AUSTERITY by any other name smells just as rank.
Yet that is the odour now emanating from Westminster as Labour’s evident failure to reorient the economy forces difficult choices on ministers.
Treasury Chief Secretary Darren Jones — number two to Chancellor Rachel Reeves — made the government’s choice pretty clear in the Commons: it is to cut public spending.
The cost of servicing government debt is rising sharply, removing the wriggle room Reeves had contrived in her Budget last October.
Jones reiterated that Labour’s self-imposed fiscal rules, mandating falling state debt by the end of the parliament, are sacrosanct.
He also pledged to stand by the government’s commitment that there will be no further tax rises beyond those announced last year.
Thus, as several Tory MPs were eager to point out, there must be spending cuts.
If ministers think they can avoid that disgrace by simply claiming that they do not constitute austerity driven by “blind ideology” as under the Tories, to use Jones’s words, they are mistaken.
Cuts caused by clear-sighted pragmatism will cut just as deep. After 14 years of Tory misrule, key services need much more cash, not a fresh round of reductions.
This newspaper warned that this was where the government would end up, given the rash promises made by Keir Starmer and Reeves before the general election.
By pledging not to raise taxes on the wealthy and big business, and by committing to stick within Treasury borrowing rules they were storing up trouble.
They claimed to have an “abracadabra” that would get them out of the box they had nailed themselves within in the form of higher growth.
Yet their plan for that has not amounted to much more than a shake-up of planning rules. The impact of that is sure to be too little and too late.
In a nutshell, Starmer and Reeves have tried to get their way out of damaging short-term commitments through a long-term strategy that does not look like delivering.
Now the bill is falling due, as ever from the international bond market, which judges that ministers do not have control of the situation.
The tragedy here is that our economy is still at the mercy of such vultures, rather than decisively reoriented towards meeting people’s needs.
Yet the advocacy of the necessary alternative is too muted. No socialist MP, whether within Labour, without or half-in, half-out like the suspended seven, intervened during Jones’s statement today.
That is hardly good enough at a time of growing crisis. The present malaise is only helping Reform UK.
The first poll showing Nigel Farage as leading the largest party in the next parliament has now come out. Another damaging round of public spending cuts is just about the last thing anyone interested in stopping his rise should want.
Socialists and unions must urgently unite around a programme of state-led investment in industry and public services to turbocharge growth, buttressed if necessary by capital controls to keep global speculators at bay.
Failing that the danger is that the future looks like Farage.
Lettuce Liz lashes out
LIZ TRUSS should have titled her memoirs Tragedy Followed by Farce. Not content with being the shortest-serving prime minister in history, she now seeks to become the first to ban criticism of her record.
In her brief time in Downing Street, the economy crashed. There, we have said it. Our lawyers are ready to take service of writ.
Only let the sanctimonious Truss at least spare us the usual lecture on free speech. As with so many right-wing champions of that precious liberty, she only intends it to apply to those she agrees with.
