hjohn3

[hjohn3]

How Did We Get Here?

When Did the Political and Media Establishment Lose Its Moral Compass on Israel?

Sources: Josep Goded account on Bluesky; Alamy

By Honest John

Looking at the two pictures above, which is the greater scandal? The dropping a 500lb bomb by one of the best-equipped air forces in the world on an undefended cafe filled with civilians, killing up to 36 of them outright and injuring dozens more, or an, until recently, fairly obscure punk/rap artist leading a chant calling for the “death” of the IDF at Glastonbury? Which is more heinous, the routine shooting by soldiers of non-combatant refugees who are making their way to find food and supplies from aid depots designated by that same military, or the defacing of planes with red paint by a protest group who had illegally entered an RAF base to highlight ongoing support by the British armed forces for Israel’s “war” in Gaza?

In any sane world, the use of a bomb by the IDF air force designed to take out enemy troop formations, military vehicles and fortified buildings, to destroy a seaside cafe would be considered a war crime; the deaths of nearly 40 civilians doing no more than eating, drinking and socialising would be viewed as a wartime atrocity. In the same sane world, a provocative festival chant by a rap artist would be viewed for what it is - a performative piece of agitprop for the benefit of an audience of festival-goers at best, or a tasteless bit of glory-hunting by a band seeking publicity at worst. If the political and media establishment appeared not have lost all sense of critical reasoning when it comes to the Gaza conflict, then the IDF and its American-supplied “aid contractors” would be condemned for terror tactics that have inflicted deadly combat injuries on unarmed families seeking to avoid starvation; if reason prevailed, the piece of political theatre by Palestine Action would be viewed as legitimate consciousness-raising by an activist group at best, and as something resembling a university Rag Week prank at worst.

But in the upsidedown moral universe inhabited by the political and media establishment of the U.K., no sense of proportion or reckoning with facts any longer applies. The rap artist Bobby Vylan is traduced as an antisemite for unseriously wishing harm on a genocidal military force - not a race; not an ethnic group; not a country; not even the British Army, but a foreign military force, armed to the teeth, and “fighting” 2,500 miles away. However ill-advised Vylan’s antics were, the furore of condemnation, faux outage, social ostracism, bookings cancellations and accusations of racism that have followed, are utterly and completely disproportionate and absurd. In the meantime in the period since the US and Israel chose to boycott the UN and NGOs providing aid on the ground in Gaza in favour of a privatised and militarised alternative (the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation), according to the UN, over 400 Palestinian civilians have died trying to reach the new aid sites designated by the GHF and “guarded” by the IDF and the GHF’s own mercenaries. According to witnesses (including anonymous IDF soldiers themselves) the shooting is almost sport - a very real, but lethal, mockery of defenceless people trying to survive. This is not war; this is not even “colatteral damage”, this is murder and cruelty. Yet the criticisms of this obscenity, certainly from our political establishment, are negligible; the majority of media outlets, who remain bafflingly pro-Israel even now, are similarly mute.

Where the British state did leap into furious action was to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, making it illegal not only to join the group but also to support it publicly and then to charge its members with terrorism offences. This is a group that entered RAF Brize Norton, armed not with the semi-automatic weapons of Hamas, nor the bombs of the Provisional IRA, nor the handheld rocket launchers of Hezbollah, or the Novichok of the Russian secret service: they were armed with paint. The activists did not disable British planes involved in an existential struggle with an enemy of the U.K.; they defaced planes that the group suspected were going to provide air mission intelligence support to the IDF. The group were guilty of trespass and criminal damage at best - offences that would attract in most cases less than twelve months in prison. Instead, Starmer’s government has charged them with being terrorist supporters and promoters in perhaps one of the more surreal moments in this troubled regime’s history, facing up to 14 years in prison. Palestine Action do have a long history of these sort of political stunts - but this makes them irritants, not threats to life and limb; it certainly does not make them terrorists when compared to the cynical actions of the IDF - happy to wipe out tens of people in order to reach one Hamas commander - an organisation, by the way, that has been incapable of inflicting harm on Israel for the best part of 18 months.

