Labour is LYING about a £20bn budget shortfall!

Right, so we seriously need to talk about this £20bn shortfall that Labour have ‘suddenly now identified’ amid media claims the situation is far worse than they ever thought possible, the public finances are in a dire state, the Tories have trashed the country, so far, so much a total rerun of everything David Cameron and George Osborne said to excuse austerity. The thing is, this isn’t a surprise to them at all, they are lying their weaselly black guts out over this, they knew about this apparent shocker of a budget black hole, or at least would have done if they’d paid any attention to the Institute for Fiscal Studies projections of the Tories spending plans during the General Election campaign, who had already identified £19bn of cuts coming down the line to unprotected government departments. Now Labour are going to enact those cuts and pretend they’ve only just noticed them. They’re lying, they knew and now they’re still going to carry out those cuts as if the Tories were still in office.
Right, so that was former Corbyn advisor Andrew Fisher talking on the BBC’s Politics Live program back in mid June, about those Tory budget cuts and that budget shortfall I outlined in my intro there and since that clip is being shared on social media again at the moment to point out the fact Starmer’s Labour are lying through their teeth over this sudden discovery of a budget black hole of some £20bn, Fisher has re-commented on his old clip, saying:
‘As I pointed out 6 weeks ago, there were c.£19bn of public service cuts baked in to Tory spending plans. Labour knew this before it published a manifesto with little extra funding for public services. The "Oooh, I've just seen the books" routine is laughable’
And it is laughable, or would be if it isn’t just a continuity of the last 14 years of the Tories with Labour now trying to cut its way to growth. It doesn’t work and come Monday we’ll find out exactly what Rachel Reeves is going to cut to try and close this budget deficit, because a wealth tax to raise that sum, is a surefire certainty not to happen.
What we’ll get is more austerity. Reeves already treats the architect of austerity, George Osborne, as an inspiration, has already sought his advice in the past and when even a tired old Blairite, like Indy journo John Rentoul can see that, everyone else ought to be seeing it too. Certainly the Tory Fibs Twitter account has, having tweeted out:
‘Labour government’s two main stories they’re pushing
• Shocked by fiscal black hole of £20bn in Treasury
• Shocked by NHS failings & Care Inspector Failings
Have Streeting & Reeves been asleep for 14 years?
I know no one who is “shocked” by the mess the Tories left. Invest more in fixing it and stop using your fake shock as an excuse for more austerity.’
Some cuts to the NHS would have Streeting appearing yet again on the media to say Labour have no choice, but no doubt behind the scenes in my mind, would be salivating at the softening up of the health service picture to allow more privatisation as he’s been hell bent on for months, no secret, he can’t ever hide his own excitement and screwing the NHS up with more outsourcing seems to be what does it for him.
So where are the cuts expected to come from then? Which budgets will have to be cut yet again, to protect the wealth of the richest in society? What can we expect from Reeves come Monday?
Well she’ll attack the Tories, obviously, that’s a given and likely deservedly so at that. They blew it over the pandemic, the contracts they were giving out like water to crony donor mates was eyewatering, The VIP lanes as they were called, Dido Harding’s track and trace, whatever happened to that cash as another for instance? There will certainly be plenty of perfectly justifiable examples of why the Tories should never be trusted with public money I am sure, and I have no doubt Reeves will enjoy throwing large numbers at them and condemning their rule. What would she do differently to fix it though? Sadly I don’t expect much of a shift, which is the Einsteinian definition of insanity, but tax rises and cuts to spending are what are almost certainly going to follow, so again that word change being associated with Starmer’s Labour becomes a bit of a sick joke.
Spending concerns have already been identified with regards to the asylum system – perhaps Yvette Cooper using Rwanda scheme funding to deport people to Vietnam instead was a bad choice and should have saved the money – welfare, because of course the out of work, the long term sick and disabled would be in the potential firing line, defence is in the frame, which is mad when you think Starmer and Reeves just declared a hike in defence spending, so clearly no cuts can come from there unless a big fat U-turn is coming and also the prison budget, which is already seeing prisoners for various offences getting released early, but seemingly only so this government can oversee climate protesters get sent there instead. It’s a mixed bag that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I daresay I’ll find plenty to shred when the facts of Reeves next actions are better known.
What seems certain is that tax hikes and budget cuts will be the name of the day as if the Tories never left office. It could even be worse and Rachel Reeves will justify this completely by saying it is all within her fiscal rules and we must stick to that or economic calamity will surely follow. When her economic rules don’t amount to anything fundamentally changing for us – more cuts to services, less money in our pocket, her rules are for fools, exactly what she’ll be taking us for.
Economist Richard Murphy shredded the notion of so-called fiscal rules in a recent article in The National:
‘The whole of Labour’s elections strategy was based upon its claim that the UK needed strong fiscal rules to deliver growth. As a result, it would seem that Labour do not know that there are no such things as fiscal rules.
The form of words that have been given this name have existed for little more than two decades, and during that period many such "rules" have been proposed, withdrawn, revised and re-written to try to disguise the failure of every single Chancellor over that period to comply with their self-imposed "rules". This has happened so often that the idea that there are such rules must be presumed to be a poor joke.
These "rules" are, at best, very poor economic public-relations exercises. At worst they are excuses for government inaction and the imposition of austerity. Either Labour know this, in which case they are misrepresenting the truth when they claim that they are of significance, or they do not, in which case Labour have to be presumed to be stupid.’
I like Richard Murphy, he speaks plainly and doesn’t suffer fools, especially on the economy, nor does he hide behind technical terms, his YouTube channel is well worth a follow.
He’s right though, every chancellor does bring their own rules in and that becomes the unquestioned legitimacy that covers all of their actions no matter how self harming to the country and how stupid they might be. We don’t need rules to fix the economy, just sound economics, which involves putting more cash in our pockets, not letting the rich avoid putting their hands in theirs. Murphy made another point in his column about how big a nonsense Labour’s fiscal rules are, because if they don’t actually fix problems, or allow the government to spend or invest to solve problems, how can the country work for people and how can these issues surrounding the services we all need, hacked to bits and underfunded as they have been for more than a decade, actually get back on their feet?
He used the example of the two child benefit cap that Labour have just whipped their MPs to vote against, suspending 7 of their own MPs for supporting an amendment to scrap that, because what kind of fiscal rule would a brand new government full of big ideas have, that requires 1m children to be left in poverty? In what way is that a salient investment and good decision in the interests of the next generation of this country? If that is what is required to meet Rachel Reeves fiscal rules, then certainly it bears out my own feelings towards this Starmer led government, bears out what I’ve been saying about Starmer’s Labour for some time, about Starmer himself mainly, in that this is a man who wants to be Prime Minister, but has no idea what to do once he gets there, and certainly Richard Murphy agrees with my assessment there in his column saying Labour are out of ideas. They’ve only just got into government, they never had any ideas in my view, just a lust for power and those two points taken together, under the cover of fiscal rules, will see things just carry on where the Tories left off. We will not notice any difference, just a change in the faces of those inflicting more misery upon us.
Meanwhile in another move Reeves is hiking pensions, has she found the finances to do that with? Not quite, You see whenever Labour do want to invest, they don’t want to be the ones spending, they want private money to do so, which will generate returns for investors, but Labour then wants to use pension pot cash, to rebuild the country with. There’s an issue with that, a big one find out all about it in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.