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Labour Leader: Keir Starmer VII

gavreid said:
Does he believe this shite himself?


“There’s no magic money tree that we can waggle the day after the election. No, they’ve broken the economy, they’ve done huge damage.”

www.theguardian.com

Starmer says he cannot ‘turn the taps on’ to fix council funding crisis

Labour leader was asked how party would plug £4bn gap at launch of its local election campaign in West Midlands
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

www.newstatesman.com

Why the British state is a magic money tree

Government spending power is limited not by tax revenues or borrowing, but by the productive capacity of the UK economy and political will.
www.newstatesman.com www.newstatesman.com
​

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The strategy that has done so much damage to the economy, is the same strategy that Starmer claims will fix it.

How anyone can keep voting for this shit time and time again is beyond me.
 
laughingboy said:
No.:) I'm arguing that even our imperfect/corrupt democracy delivered universal suffrage, the NHS, the welfare state, the minimum wage. There is every reason to believe that it can be made to work in our interests again.

The idea of revolution is seductive, but it offers more peril than promise IMO.
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You’ve got it the wrong way round. Democracy did not deliver universal suffrage, class struggle delivered (limited) democracy, and all the other gains you cite.

But fair enough, I’ll accept your recommendation that we agree to disagree. I’ve been arguing the toss about this for thirty five years, usually responding to the “ah, but what about Russia, doesn’t that prove socialism cant work?” line. So thank you for the informed and fraternal debate.
 
Labour is very clearly going to use the 14 disastrous years of Tories as a stick to whack us with.

All clever stuff!
 
No MMT. Now that that bit of pre-election messaging is out of the way, we should welcome Labour's LU announcement.
 
Finnegan said:
You’ve got it the wrong way round. Democracy did not deliver universal suffrage, class struggle delivered (limited) democracy, and all the other gains you cite.

But fair enough, I’ll accept your recommendation that we agree to disagree. I’ve been arguing the toss about this for thirty five years, usually responding to the “ah, but what about Russia, doesn’t that prove socialism cant work?” line. So thank you for the informed and fraternal debate.
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I could have expressed it better: democratic protest and pressure were enough for our even our imperfect/corrupt democracy to deliver the goods. But yes, I recognise that you and I are not going to agree.
 
Not directly relevant here, though I believe Claudia Webbe remains suspended from the Labour whip, following this case:

www.bbc.co.uk

Claudia Webbe: CPS apologises over acid threat inaccuracy

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) failed to update a press release about MP Claudia Webbe.
www.bbc.co.uk

An MP has received an apology after the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) failed to properly update a press release after stating she had "made a threat to throw acid".
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Claudia Webbe, independent MP for Leicester East, was convicted of harassing a woman in 2021 and later lost an appeal against the ruling.
The Court of Appeal, however, found she had not made a threat to throw acid, as her trial originally heard.
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What?!

On second thoughts, maybe this should go in the Diane Abbott thread.
 
Kirk said:
Will Hutton article on Reeves. Meaningful (rather than radical) change is on the way.

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...s-has-outlined-a-plan-to-give-britain-liftoff
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Plans to create bigger pension funds capable of spreading risk and thus investing in British enterprise would be turbocharged.

LOL! It's not size and a lack of diversification that's dissuading pension funds from investing in British firms.

Mandating that pension funds MUST buy underperforming UK shares in a desperate attempt to boost market cap. Continuity Hunt indeed.
 
From the James Meadway article....

"Reeves and Starmer’s Labour flips this on its head. Some public services will be subject to extended neoliberalism and privatisation, notably including the NHS under likely health secretary, Wes Streeting."

It would be an abomination if it were Labour that destroyed the NHS that they themselves created.
 
Finnegan said:
novaramedia.com

Labour Will End Neoliberalism. Just Not in a Good Way | Novara Media

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has been compared to Margaret Thatcher. But that's just spin, writes James Meadway.
novaramedia.com novaramedia.com
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The most fundamental characteristic of neoliberalism is on government spending. Neoliberalism was and is a revolutionary ideology that overthrew an ideology that spending is a good thing, and replaced it with an ideology that spending is a bad thing.

Reeve was, and still is, fiirmly in the spending is bad camp.
 
Reeves will make Prudence blush! I expect Austerity part 3 to do further lasting damage in the economy during the whole of the next Parliament.
 
ks.234 said:
The most fundamental characteristic of neoliberalism is on government spending. Neoliberalism was and is a revolutionary ideology that overthrew an ideology that spending is a good thing, and replaced it with an ideology that spending is a bad thing.

Reeve was, and still is, fiirmly in the spending is bad camp.
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You can't take action on climate change without spending money. Private firms may scratch the surface but they will not put up the billions needed for wind farms or solar energy let alone any new nuclear. This is just pie in the sky thinking.