So where does this apparent blindness to facts on the part of most of our governing and media class come from? How did we get here? Its root, I suspect, is an unwillingness to see Israel - despite the Netanyahu regime taking Zionism into ever greater realms of violence, unrestrained vengeance, expansionism and ethnic cleansing - for what it is. The main political parties and most of the media continue to view Israel as basically a civilised western-style democracy, simply exercising its right of self-defence following the atrocity perpetrated by Hamas nearly two years ago. Israel is often described as an “ally” whom Europe and the United States must support, but it is hard to see how this so-called alliance, forged in the days of the Cold War, is relevant any more to modern geopolitics and even if it was, what the U.K. gains from it to merit such fawning acceptance of whatever Israel chooses to do.

Without doubt a factor in this almost-uncompromising support for Israel is the deep fear the establishment has of being accused of being antisemitic, and it is not only Britain, the former ruler of Mandated Palestine, that feels this keenly - Germany is almost neurotic about the charge for understandable historical reasons. But this in itself is curious. The state of Israel arguably ever since its foundation, and certainly since the occupation of the West Bank after 1967, has sought to present Zionism and Judaism as indistinguishable and therefore anyone opposed to Zionist excesses must also be at least implicitly antisemitic. However for years this contention was vigorously challenged - not just by left wing and liberal critics of Israeli policy and behaviour, but also by Western governments frustrated as the Likud led administrations in Tel Aviv made it clear they had no real interest in the “two state solution”, who often challenged Zionist assertions that to be opposed to Israel (regardless of what they were doing ) was to be an implicit Jew-hater.

But all this has changed and changed utterly. The Western powers who have sustained Israel morally and militarily almost from the point of its creation, have now bought wholesale into Netanyahu’s narrative that to criticise Israel’s oppressive and settler policies is to be antisemitic; to oppose Israel’s extension of war into four sovereign states, is to get in the way of Israel’s right to self-defence and to side with the Palestinians themselves is to side with genocidal terrorists. Only this explains the routine ignoring, under-reporting and complicit silence every time the IDF launches another unprovoked attack on refugees and civilians; only this can explain the extraordinary legal and censorious over-reaction to music acts such Vylan and Kneecap and protest movements like Palestine Action; only this can explain the complete loss of a moral compass on the part of our elites when the existence of illegal, amoral, even evil, political and military behaviour is there for all to see.

However, I believe the ultimate explanation for this retreat by our leaders from standing for the values of international justice and human rights that they proclaim when it suits them, is the sheer horror of the attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas on 7th October 2023. The violence on that bloody day was visceral, cruel and ethnically-charged: it was as close to an actual pogrom as anything since the Holocaust. And in a microcosm of the compensatory support and enablement of a Jewish homeland by the guilty European powers in the late 1940s, so Hamas’ act of self-destructive insanity has condemned all Gazans in the minds of pro-Israel politicians, commentators and journalists as psychotic Jew-hating terrorists. It is the Gazans’ Original Sin. Nothing therefore Israel does to “punish”, not just the perpetrators of the Hamas attack, but the very men, women and children from whose communities those perpetrators emerged, is too severe, too dreadful, too genocidal. One could argue that no one in any position of power either regionally or globally, has ever cared very much about the fate of the Palestinians, but it seems the Gazans who voted Hamas into power nearly 20 years ago are now cast as pariahs, deserving of everything the IDF can throw at them. Even if all Gazans still support Hamas’ rule and tactics (which is hard to believe, given its consequences), they must still be punished, apparently, for their thought-crimes.

When the dust finally settles and the smoke clears on what I fear will be Israel’s imperial settlement, not only of the Palestine/Israel “conflict”, but probably of the wider eastern Mediterranean as well, History will perhaps conclude that among others, the U.K. establishment lost not only its moral compass, but also its moral authority when it excused and enabled the great war crime of our times - the destruction of the people of Gaza.

