https://anotherangryvoice.substack.com/p/rachel-reeves-lying-austerity
When Rachel Reeves claims there will be "no return to austerity" under Labour, she's pretending that austerity is a thing that happened in the past, rather than an existing policy she wants to keep
Another Angry Voice
May 29, 2024

Rachel Reeves claims that there will be "no return to austerity" under Labour, but this is highly deceptive, because austerity never actually went away.

Reeves tries to pretend that austerity is an abandoned policy that only existed between 2010 and 2015, but this is entirely inaccurate because government departments, public sector wages, and social security provisions have continued to suffer countless real-terms cuts since Cameron and Osborne left office in the wake of their Brexit referendum shambles.

Furthermore, if austerity were over, surely the worst of the massive departmental budget cuts should have been reversed, rather than being kept in place?

If Labour wanted to really put an end to austerity, they’d need to reverse the 14 years of budget cuts and restore public spending, especially in areas that are known to generate large positive returns on investment in the long-term (education, quality public services, social housing, public health, infrastructure investment, and transport modernisation).

One of the main reasons the country feels like it’s falling apart at the seams and locked into a terminal downwards spiral is the vast austerity cuts inflicted on local government spending.

Councils all over the country are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, local services are massively over-stretched and under-funded, and local councils are being forced to flog off £millions in public property to greedy speculators in desperate attempts to balance the books and fill the giant austerity-sized black holes in their budgets.

If Reeves wanted to distance herself from Tory austerity madness, she could restore local government spending to where it was in 2010, with incentives to councils that invest the restoration cash in areas that are known to generate economic activity and deliver positive returns on investment.

Instead of doing anything like this, Reeves is sticking to Tory spending plans, keeping the austerity cuts in place, and fixating on the same myopic self-defeating penny-pinching ideology that resulted in the lost decade and a half of austerity stagnation.

Think of it this way. If you told people that you were "not going to return to driving dangerously slowly on the motorway" people would assume that you’d be increasing your speed, rather than keeping things the same and sticking at 25 miles per hour.

If you told people you were "not going to return to crash dieting" they’d expect you to increase your daily calorie intake back to a healthy 2,000 or so, rather than keeping things the same and staying at below 500 calories per day.

Reeves is trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes by pretending that keeping pretty much all of the Tory austerity cuts in place, and voluntarily tying the treasury up into a "fiscal rules" straight jacket is somehow isn’t just austerity with a red rosette on it.

In fact, she’s trying to pull the exact same scam as Theresa May when she claimed that "austerity is over" in the wake of the 2017 general election, while keeping all of the disastrous austerity cuts in place, keeping the cuts coming for another four years, and insisting that investment would only be possible when her (economically suicidal shambles of a) Brexit deal started delivering prosperity.

It just goes to show how dramatically Labour has shifted to the hard-right under Keir Starmer that they’re imitating Theresa May’s panicked pretence that she was moving away from austerity, rather than keeping the pro-investment policies that wiped out May’s majority in 2017 and forced her into pretending that austerity was over.

Unfortunately capitalist media hacks and the BBC aren’t even remotely interested in calling Reeves out on her Theresa May style economic deception of pretending that keeping Tory austerity cuts in place and refusing to invest for the future is going to deliver prosperity, when the last 14 years is ample enough proof that is absolutely won’t.