Funding the Future

When being interviewed on the radio I was told by the broadcaster that £90,000 was only ‘middle class income’ and not enough for MPs. She was, very clearly, out of touch with reality.

Wes Streeting’s plans for the NHS all have one purpose, and that is to increase the role of the private sector and big pharmaceutical companies within it, at cost to us, the patients. He should not be trusted.

For literally hundreds of years the Tories have been one of the two parties that have at all times dominated UK politics. The other might have changed from time to time, but the Tories have been a constant. That, though, can no longer be assumed to the case. Now they might be heading for extinction. Does that matter?

The Bank of England is selling about £100 billion a year of government bonds it bought during the Covid crisis back into City financial markets. There’s no need to. It’s making massive losses doing so. But worst of all, that £100 billion is preventing the government from spending on the investment in the real economy we really need. QT has to stop, now. 

As far as most people know, the job of the Bank of England is to control inflation, which it has proved itself utterly unable to do. Meanwhile its essential roles in money creation, government funding, and bank and financial services regulation are almost all ignored, when they are really important. We need a Bank of England that concentrates on the jobs it needs to do, not the one it can’t do.

If Labour was really a party interested in reform they would be radically overhauling the UK constitution and the way in which the government is managed. But it isn’t. And as a result, they are sending out the strongest possible signal that nothing is really going to change on their watch.

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.

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 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?

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