8th July 2025

[hjohn3]

Turning Point

Why Labour’s Disability Cuts Rebellion Mean Things May Never Be The Same Again

Source: BBC

By Honest John

THE REBELLION by over 121 members of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) who signed an amendment allowing them not to vote in support of the budgetary cuts to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) for disability benefits claimants, which comprised the most consequential aspects of the government’s Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment bill is extraordinary. The vote passed, but without great enthusiasm, by 75 votes. The substantial concessions Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Liz Kendall permitted the rebels, which has left PIP in place for all existing claimants and ensured the tightened thresholds for successful claims will only apply to new claimants, did not satisfy everyone. With 150,000 people still projected to be driven into poverty by the revised bill’s proposals, there remains significant disaffection amongst Labour MPs to what they regard as a tin-eared front bench and a dictatorial Number 10. The significance of this rebellion goes far beyond irritation with an out-of-touch leadership however. For a government elected just shy of twelve months ago, with a working majority of 165 seats, to lose the substance of a flagship policy, is unprecedented. Why so many PLP members, by no means drawn from the “usual suspects” on the left of the party, were so infuriated with the perceived wrong-headedness of the disability budget cuts was not simply a result of angst felt by non-ministerial MPs who believed that welfare reform carried out in this way is not “a Labour thing to do”, it also derived from a final and perhaps decisive, Parliamentary disaffection with what has animated the government’s fiscal thinking ever since the general election and Reeves becoming Chancellor. The rebellion was little short of a repudiation of a political and economic direction; effectively a rejection of what “Starmerism” currently appears to be. The government has well over four years to go in office, but after the destruction of the benefits bill as originally conceived, by its own MPs, it is possible that twelve months in, things may never be the same again.

At the heart of this imbroglio lies the intense confusion that has defined Starmer’s government since it was elected this time last year. I have in previous blogs described the government as schizophrenic: it has a legislative programme that includes many measures that have been welcomed by the left (rail nationalisation, the workers’ rights bill and the proposed house building programme being obvious examples) and yet fiscally, it has cleaved to Treasury neoliberal orthodoxy, fetishised its voluntary “fiscal rules”, and comically restricted its room for manoeuvre by ruling out any and all direct tax increases. This has created a bizarre situation in which the government has a recognisably social democratic vision it seemingly never wishes to talk about, and which is utterly constrained by a fiscal strategy that stands in direct opposition to its expansionist instincts. Given the financial hole left by the Conservatives, the fiendishly expensive costs of UK borrowing thanks to the antics of Liz Truss, and Rachel Reeves’ uncritical obeisance to the Treasury and the Office of Budgetary Responsibility (OBR), substantial cuts to day-to-day government spending were inevitable given all other revenue-raising options had been discarded. In many ways, the disabilities benefits rebellion has arisen from the intense frustration on the part of many Labour MPs at the fiscal cul-de-sac the government has seemingly deliberately driven itself into, and they have been forced to defend on the doorstep for too long.

Added to the cognitive dissonance that accompanies such contradictory positioning, what passes for Starmerism has also been characterised by dreadful political misjudgements, woeful policy positioning and catastrophic messaging. Apparently wilfully ignoring why it was elected (to restore public services, improve pay and living standards within a growing economy, reduce a reliance on high immigration and to address regional and social inequalities), Starmer and Reeves have instead behaved as though the public’s main ask of a Labour government was to demonstrate fiscal rectitude a la 1997. Where the government did take strong policy positions they were uniformly disastrous: removing winter fuel payments when there was no fiscal need to do so; issuing unconvincing but divisive and stigmatising statements and imagery on immigration and asylum seeking, and carelessly throwing its left wing and Muslim vote overboard by its cuts to public spending and its virtually uncritical support of Israel when the Zionist state is credibly carrying out genocide in Gaza. At times it has seemed as though Labour is governing in the interests of the bond markets, Reform voters and right wing Zionism. No wonder the PLP has become confused, despondent and angry - reflecting in this the views of much of the wider electorate. Hence the disabilities benefits rebellion.

This rebellion is not something that Starmer, Reeves and Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney can simply “move on” from. If winter fuel became a totem of Labour’s collapse in popular support, the gutting of the Universal Credit and PIP bill has also shredded not just Starmer’s political authority, but the entire fiscal strategy on which his “project” was built. Along with the restoration of the winter fuel allowance, the almost certain abolition of the two child benefit cap later in the year, and now the loss of the £5bn a year of savings the welfare bill was intended to deliver, Reeves’ fiscal rules are essentially holed below the waterline - the overwhelming message of this assertion of PLP power is that there can be no spending cuts on direct public services this Parliament. It has opened up a debate the Labour leadership has hitherto shut down - i.e. the role of higher taxation to fund public services, reduce inequality and grow the economy, and the resultant enhanced role of the state in managing the post-Brexit economy.

