A general election has been called and the relevant party leaders are busy trying to define what it is all about.
Should we accept and nurture a slow recovery or change course to avoid chaos and incompetence? Or, from a different perspective, should we tie ourselves to the sinking mast of net zero, or focus on repelling the cultural onslaught offered by mass immigration and wokeness?
But none of these false structures (which are mutually exclusive) confront the key question that those who question the broadcast media cannot answer either: what will Keir Starmer’s Labor Party actually do if it is lucky enough to come to power?
In the absence of clear statements of intent from the Labor leadership (other than introducing a 20 per cent VAT on independent school fees and increasing taxes on domestic oil and gas production), I felt compelled to write a series of articles aimed at exposing the reality of Labor economics. Because politics will set the parameters of everything he does.
I looked at pro-Labour think tanks, key Labor tax advisers, and they all suggested that Labor would make no commitments, but would then introduce cunning, stealth taxes by expanding the scope of existing taxes to hit pensioners, savers, motorists and the poor in particular. progress. self-employment.
Yet I still see readers voicing their doubts in comment sections (yes, I read them) and sometimes veering into the Tories’ register (of which I am equally critical), as if excusing Labour’s lack of outspokenness.
Fortunately, we have a new and reliable source of illumination that may reveal Labour’s true intentions. International banking and finance adviser Bob Lyddon spent a lot of time dissecting the Mais Lecture given by shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves in March, trying to decipher what her seemingly empty chatter and cryptic euphemisms actually meant.
He wrote a 56-page report, “Destroying the jargon”, which delved into deliberately obscure verbiage and then distilled it down, no doubt fearing that the scale of the task might be too much for most to digest. A shorter 16-page article is “Decoding Rachel Reeves.”
Lyddon, who broke new ground in modern languages at Cambridge and can speak Norwegian, Dutch, German and French fluently, has now added “Reevespeak” to his dictionary and tells us the secrets of this language.
By translating what Rachel Reeves said on the record into plain English using his own obscure language, Lyddon identified Labour’s desire to go into a general election without any democratic constraints on its future spending plans. This could lead to painful tax increases not only now but for future generations as well.
Phrases such as “investment through partnership between strategic government and entrepreneurial companies” may confuse us, but they actually mean that firms and financial institutions will be pushed to invest in Labor projects on the basis of taxpayer guarantees. So tell us, Rachel, are you going to spend more, tax us more, borrow more? After analyzing your Mais conference, Bob Lyddon concluded that the answer must be yes, yes, and yes.
Rachel Reeves talked about the extensive public borrowing in the so-called easy days under Gordon Brown, and in particular the use of PFI (private finance initiative) “investment”, which today still costs us billions of dollars to repay. PFI payments from 1996/97 to final transaction due in 2052/53 totaled £278.3 billion, a staggering 555% of the capital total of £50.1 billion.
Of these 669 PFI contracts, 588 were under Labor governments. The left-of-centre Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) estimated £13bn of PFI-funded capital investment dating back to Labor in 1998; It had cost the NHS £80bn and as of 2019 it still had £55bn to pay. By 2030 PFI payments will cost the NHS £2.5bn a year, and some NHS trusts have allocated a fifth of their budgets to PFI repayments alone.
Acknowledging that government borrowing is already approaching its limits, Reeves is unapologetic about finding ways to circumvent common sense, transparency and accountability. In his speech, Mais signaled how he would emulate the EU’s off-balance sheet PFI-style borrowing, known as InvestEU, so that the debt would remain in the shadows rather than in the spotlight. This is consistent with Labour’s desire to readjust to the EU and will lead to the same sub-optimal levels of economic growth.
Reeves went on to explain how net zero provides all the justification for the higher spending he and Labor are committed to. Pension funds will be directed to use their investments to target net-zero infrastructure, which will further expand state control of our economy, regardless of the damage to future retirement returns.
To deliver this cocktail of excessive government spending and centralized regulatory direction, Reeves also promises to create new unaccountable institutions; More quangos and agencies for Labour’s nomenklatura, whose loyalty and secrecy are bought with eye-popping taxpayer-funded salaries and pensions.
Although taxes will have to increase (but no new decipherable details are given), most of the bill will be presented not to us, but to future generations, especially our grandchildren, who cannot be asked whether they will accept this law or not. load. It is packaged and presented as “security economics”, but the risk of economic ruin is so high that there is nothing safe about it, and where it is economical there is only avoiding telling the truth.
So here we are. While Labor continues to avoid admitting its true intentions, the direction of progress is clear and the means to achieve it are already understood. Sane journalists have less than six weeks to ask the right questions, and then, no doubt, they will question the vague answers further until we get to the truth.
Labor speaks, argues and orders in political codes. Thank goodness Bob Lyddon cracked Labour’s mysterious code.
