Keir Starmer’s Labour Party got into power on a platform of ‘change’. Now he’s in power, Starmer is implementing Tory-style austerity measures. The ‘change’ in question? Namely to rebrand ‘austerity’ as ‘tough decisions’ – tough decisions like cutting off winter fuel payments for more than 10 million pensioners.
The result of all this is that Labour and Starmer’s popularity have tanked, with everyone understanding these so-called tough decisions are simply more of the same. Given that, some suspected Starmer might use his interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg to U-turn on his war on pensioners.
He did not do this.
And to add insult to injury, he couldn’t help but laugh as he repeated the phrase ‘tough decisions’ – a phrase now synonymous with freezing pensioners.
See for yourself, it’s six seconds into the video below:
Starmer says hes prepared to be unpopular because hes got to make tough decisions.
The tough decision for Starmer would be making the man who buys him his suits & glasses pay more tax. Decisions that target the poor & powerless aren't tough for Starmer. They're easy #bbclaurak pic.twitter.com/pICDQJLel4
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) September 8, 2024
Winter fuel payments: the more things change…
In the clip above, Kuenssberg asks Starmer if he’s “willing to be unpopular?” He answers with the banal word salad we’ve become accustomed to – word salad we’ll deconstruct as we go:
We’re going to have to be unpopular.
This idea that ‘smart, grownup politics’ must by definition be unpopular is straight up propaganda. Starmer’s chancellor Rachel Reeves claimed that Labour had ‘inherited the worst set of circumstances since second world war’. It’s an interesting thing to say, because the post-war Labour government founded the NHS – the most popular institution in the UK – demonstrating that politics can improve people’s lives where there’s a will.
What Starmer says next is the ghoulish part, because he can’t stop laughing as he says it:
Tough decisions are tough decisions.
Famously, when people make a tough decision they didn’t want to make, they can’t stop laughing when they think about it.
Starmer continued:
Popular decisions aren’t tough, they’re easy.
This is a repetition of the same thinkspeak propaganda as before: ‘war is peace: freedom is slavery: ignorance is strength: the unpopular decisions are actually in your best interests, plebs’.
Following this, he issues a clarification:
When we talk about tough decisions, I’m talking about tough decisions.
Ah, okay, thank god he cleared that up. He’s still smirking as he says this by the way!
The thinkspeak intensifies from this point onwards:
The things that last government ran away from – that government’s traditionally run away from – I’m convinced that because they’ve run away from difficult decisions, we haven’t got the change that we need for the country.
Is that clear now?
The Tories ran away from tough choices by inflicting years of austerity and keeping taxes low for the rich.
Starmer, meanwhile, is going to face tough choices head on by inflicting years of austerity and keeping taxes low for the rich. Oh, and cutting winter fuel payments.
He’s doing it for the country.
Tough choices.
It’s funny.
Get it?
Why aren’t you laughing?
The emperor’s new choices
Austerity was bullshit when David Cameron and George Osbourne tried it; it was bullshit before, and it’s bullshit now, as Raoul Martinez explained for Novara Media:
When the [2010 Conservative-Liberal Democrat] Coalition came to power, neither history nor mainstream economic theory provided any support for the claim that cuts were the only way to reduce the deficit. Cutting spending in a recession has been tried many times and – without exception – failed. For instance, in the aftermath of the First World War, the US, Britain, Sweden, Germany, Japan and France all adopted austerity policies with devastating impacts on their economies. President Herbert Hoover’s austerity response to the 1929 economic crash was followed by the Great Depression.
The historical failure of austerity as a response to economic crises resulted in a widespread consensus among academic economists that, since recessions are caused by a reduction in demand (and when there is no room to offset cuts by reducing interest rates), cutting spending only makes the situation worse. The textbook response to economic downturns, as any student of the subject knows, is to increase spending. By spending more in the short term, a government can reduce public debt faster because smart spending creates jobs, increases tax revenues and releases more people more quickly from dependency on the state.
However, as governments began to embrace austerity, a handful of economists produced research telling them exactly what they wanted to hear.
Cameron and Osbourne had economists and media types willing to back them; Starmer has no one. What he does have are many people willing to point out that his ‘tough choices’ like winter fuel payment cuts are actually just ‘Tory choices’:
When leaders like Starmer blather on about “tough choices”, why is it *always* code for hitting some of the poorest hardest? Where’s the “tough choice” of a wealth tax on the super-rich? Why do shivering pensioners have to pay the price for “fixing the foundations”? #bbclaurak
— Caroline Lucas (@CarolineLucas) September 8, 2024
For 14 years we’ve repeatedly heard politicians talk about the "tough choice" of austerity.
Why is it always the working class hit by these "tough choices", and not UK billionaires who have seen their wealth increase threefold in the past decade to £684,000,000,000?
— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) September 7, 2024
We’ve basically had the same fucking Government since 1979, & they’ve spent over 40 years taking turns rinsing the living shit out of the poor, calling it ‘Tough choices’.
— Michael Walsh (@thatbloodyMikey) September 7, 2024
There are also people like Gary Stevenson and Richard Murphy who are explaining why taxing the rich more isn’t just a popular decision; it’s a vital one:
If the government want to fix the UK's problems, taxing the rich more isn't just an option.
It's the only option. pic.twitter.com/zCZOkYiV9p
— Gary Stevenson (@garyseconomics) August 27, 2024
The Taxing Wealth Report 2024 shows that austerity is not needed in the UK. Instead, we can have decent public services employing appropriately paid people, and we can invest in our future. Download it here https://t.co/vo17uvC6cR pic.twitter.com/stJsH4c9Y3
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) April 5, 2024
Murphy further explained how Labour could have made choices other than cutting winter fuel payments without even being radical. This suggests that either Starmer and Reeves are entirely incompetent, or that the suffering is the point:
Lucy Powell MP, Leader of the House of Commons, made the absurd claim that cutting winter fuel allowance saved the economy from collapse when taking on television on Sunday morning.
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) September 2, 2024
No one but those on low income have been hit by Labour plans, so far.
Labour clearly has a line on this. Rachel Reeves supported this claim in the Observer yesterday, saying that almost immediately after coming into office she was advised: pic.twitter.com/oc6vc3YpNG
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) September 2, 2024
More than that, though, everyone knew Jeremy Hunt’s budget was a fantasy that did not in any way add up back in March. Everyone said so. If Reeves did not know she was negligent.
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) September 2, 2024
First, it could have been filled by the Bank of England simply offering the Treasury an increased overdraft facility. It did that in March 2020. It could have done it again now.
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) September 2, 2024
To make that easier they could have cancelled the quantitative tightening programme, which wholly unnecessarily sold £33bn of gilts between April and June this year without a penny going to the government to fund spending.
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) September 2, 2024
The next option for finding £22 billion would be to simply have the Bank of England cut its base rate by at least 2%. The economy desperately needs this. There is no way it can grow with rates anywhere near where they are. This would save more than £22 billion a year.
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) September 2, 2024
My point is, cuts were wholly unnecessary, in my opinion.
Would the financial markets have agreed with me? I think so. They don’t like quantitative tightening and would love to see it gone.
They would like rate cuts: they have no desire for the stress they have caused.
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) September 2, 2024
Smirking class hero
Starmer and Reeves have made it very clear where their loyalties lie, and it’s not with ordinary people. With no support from the mainstream media, they’re going to struggle to last longer than a single term in office without support from the masses.
We’ll see who’s laughing at the next election.
Featured image via BBC
