Funding the Future

The speech Keir Starmer should have given

The speech Keir Starmer gave to the Labour Party conference on Tuesday was profoundly disappointing, including, I suspect, to most in Labour if only they were honest about it. So, I decided I should write my own version. This is it, with only slight apologies for it being almost as long as his was.

Oh dear, Keir

I had few hopes for Keir Starmer’s speech at Labour Party conference, and he managed to match none of them. That is how bad it was. Let me run through some of his failings…..

Rachel Reeves really is clueless

Rachel Reeves budget speech was a vacuous re-presentation of what she had said during the general election campaign, mixed with arrogant smugness, meaningless rhetoric and a total absence of narrative or ideas. I wish there was something good to note in all this, but before she celebrates being the first woman Chancellor of the Exchequer shouldn’t she prove she is up to the job?

Who should Labour tax?

Labour gave no positive clues on where they might raise revenue during the election campaign. So, what might they do in the October budget?

Perfection is the enemy of the good

Politics is the art of the possible, and not about the creation of ideal solutions, about which few are likely to agree in any case. It’s important that this is understood, because far too many political debates argue over the pursuit of goals that are unachievable. 

Why can’t Labour do critical thinking?

With a Cabinet made up of supposedly highly qualified graduates, all of whom would claim to have a social conscience, you would expect Labour to be able to think critically about the solutions required to the problems created by fourteen years of Tory rule. Right now, however, it seems that there is not one critical thinker amongst the lot of them. No wonder they’re already in such a mess.

What is the single transferable party?

The single transferable party describes the system of government that we now have in the UK, where whoever is in power, the policies appear to always be the same. When all that is on offer is austerity, and all that changes is who delivers it, do we really have a democracy any more, or is there just a single transferable party in power?

Labour hasn't got a story to tell

All of life, including political life, depends on our ability to tell stories about who we are, what we are, what we think and what we hope for. In that case you would have thought Labour would have defined its story about what its latest iteration is by now, but it hasn’t. As far as I can see, it has no story to tell about what it is, what it believes and what it is for. No wonder it is in a mess.

Can commercial banks create money out of thin air?

As a matter of fact, the Bank of England can always create money out of thin air. But can commercial banks really do so? The answer is yes, subject to a massive caveat – which is that they can only do so under licence from the Bank of England, which means that the buck for all money creation ultimately stops with the government.

Why is MMT so important?

Some people argue that  modern monetary theory is irrelevant, or that it changes nothing. They’re wrong. MMT fundamentally reframes the power relationships within our economy, moving power away from banking and the City and towards democratic government control, whilst prioritising people and full employment instead. No wonder so many people don’t like it: MMT challenges all the privileges they enjoy at cost to the rest of us.