Funding the Future

As far as most people know, the job of the Bank of England is to control inflation, which it has proved itself utterly unable to do. Meanwhile its essential roles in money creation, government funding, and bank and financial services regulation are almost all ignored, when they are really important. We need a Bank of England that concentrates on the jobs it needs to do, not the one it can’t do.

If Labour was really a party interested in reform they would be radically overhauling the UK constitution and the way in which the government is managed. But it isn’t. And as a result, they are sending out the strongest possible signal that nothing is really going to change on their watch.

I had few hopes for Keir Starmer’s speech at Labour Party conference, and he managed to match none of them. That is how bad it was. Let me run through some of his failings…..

The speech Keir Starmer gave to the Labour Party conference on Tuesday was profoundly disappointing, including, I suspect, to most in Labour if only they were honest about it. So, I decided I should write my own version. This is it, with only slight apologies for it being almost as long as his was.

Rachel Reeves budget speech was a vacuous re-presentation of what she had said during the general election campaign, mixed with arrogant smugness, meaningless rhetoric and a total absence of narrative or ideas. I wish there was something good to note in all this, but before she celebrates being the first woman Chancellor of the Exchequer shouldn’t she prove she is up to the job?

Labour gave no positive clues on where they might raise revenue during the election campaign. So, what might they do in the October budget?

Politics is the art of the possible, and not about the creation of ideal solutions, about which few are likely to agree in any case. It’s important that this is understood, because far too many political debates argue over the pursuit of goals that are unachievable. 

With a Cabinet made up of supposedly highly qualified graduates, all of whom would claim to have a social conscience, you would expect Labour to be able to think critically about the solutions required to the problems created by fourteen years of Tory rule. Right now, however, it seems that there is not one critical thinker amongst the lot of them. No wonder they’re already in such a mess.

The single transferable party describes the system of government that we now have in the UK, where whoever is in power, the policies appear to always be the same. When all that is on offer is austerity, and all that changes is who delivers it, do we really have a democracy any more, or is there just a single transferable party in power?

All of life, including political life, depends on our ability to tell stories about who we are, what we are, what we think and what we hope for. In that case you would have thought Labour would have defined its story about what its latest iteration is by now, but it hasn’t. As far as I can see, it has no story to tell about what it is, what it believes and what it is for. No wonder it is in a mess.