Proof that Labour is going to put dogma before people's lives. Don't vote for them at a time when we urgently need action on climate change.
 
Labour's plan seems to be to create a 'growth fund' that will be invested in "fast-growing" high-risk UK start-ups that, astonishingly, no one else wants to invest in.

Under the plans pension schemes will be forced to to invest 5% of pension contributions into the fund. It can't fail*.

* to lose money

i6JAd90.png


Labour willing to force pension plans to invest in £50bn ‘growth fund’

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves wants to boost capital available to fast-growing companies
www.ft.com www.ft.com
 
les24preludes said:
From the James Meadway article....

"Reeves and Starmer’s Labour flips this on its head. Some public services will be subject to extended neoliberalism and privatisation, notably including the NHS under likely health secretary, Wes Streeting."

It would be an abomination if it were Labour that destroyed the NHS that they themselves created.
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Labour will not flip neoliberalism on it’s head at all, Labour will be only change neoliberalism by increasing it. The ideology of government spending is central to distinguishing neoliberalism from social democracy and a commitment to austerity is entrenching declining government investment in public services, not flipping it.
 
The monstering of Angela Rayner by hypocritical Tory grifters and their far-right press continues apace even as they shamelessly sell yet another gong to yet another multi-£million party donor.

Jo Maugham of Good Law Project is facing up to Tory “Lord” Ashcroft:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1773621341184270612

”If you want to know how power works in the UK contrast the press interest in (1) the £1,500 of capital gains tax Angela Rayner is said to have evaded with (2) the tens of millions Lord Ashcroft denies having evaded.

Lord Ashcroft set up the Bermuda based Punta Gordon trust. A financial statement in the leaked Paradise Papers reported it as holding assets of $450m. But the Paradise papers didn't just reveal the value of the trust.

They also revealed that Appleby, a firm of solicitors that was acting as trustee of the trust, complained vigorously about the fact that Lord Ashcroft dealt with some of the assets in the trust and then invited the trustees to rubber stamp his dealings.

This is a problem because the essence of a trust is that you don't own the assets - they are owned by the *trustees* - and so *you* shouldn't be able to deal with them at all. This is why they attract the tax treatment of trust assets rather than the tax treatment of your assets.

So why were those assets put into the Bermuda - a tax haven - based trust if Lord Ashcroft wanted to deal with them himself? How did he deal with them himself if they were actually owned by the trust? What did he tell HMRC in his tax returns about who owned the assets?

I have seen the Lord Ashcroft Paradise Papers and the arrangements looked to me *consistent with* tax evasion. I am a KC specialising in tax but not offshore personal tax. I shared them with another tax adviser who is a specialist and he reached the same conclusion.

I discussed them neutrally with a third - I no longer hold the papers - and he immediately arrived at the same conclusion. So there is a plausible basis for believing that Lord Ashcroft may have been engaged in tax evasion involving assets worth hundreds of millions.

If our media did its job these papers would be fished out of the @ICIJorg archive by a media org which would invest properly in understanding whether Lord Ashcroft's affairs really do disclose large scale tax evasion. There is a proper basis upon which to ask that question.

As it is, and as is so often true in England the power of the press, including the BBC, is weaponised against working class people, people with no money to hire defamation lawyers, in respect of trivial sums of money and, it seems, if true, technical breaches.

The Ashcroft story involves vast sums and might plausibly reveal a very deliberate attempt to both have the cake of tax 'efficiency' and to eat it to by dealing with the assets as their owner.

The whole thing is hypocritical, ugly, weaponised to keep 'uppity' outsiders in their place, and to protect the rich. It stinks - and it shames all of us who engage in it.
https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham

And let me stake myself to the mast by saying this: if I get a letter from Ashcroft's lawyers I will publish it.”

PS I’ll cross-post this on the Good Law Project thread too as it is significant to both IMHO. As ever please consider donating to GLP. They are vastly more effective at speaking truth to power than the whole Labour Party IMHO.
 
paulfromcamden said:
Labour's plan seems to be to create a 'growth fund' that will be invested in "fast-growing" high-risk UK start-ups that, astonishingly, no one else wants to invest in.

Under the plans pension schemes will be forced to to invest 5% of pension contributions into the fund. It can't fail*.

* to lose money

i6JAd90.png


Labour willing to force pension plans to invest in £50bn ‘growth fund’

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves wants to boost capital available to fast-growing companies
www.ft.com www.ft.com
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This “wealth fund” is ring fencing public spending for private purposes. To try to claw some of that back by getting pension funds to invest is much the same as government issuing bonds.

This wealth fund is no more or less than an accounting trick to get “borrowing” of the books in much the same way as PFI was a device to get spending off the books.

It will end in the same way.
 
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