WITH the pound hitting an all-time low following Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax-cutting spree and inflation its highest in decades, Labour stresses its credentials as the party of responsible finance.
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves recalled telling last year’s conference that she was happy to take the Tories on over economic competence “because I know we can win.
“Now I’m wondering if they even plan to turn up for the fight.” The mood is echoed by Labour MPs stunned at the scale of Kwarteng’s assault on the pockets of the poor to help the rich: some volubly wonder whether the Tories have concluded they cannot win in 2024 and are simply intent on handing as much of the country to the super-rich as they can before their time runs out.
It’s important, though, that the left avoids the trap of framing economic decision-making in terms of competent or incompetent management, or that of fetishising the behaviour of financial markets.
In some ways the Conservative government has been an extremely competent servant of the class that owns rather than works: by this summer British billionaires had increased their wealth by over £106 billion since the beginning of the pandemic, or £290 million per day.
Ministers also proved adept at channelling public money into the pockets of their friends and relatives during this period.
This reflects the reality that our “economic crisis” is the result of a class war waged by the rich against the rest.
It’s true that Tory policy leaves Britain more exposed to this than most of our neighbours.
We face the biggest energy price rises in Europe, for example.
But all Europe is in crisis. The extreme concentration of wealth, accelerating during the pandemic, is a global phenomenon: worldwide billionaires increased their wealth by $3.9 trillion in 2020, while poorer countries sank deeper into debt.
Nor is Britain’s turbulent recent political history at all anomalous. In Italy elections have just returned the far right to power, the predictable result of the social democratic left’s embrace of not just neoliberal policy but its anti-democratic imposition by technocrat bankers.
In the United States the Donald Trump bandwagon rolls on, having apparently swallowed the Republican Party whole. Alienation from and anger at the political system is now the norm.
People realise the system is broken. This must be borne in mind when Labour boasts that it has returned to the “centre ground,” as Keir Starmer is due to do today, or when Peter Mandelson briefs that people think it is “safe to vote Labour again.”
Rather than a bizarre career around the political fringes prompted by a whimsical membership, the years of the Corbyn leadership expressed a popular feeling that only radical change can now fix an economic system delivering mass impoverishment and poisoning the climate.
Its vote rose dramatically in 2017 as a result, and despite falling back in 2019, it still received more votes then than in 2015, 2010 or 2005.
More pertinently still, it advanced relative to the Tories in 2017 because it was seen as the party of rupture with the system. Just as the Tories won in 2019 by posing, through Brexit, as that party.
A chaotic climate, catastrophic crop failures, huge dislocation to international trade, war in Europe and “decoupling” from the world’s most dynamic economy on political grounds: that is the status quo and it’s grim.
Labour’s claim that returning to the “centre ground” is the way to address this, that a partnership between workers and the businesses ripping them off is somehow plausible, are unconvincing.
It needs to recapture the radicalism of the Corbyn period: the spirit of which is still strong among thousands of party activists, an increasingly confident labour movement and the crowds packing venues across Britain under a range of union banners to demand a different future.