Reeves’ position as Chancellor must now therefore be called into question given the political disasters her stance and actions have visited on the government. Similarly Morgan McSweeney’s reputation as a strategic genius, always dubious, is also probably fatally undermined. As Chief of Staff, McSweeney should have seen this rebellion coming and been able to intervene to blunt its impact. However, McSweeney introduced a bullying culture at the PM’s Office that has no time for MPs. Animated it seems by nothing more substantial than a hatred of Labour’s Corbynite left, McSweeney has presided over serial electoral defeats, collapsed poll ratings and a complete disconnect between No 10 and the government’s own MPs. Both figures may cling on for a time, but the entire approach they represent had been discredited and there is very little chance either will be in their current roles by the time of the next election.

The unravelling goes on. If Reeves goes, or stays in a much diminished position, what becomes of the economic neoliberalism espoused by the Treasury and accepted uncritically by the Chancellor? If the fiscal rules are effectively over, what is the point of the OBR any longer? Should it be abolished and replaced with an objective financial planning body that looks to long term investment, managed national debt and improvements to social goods as key to a successful economy rather than obsessing over year-on-year financial balance? And of course, the key question - what of Starmer himself? The PM’s lack of vision, consistency and political hinterland make him more exposed than any Prime Minister in recent history. After the public failure of Starmerism, is there any long term future for the man himself? Starmer’s very suppleness may be the saving of him and he certainly does not lack a survival instinct: in a mea culpa interview with his biographer Tom Baldwin published in The Observer last weekend, Starmer clearly distanced himself from the political strategy championed by McSweeney and its accompanying anti-migrant rhetoric designed to attract Reform voters. Instead Starmer emphasised his intention to lead a progressive political party that would take the fight to Farage, clearly aware of the tidal wave that was engulfing Reeves’ and Kendall’s so-called welfare reform. One could be forgiven for seeing another exercise in Starmer shape-shifting underway.

In truth, it could go either way. Starmer is in no danger of any immediate leadership challenge. His most credible Labour opponents are safely ensconced in Mayoralties and without Parliamentary seats; no obvious challenger comes to mind. The Labour Party, unlike the Conservatives , is not keen on regicide, and one glimpse at the chaos of the Tory years provides clear evidence that changing Prime Ministers mid-term, rarely ends well for a ruling party. However, make no mistake, the destruction of the disabilities bill is a turning point. It has, certainly for now, re-set the balance of power within Labour in favour of backbench MPs and probably permanently discredited the top-down authoritarian practices of McSweeney and his team. The choice is Starmer’s own. If he doubles down on fiscal restraint and centrist sectarianism as represented by Reeves and McSweeney, then I believe he is doomed. He will be a lame duck Prime Minister reacting to events and poor advice with no political lodestar or allies to guide him. In truth, no one wants the self-limiting ordnances and “difficult decisions” so beloved of Reeves - not most of the Cabinet, clearly not the PLP, not much of the sympathetic media and, crucially, virtually none of the electorate. If Starmer maintains his current course a leadership challenge will, I believe, be inevitable. If however Starmer acts on what he claims are his real views as articulated in the The Observer and visibly becomes less of a cipher for others and more of a recognisable social democratic Prime Minister, he could yet salvage his premiership.

These are perilous times for Keir Starmer personally, but the PLP rebellion may actually be remembered as the moment the PM was forced to re-set his political project in a way that chimes with Labour supporters but also with the wider electorate. With Farageism still making hay, such a re-set that champions higher tax for the wealthy, well-funded public services, stimulus green economics and a managed economy, could be transformative for a country seemingly in a permanent divided and angry doom loop. Whether or not Starmer survives is actually a secondary question - the key issue brought to the fore by this momentous Parliamentary rebellion is no less than the fight for the future direction of the country itself.

2nd July 2025

[hjohn3]

(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang by Heaven 17 (1981)

Recent events in the United States, particularly the sight of marines on the streets of Los Angeles to enforce Donald Trump’s draconian slew of migrant deportations in the teeth of huge civil protest and the horrific murders of a Democrat state politician and her husband in Minnesota, brought to my mind the tremendous track by early 1980s synth-pop band Heaven 17, (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang. The group, one of an insurgent wave of serious outfits who had dropped post-punk guitar sound for synthesiser-led tunes and which incorporated the Human League, New Order, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and Yazoo, released this postmodern disco anthem as a protest against what the songwriters (Glenn Gregory, Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware) saw as an incipient fascism on the rise in America driven by the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980. By labelling Reagan as ‘fascist god in motion’, Heaven 17 saw the track, their debut single, banned by the BBC and greeted with a general reluctance to play it by other British radio media. Despite this, Fascist Groove Thang still made no 45 in the U.K. singles chart.

