Labour Party facing bankruptcy
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As I was in Waterstones yesterday I had a look inside the book by Rachel Reeves, the would-be future Chancellor of the Exchequer, on “The Women who Made Modern Economics”.
So Labour’s shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has been exposed as a common plagiarist.
A comrade tried to buy this book today but was told that it has been withdrawn from circulation. So she has pleaded guilty as charged.
The Labour Party seems to be relying a lot on being able to conjure up “growth” to honour its rash election promises.
Earlier this week, Darren Jones who is the would-be chief secretary to the Treasury was reported as saying:
“If we are successful in growing the economy in the way that we think we will be, then that creates more investment” (Times, 4 January).
This is a strange argument as business investment is what brings about growth. So any growth that might take place would be as a result, not the cause, of business investment. He’s put the cart before the horse and expects it to pull the horse.
But it’s not only creating new business investment that the growth they think they can conjure up will bring about. A speech by their would-be Health Secretary, god-botherer Wes Street, was reported under the headline: “Labour says it would rely on growth to fund pay rises to the NHS” (i paper, 6 January).
On the same page the same paper reported the clueless Labour Leader himself:
“Sir Keith reiterated his comments on Thursday that economic growth was key to creating wealth and improving living standards.”
But if a Labour government under Starmer is not as lucky as the Blair Labour government was in happening to be in office during a period of growth, and there is no growth at the rate Labour think they can bring about?
Back to Darren Jones:
“If we are not [successful in growing the economy], then the fiscal rules come first and are non-negotiable.”
So. fiscal conservatism, otherwise known as austerity.
In any event, no government can control growth — that depends on business investment. This may or may not happen when a Labour government is in office but if it does it won’t be due to anything that government did. It would have happened anyway, even under a Tory government.
Governments don’t and can’t control capitalism. It’s rather the other way round — what they do is to react to what the operation of capitalism, as it passes through its cycles of boom and slump, brings about.
Possible a hint at their political bankruptcy, this blog post on the centenary of first Labour government makes some interesting points about how MacDonald emphasised confidence and stability over radicalism and scientific government: and in so many ways it seems to presage the coming government of Mr Starmer (we should normalise calling him Mr Starmer), and it looks like it could be a re-run, which means it will go the same way.
Here’s what we said at the time about the election and subsequent ejection of the first Labour Government in 1924:
Another of the leaflets handed out yesterday at the anti-Gaza war rally was headed “It’s time to stop Starmer”. According to their website they’ve really got it in for him:
Even stating:
“Is a Starmer government better than a Conservative government? No, it will be worse. It will be the end of hope.”
Labour as the greater evil than the Tories. That’s a variation on the lesser evil theme.
The leaflet is calling for “not voting for Starmer’s Labour or voting for a viable alternative.”
Showing that this is not a Tory dirty tricks site, the leaflet indicates support from among others, George Galloway and former Labour MP (deselected and expelled) Chris Williamson.
To be fair to Steamer, on that leaflet you could swap his name for almost any bougeois politician in the ‘democracies’ and it would still make sense. Politicians are devious and power mad – who knew?
That leaflet could have been about Kinnock, 35 years ago. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
On their website, they bang on about being against Starmer, however, they don’t mention what they’re for.
Rachel Reeves, the would-be next Chancellor of the Exchequer, is in Davos to meet and reassure what the Financial Editor of the Times calls in today’s issue “the pluto-tribe”.
She is reported as saying that “the Conservatives have vacated the space of a pro-business party” and that she was in Switzerland to “show that Labour are now are now the pro-business party, the party of wealth-creation … “
If the so-called Labour Party thinks that capitalist entrepreneurs rather than the labour of the workers creates wealth, then they should change their name to the Business Party and stop trying to fool people in to thinking that they have the interests of the working class at heart.
“The shadow chancellor has told the BBC Labour would not reinstate a bankers’ bonus cap that was scrapped last year by the Conservative government”.
“… we don’t have any intention of bringing that back. And as chancellor of the exchequer, I would want to be a champion of a successful and thriving financial services industry in the UK.”https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68145720.amp
Comment is superfluous.
More from Reeves, at the Labour Party’s pro-Business meeting yesterday. The would-be future Chancellor of the Exchequer told her audience of businessmen and women:
“This Labour Party sees profit not as something to be disdained but as a mark of business succeeding”.
She also pledged not to increase Corporation Tax (a direct tax on profits) for the whole period of the next Labour government (assuming it lasts the full five years).
Labour evidently feels the need to convince Business that under a future Labour government British capitalism will be in a safe pair of hands, but they don’t need to convince us.
Given the brutal realities of capitalism, Steamer and his crew may find themselves reneging on its promises to the capitalist class. Poor things.
Why do Labour make appeals to these people? After all, in terms of number of votes they are little more than a skid-mark on the gusset of the big knickers that is the electorate.(Delicious metaphor).More of what Reeves told business leaders on Thursday:
“Be in no doubt, we will campaign as a pro-business party — and we will govern as a pro-business party” (this weekend’s i paper).
Why are they doing it? They seem to be afraid of what happened to Truss happening to them. Or maybe they are just facing reality — that the profit system which they support can only function as a profit system and so they have to give priority to allowing private enterprises to make profits as the quest for these is what drives the capitalist economic system, the motive for the “growth” they promise.
And here it is from The Man Who Woukd Be Prime Minister himself :
This is getting boring. But there might still be a few people around who imagine that the Labour Party is the party of the working class. The Communist Party of Britain, for instance, whose General Secretary, Robert Griffiths, describes the Labour Party, in a book published this year, as “the mass electoral party of the labour movement” (The Gleam of Socialism, p. 58).
He’ll be voting for the Party of Business then (and urging others to do the same)? We won’t.“We woz blown off course” is usually the excuse that governments invoke when they fail to deliver on their election promises. Starmer and the Labour Party have gone one better. They have invoked this to justify abandoning one of their election promises even before the election when Starmer announced yesterday that the party was abandoning a previous promise to spend £28 billion pounds a year on a grandiose “Green Prosperity Plan” because “circumstances have changed”.
The plan was never going to work anyway because governments can’t control how the capitalist economy works and so it was likely to have been had to be abandoned at some point due to “changed circumstances” — such as capitalists not being willing to take part in it since the profits from it were not high enough or because of a downturn in economic activity which meant that capitalist profits had to be given priority over taxing them to pay for the plan.
“Green Deals” are pie in the sky because they are based on the mistaken assumption that governments can make capitalism serve some useful social purpose. They can’t because what drives capitalism is the quest for profits and that will always prevail in the end. Capitalist enterprises will invest in green projects if that is profitable; otherwise they won’t. And governments can’t tax profits too much to pay for unprofitable projects without risking an economic slowdown or downturn.
But Labour are sticking to one promise, made by Reeves last week:
“we will campaign as a pro-business party — and we will govern as a pro-business party.”
We can’t fault them on that. That’s exactly what they are doing and will do. If you are not a business, take note.
You’d have to have a heart of shit not to laugh:
Labour have disowned their by-election candidate (but their free mailout is still going out tomorrow, too late to cancel).
They’ve disowned another candidate.
Sue Gray is in trouble for unlawful leak investigations.The fish rots from the head down; when will Kier apologise?
They’re briefing and leaking like fiends: they may yet throw the election.
This is too funny for words.
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