I understand it’s something the Brits call “fiscal responsibility.”
No, “fiscal responsibility” is having the funds to pay for spending. There is currently no political party in the anglophone world that does that, as it would require raising unseemly amounts of revenue or cutting unseemly amounts of services.
Unfortunately for the UK, they aren’t the world’s reserve currency anymore (to the extent they ever really were) and they crippled their economy with Brexit. The amount they can borrow is limited before cost exceeds benefit. If the US ever loses its status as the reserve currency, we’re going to go through something akin to the Great Depression. Better to take your medicine in smaller doses.
I was thinking of increasing taxes: How much money would be raised if all tax rates were restored to what they were the last time Labour was in power?
The literal headline in the article YOU quoted was:
Rachel Reeves planning to raise taxes and cut spending in October budget.
Emphasis added.
I’m not trying to pick on you, but did you read your own cite?
Raising taxes and cutting spending is on the road to fiscal responsibility, to make income more closely related to outgo on spending.
I don’t know about tax rates, but UK tax as a percentage of GDP is at its highest level since the 1980s. The economy is more heavily taxed, not less heavily, than under the last Labour government (which left office in 2011). This is true for taxes as a whole and also separately for each of the major taxes — income tax, national insurance, value-added tax, corporation tax, capital gains tax, stamp duties. The only taxes which collect a smaller percentage of GDP than they used to are excises on fuel and tobacco (and the latter is largely explained by a reduction in smoking).
So, while Labour is raising extra taxes, the capacity to do so to any very great extent without signficant adverse impact on the economy is probably limited. If Labour want to increase spending they largely need to finance that by increasing borrowing, and their election commitments constraint their ability to do that.
FWIW, Labour’s official line is that they will create the capacity for additional spending by growing the economy, and therefore tax receipts. But their aversion to revisiting the economically harmful policy of Brexit signficantly constrains their ability to acheive economic growth.
Good Lord, what a pointless own-goal.
(I don’t mean to hijack, and we all have known this to be true for eight years and counting. It just still blows my mind.)
My inner pessimist after reading this:
Labour will be perceived as a failure whatever they do and the next government will be basically Nazis.
I hope my inner pessimist is wrong but he’s being depressingly right lately.
Me too.
And me.
A more optimistic perspective: Labour don’t have to usher in a golden era of prosperity, and a chicken in every pot. They just have to be perceived as more competent than the Tories. And that’s a pretty low bar.
I hope you are right
Very low. Basically just dont blow it.
The criminal justice system trundles on:
But look at history: these beliefs never last. After a few to several years people forget how bad the opposition party was and vote to bring them back in.
Yes.
A very standard play in the RW playbook is
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Get elected with a small majority and do something practically irreversible which will utterly screw your country, albeit not all immediately.
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Expect the opposition to be elected as the harms you’ve (secretly) deliberately visited on your own country become manifestly obvious to all.
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Watch them during their term in office as they try to reverse the irreversible, and fight them at every opportunity to enforce their ineffectiveness in power.
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Ride to power at the next election on a wave of populist revulsion at the other guys’ ineffectuality where you can then suborn the remaining honest areas of government to cement your permanent status as extra-constitutional one party rule.
Or not so secretly- like the GOP and the national debt.
But yeah, you took that right out of the Right Wings Populist handbook, when Boris Johnson torpedoed the UK by Brexit.
They also got elected on the promise of not raising income tax, national insurance (a tax levied on workers in addition to income tax) and VAT (sales tax), so their options for raising taxes are limited anyway.
On one hand, of course I hope these harsh sentences have the desired effect of discouraging rioters (though I have my doubts - in most cases it’s a ‘crime of passion’, i.e. the person isn’t thinking straight anyway and therefore isn’t deterred from committing the crime by the thought of possibly going to prison. Plus, they don’t think they’ll get caught). On the other hand, I’m concerned some may get overturned on appeal, which sends the opposite message. Maybe that doesn’t matter too much though, as the initial madness seems to have passed.
I’m not convinced Brexit fits this model, for 2 reasons. Firstly, I believe it was largely pursued by those who saw the potential for short term political and therefore long term (personal) financial gain, rather than as part of some grand plan to eventually have a bloodless right wing coup. Secondly, for many (and some of them were the same people) the EU was a genuine and (in some areas) legitimate source of irritation for many decades. Unfortunately, it turned out that pursuing Brexit was too economically damaging to make it a sensible option. Yes, I know this was mentioned in advance of the vote, but I don’t think it really became clear until 2020 or so. Up to then it seemed like some kind of compromise might be possible, but Johnson et al hijacked it for their own (aforementioned) political and financial ends.
I counter argue that the Brexit vote was heavily fueled by xenophobia and bigotry.