The track also bestowed on the band an aura of political cool that propelled the resultant album, the critically-acclaimed Penthouse and Pavement to much greater chart success than the single later in 1981. This success allowed Heaven 17 to become a leading light in the so-called “alternative dance” music of the early 80s which saw hip British musicians embrace American black dance vibes and re-invent them for a U.K. audience who hated Thatcher but who had tired of the po-faced politics-on-your-sleeve of punk. Given that where the US leads, sadly much of the western world follows, and with Reform U.K. mixing its toxic brew of divisive rhetoric and easy populist lies, Fascist Groove Thang has never felt more prescient or relevant.

[hjohn3]

Why George Osborne Still Runs Britain

An excellent article by Will Dunn in this week’s New Statesman in which Dunn reviews the breathtaking insouciance of David Cameron’s Chancellor, George Osborne, whose evidence-free experiment in devastating austerity economics (aided by the Cable and Clegg-led Liberal Democrats, and a disgraceful consensus amongst institutions and media across the developed world that slashing public spending was the “only” solution to the debt crisis of 2008-2010) played havoc with public services and people’s living standards for more than a decade. The baleful affects of Osborne’s unforgivable assault on the poor and the UK’s public realm are with us still and go some way to explain the continuing appeal of the far right. The article also explains how a confused Labour government under doctrinaire neoliberal Rachel Reeves and seemingly politically vacant Prime Minister Keir Starmer cling to austerity’s verities, despite the resultant damage to Labour’s own core support.

Dispiritingly, there is little that we don’t already know in Dunn’s assessment, but it is nonetheless a scathing takedown of one of the most unserious, yet consequential, politicians of the last twenty years and the witless lightweights who have followed him. I strongly recommend it.

HJ

20th May 2025

[hjohn3]

Reform Lite or Labour Re-set?

Why There May Be More to Labour’s Immigration White Paper than Meets the Eye

Source: Electronic Immigration Network website

By Honest John

WHEN GLANCING at the headlines accompanying the launch of Labour’s new White Paper on immigration, one could, if one was on the left, be forgiven for having another “here we go” moment in respect of Keir Starmer’s government, drearily familiar from numerous dropping of previous policy positions before the last election and from some of the abysmal political messaging and actions since Labour entered government that has done so much to collapse its support in such record time. In fact Keir Starmer’s “remarks” (rather than speech) launching the proposed new immigration policy seemed to confirm the expectation that Labour’s drubbing at the hands of Reform at the local elections earlier this month, would result in Starmer leaning in on Reform rhetoric on migration, and like his predecessor Tory governments, join the seemingly endless race to the bottom when it comes to what passes for debate on immigration in this country. However, more detailed scrutiny of the White Paper itself belies such an easy initial assessment. Its proposals, although deliberately aimed at reducing Britain’s dependence on migrant workers to keep vital elements of the U.K. going, is much more nuanced than the early headlines and left-wing outrage would imply. In fact there is a lot more to the White Paper than meets the eye. In my opinion it is a carefully thought through approach to migration policy that does endeavour to be fair, but is also determined to break with the model of low wage high immigration workforces that has characterised the U.K. probably since Thatcher’s deindustrialisation and her and her successors’ neutralisation of the trade unions, and certainly since Brexit and Covid. The document does not, thankfully, indulge in much of the way of nativist or culture war rhetoric (unlike Farage or Rishi Sunak): above all it is an economic assessment of Britain’s arguable over-reliance on migrant labour, which makes it worthy of taking seriously and on its own merits.

