MOST people want the government to prioritise the crises across our public services in its Budget next week.
Research shows they are — rightly — unconvinced by the need for Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s “fiscal rules,” which risk starving the public sector of funding.
This gives ministers — reported last week to be appealing to Keir Starmer over the scale of planned cuts to their departments — an argument that Reeves needs to change course.
There are some signs she may do so: the backlash over her attack on pensioners’ winter fuel payments saw her talk up the end of austerity at the party’s conference last month. She has since hinted at changes to the way debt is calculated to give greater flexibility in borrowing to invest.
Unfortunately, other signs point in the opposite direction. Reeves has expanded on the so-called £22 billion black hole in the public finances, now claiming she must find £40bn in tax rises and spending cuts next week.
Trailed “difficult decisions” on welfare may herald a new round of attacks. Work & Pensions chief Liz Kendall took to the Telegraph at the weekend to announce further crackdowns on benefit fraud, including powers for her department to remove money from people’s bank accounts directly without legal proceedings. Yet more than twice as much money goes unclaimed each year by people entitled to it as is lost to benefit fraud.
Some Labour politicians share the Conservatives’ ideological commitment to cutting public spending.
More, though, are duped by the idea that it’s popular. The delusion is understandable: it’s popular with the billionaire-owned press, and politicians may measure their popularity by the headlines they generate.
Viewing Tory policies as the recipe for success also has a certain logic for those who see the Conservatives’ long dominance of British politics as evidence they reflect the public’s views.
The narrative has huge power, incessantly repeated as it is in Establishment sources: Britain is a “small-c” conservative country; its people would not tolerate “European levels” of taxation, a convenient abstraction that avoids discussion of how taxation is distributed.
But it’s a myth.
A myth reinforced by Starmer as he jettisoned the redistributive policies of Jeremy Corbyn: erasing all mention of the popularity of these policies in the 2017 election and downplaying the catastrophic role of Brexit in the 2019 election to breathe new life into the lie that British people will not vote for higher taxes to fund better public services.
A myth he repeated at Labour’s conference last month, still claiming smugly that the changes he has wrought in Labour are responsible for it winning the election — when he has actually lost it votes on 2019, and is solely in power because the Conservatives imploded.
In fact, as Tax Justice UK found in May, almost two-thirds of the public back higher taxes on the rich to boost public spending, with over 70 per cent supporting wealth taxes on those with assets worth over £10 million, as proposed by a cross-party group of MPs in a letter to Reeves this week.
Politicians do not simply do what they think the electorate wants: their actions reflect their class allegiance, and the ruling class has deep hooks in Labour. Starmer and Reeves will not look at the polls, admit they are wrong and make a U-turn.
But exploding the ruling-class myth about British people’s alleged love of small-state neoliberalism can empower resistance to their agenda, especially given hundreds of Labour MPs’ dubious prospects of re-election should the party continue to run public services into the ground.
Inequality has reached toxic levels in Britain, and the link between what the TUC’s Paul Nowak terms “private affluence and public squalor” is clear. Reeves must be made to understand that a Budget which leaves both untouched is the road to ruin for this government.
