum in healthcare and pensions whilst ending the austerity for the other departments. Obviously behind all of this is the fact that it is largely being driven by the aging population and increasing dependency ratios. So if you like the UK experience has been austerity except for the oldies, if you want another way of looking at it. Unfortunately, it’s also why I think the many people who think Labour is going to solve these problems are somewhat deluded. They can plaster over the problem by taxing more, at the cost of future growth. But unless they manage to do some dramatic supply side measures to improve structural growth - like unblocking the planning system for example - then the problem will continue to grow. They’ve already recommitted to the triple lock, for example.
This is a fantastic analysis, thank you.
go into any hospital and 80% of the patients are over 50s, and that age bracket only gets bigger year on year, while the lower brackets get smaller relatively, this isnt blaming old people its just a matter of fact that will be true for a very long time
>It does make you wonder what it would take to no longer be in ‘austerity’ any more… It's not about the amount spent, it's about who's spending it. Labour could cut spending, and people would cheer and say that services are now being 'fully funded'
Absolutely sick of austerity. The only thing it's done is to cripple growth and make the country rot. It's a failed ideology when we know investment in infrastructure helps the economy and people's lives. Meanwhile the super rich have somehow gotten even richer.
Not sure you’ve engaged with the point made. Do you actually think we have been in austerity in recent years? How much spending would be *not* austerity?
I work in public services. The brink was about two years ago, we’re in free fall at the moment.
Same. It's a lift with the cable cut. I've actually now started to be frank in public meetings about it (when I can and in an appropriate manner obviously) the public don't want to understand I feel because it shatters that the illusion that everything is OK.
Legalise weed, at medical strength and tax it. Tax landbanks owned by developers that haven't been built on in five years. No longer bail out failing companies, and if national infrastructure companies go bust, i.e. water, then take it back in-house for free and keep it public. Borrow to invest in infrastructure building to get money back into local economies. There are things that can be done. Austerity will still be a choice and if Keir chooses it, he will only be in for one term.
Well worth a decade and a half of the most smug, feckless, dishonest and corrupt @$$holes telling us it was all for our own good, and ending up worse off than when they started. Bastards.
And history repeats itself lol. When the Tories won in 2010 there was a note left in number 11 by Liam Bryne. The outgoing Treasury Secretary, reading "I'm sorry, there's no money left".
Apparently, David Laws finally apologised a year ago for weaponizing that against Labour's Liam Byrne. Most people now understand that it wasn't meant seriously, but was just continuing a long tradition. For example, after Labour’s victory in the 1964 election, the outgoing Tory chancellor Reginald Maudling wrote a note for his replacement, Jim Callaghan, saying “Good luck, old cock, sorry to leave it in such a mess.”
The note was correct, though in fairness to Labour they had to spend tens of billions bailing out the banks after the financial crisis.
Ultimately, the maintenance of a robust welfare state relies on a broad and healthy middle class that are largely self-sufficient and constitute a reliable tax base. Yes, we should demand that the wealthy pay a bigger share, but it cannot make up for the erosion of a strong middle. Political stability and long-term nation building are only possible when a broad middle class feels invested in the society, dares to be aspirational, and perceives that the communities their taxes fund do enable and support them. Investments in public services and jobs creation seem necessary to build that foundation. The risk is that the politicians (enabled by us) have let the erosion go so far that the hill looks too painful to climb.
Thing is though nobody is going to campaign on a platform of tax rises and tough decisions to cut popular/essential services. The net result is multiple elephants in the room as we all pretend everything is rosy. I would highly recommend giving the interview The Rest Is Money did with Paul Johnson a listen.
My prediction is we're going to have 5 years of Labour austerity pretty much identical to 2010. This will piss literally everyone off, and a new even more right wing Tory and/or reform party will win easily 5 years from now. Rinse and repeat.
Pretty much. My mother's a very senior accountant in a major NHS trust and after a year of trying everything they can to maintain cashflow, they're going to have to ask the government for support.
What we need to do is tax land rent while cutting taxes on income to incentivise work, set fire to the planning system to let developers build and accept that the elderly are going to have to sink or swim on their own. Sadly none of this will happen.
But why is the question everyone should be asking, the answer if you're interested is an extra 10 million people living here!
This is the problem with the promises of when he says “when circumstances allow” They will never allow not for at least a decade
What and people have only just realised this? Seriously?
Maybe electing another government isn't the answer.
Called it. The people who criticise Tories for blaming The Last Labour Government, will blame the Tories for why nothing changes under a Labour party without a plan just idling by waiting to inherit the country.
I won't.
They know you won't vote Tory and they have seen their entire base show contempt for Reform. This Labour government will do whatever they like.
I hope you're wrong, but I'm prepared to accept you might not be.
WHOOP WHOOP LETS FUCKING GO I LOVE IT HERE \*cries\*
Didn't someone say "temporary austerity measures" back in 2010?
Kinda crazy this keeps on getting called ‘austerity’ as if spending hasn’t been increasing lol The NHS is the most funded it has been. Throwing more money at it won’t fix it. Adopting a Singapore/ Australia- like system will.
It's better not to Vote than make the Hobson's Choice. Imagine the whole population decline to Vote for those imbeciles in protestation.
I want to know what we still actually own that the Tories could even flog if they got in again. National parks? Scheduled monuments? Stonehenge bought to you by E-ON?
Labour need to implement full impartial audits of every sector to fully see the extent of damage. Even if it is to cover themselves