High-vis and safety helmet. Lots of talk of building and “we can fix it.” No, not CBeebies, but Rachel Reeves the builder, after the comprehensive spending review (CSR).
The first trick the spin doctors do is to try and establish a figure. They know few people will bother to check the numbers. £113 billion of capital spending is the figure they have been pushing. But, £90 billion of that was already planned and announced when the Tories were in power a year ago.
Spending review or fudging the numbers?
Scratch the surface, and lot of the numbers don’t add up. £14.2 billion over the next 5 years for a new nuclear power plant at Sizewell C. Hinkley Point C, the identical kind of nuclear plant, was forecast to cost £18 billion in 2015 prices, and to be in operation in the early 2020’s. It’s currently sat at an estimated cost of £46 billion and ten years late. Renewables are faster to deploy and way, way cheaper. Yet, the CSR made only 1 mention of climate change, and took billions out of GB Energy’s budget.
Councils will get a spending power increase of 2.6% in real terms, we were told. But the small print shows only 1.1% is coming from government, and that’s in cash terms, not counting for inflation. So Rachel the builder has graciously allowed you to pay council tax to fix your broken potholes, bridges, and derelict parks. Not to mention councils facing insolvency due to a £5 billion deficit in special educational needs spending. But I guess BlackRock haven’t found a way to profit from disabled kids yet, so no cash is heading that way.
Best laid excuses
Rachel the builder announced that growth was great, and her Midas touch was the reason she could shower these golden gifts upon us in the spending review. Before the ink was dry, official figures showed the economy shrank 0.3% last month. Her explanation on the media round? “The world is unstable.” Sherlock Homes is in the building!
Before the general election I warned, “What have the Labour leadership offered? The magic growth bunny. It will hop along, and Britain will boom. No need to invest in public services. The magic growth bunny will fix the crisis in social care. The sick will walk. Greenhouse gases will chill out.” I also said there was a £20 billion hole in public finances in March 2024. If I knew before the election was called, so did Labour.
Trickle down has never worked as plan. It is a smokescreen to justify the rich getting richer. Of course the world is unstable. We keep fuelling wars and climate destruction. We keep stripping away regulations and privatising common assets to create “investable propositions” to allow very, very rich people to make even more money. Although “we” is not accurate – it’s a tiny fraction of society. That’s why we need a plan to fix things without relying on trickle down.
Part of the problem is that the system is too big to be easily seen. Understanding the relationship between investment banking, big oil, regulatory capture, and dark money in politics requires a bit of digging. That’s why in Majority we run economics reading groups.
Holding pattern
I’ve worked and negotiated with government ministers and many in the current cabinet. Most of them genuinely believe they are doing the right thing. Although if you cross examine them on their own, their imposter syndrome is easy to see. Once you talk about anything outside their briefing notes, they go into a holding pattern of clichés.
There’s a scene in The Big Short, an excellent film which exposes the causes of the 2007 financial crash. One of the bankers says:
Tell me the difference between stupid and illegal and I’ll have my wife’s brother arrested. I guess you just don’t realise how clueless the system really is.
On the left, we have to be better than that. We have to move beyond critical slogans and establish alternative ideas for government. I’ve said it before, to win an election you need to convince people of two things:
- These people can run the country.
- These people have got my back.
The truth is pretty much no one believes Starmer, Badenoch, Farage, or anyone else could run the country at the moment. Shouting our demands is not enough. Saying these people are crooks, warmongers, or careerists is not enough. Most people already think that. They hold their nose and vote for the least objectionable.
What do we need to do?
We need to show that it is we who have the plan, and they are the CBeebies politicians. A plan that fixes the things that matter to people’s daily lives – traffic jams, housing costs, food prices, childcare, crime. A plan backed by evidence, that could actually be delivered in the short and the long term. Tax the rich is a good slogan for the converted, but we need to add the hows and the whys.
A year ago Act Now was published. I co-wrote it along with many others. It’s a ready to go manifesto on how to fix everything in domestic policy. How to actually fund and deliver expanded public transport that is simultaneously cheaper and more reliable. How, exactly, we could take back ownership of the utilities, and why it would be really cheap. And, how this would increase people’s freedom, not curtail it.
The costings and economic analysis is all there. It demolishes the “magic money tree” and “iron clad fiscal rules” rubbish that are the bread and butter of the spending review.
Can we fix it? Yes we can.
Featured image via Unsplash/Towfiqu barbhuiya
This post was originally published on Canary.