Starmer’s speech, behind which I detect the malign hand of Morgan McSweeney, doesn’t do much to deflect the accusations of Reform-lite posturing however. The “remarks” were riddled with loaded statements from the reference to a ‘squalid chapter in our politics, economy and history’ that led to an ‘experiment in open borders’ to the phrase that raised the greatest liberal ire, a claim that a continuance of high immigration would result in ‘an island of strangers that does not walk together’. That phrase is hardly “Powellite” as left wing critics claimed (Powell after all was predicting, and arguably trying to provoke, an actual race war between the “native” English and recent West Indian arrivals), but despite masquerading as a plea for social solidarity it was knowingly stigmatising and possibly a pop at multiculturalism and the ethnic segregation that applies in certain parts of the country. He also claimed high immigration was a contribution to the ‘forces pulling our country apart’ - probably a reference to Reform itself, but a phrase that could, probably deliberately, be taken several ways. To this extent Starmer was definitely reaching out to the anti-immigration Reform voter in former Labour heartlands, and not in a good way. So far, so predictable, but Starmer also defended the need for continued immigration into the U.K. to keep the economy going, he referenced the positive contribution of migrants to society and criticised the chronic failure of employers to invest in skills training for U.K.-based workers, in preference for overseas low wage recruitment. Interestingly he utilised the Brexit “Take Back Control” slogan, not purely in reference to borders, but also to the management of the economy itself. These are statements that would not have found their way into a Farage speech and are the basis of the substance of the White Paper.

The White Paper denotes a decisive break with previous immigration policy. One of the frustrating aspects of the posture of the series of Tory governments from 2010 until last year, and Labour under Ed Miliband, was that there was constant rhetoric about the need to bring immigration down while at the same time presiding over, and encouraging, a neoliberal economic settlement (both within and outside the EU) that celebrated flexible labour markets, non-unionised workforces and high corporate profits - in other words a system that led inevitably to a dependence in key sectors on low wage, mobile workforces that post-industrial Britain could not or would not furnish. The result has been a significant growth in legal net migration, which rose from 111,000 entrants in June 2020 to 908,000 in June 2023. The Office of National Statistics estimates that on this trajectory, despite a slight fall in 2024, the U.K. population is likely to rise by nearly 5 million people by 2032, most of which is attributed to a growth in net migration. There is therefore a genuine issue at play here - in terms not just of social cohesion but also of pressure on social infrastructure, particularly in the cities and towns.

In very brief summary the White Paper includes the following:-

It amends the minimum educational requirements for the so-called Skilled Worker Route (SWR), from A-level equivalent to degree, and excludes certain areas from the RSW, such as technical, supervisory and senior care roles, into which it wishes employers to recruit U.K. based applicants. Salary thresholds will be raised to £38,700 from £26,200 for SWR roles and such jobs will be required to be advertised at market rates, monitored by a new Migration Advisory Committee (MAC);

The Temporary Shortage List (TSL), introduced by Boris Johnson’s government to help employers fill post-Brexit labour shortages in logistics, hospitality, food production and care by recruiting workers from outside the EU, will remain, but employers will have to evidence approved skills and training strategies, an absence of exploitative recruitment and workplace practices and a timeframe within which to reduce reliance on the TSL as its primary source of workers.

The Health and Care Visa route will be closed. From this year, no further visas for new health or care workers will be issued, although this will not affect existing visa holders. The Paper correctly states the care sector is characterised by low pay, poor working conditions and a very heavy reliance on overseas recruitment. Fair Pay Agreements will be introduced, to be agreed between government, care providers and workers to boost pay, and improve conditions with a view to encouraging domestic workforce applicants and to protect existing migrant workers.

Family Migration and Earned Settlement rules will be made much tighter. The minimum financial qualification for family entrants will be retained at £36,700 and language competence requirements for dependents will be increased to A1 (Beginners) at application, rising to A2 (Elementary) during application and B1/B2 (low Intermediate) at settlement. Indefinite Leave to Reside applications will require ten years residency, up from five years, and applicants will need to provide evidence of economic, social or civic contributions to wider society in order to be approved.

Applications for the dependents of foreign university students will be restricted to postgraduates and those students undertaking long term accredited research.

I would argue that the immigration White Paper, which is by no means flawless, represents the first serious attempt in recent decades to actually manage legal migration into the U.K. as opposed to leaving it to market forces. It recognises immigration for what it is: an economic phenomenon which should the serve needs of the British economy first and foremost and not be a means to depress wages, exploit the vulnerable and prevent unionisation of workforces. By avoiding nativist rhetoric, but by implication recognising the genuine concern of many British citizens at the recent exponential rise in legal migration, it is arguably a step towards detoxifying a divisive debate exploited by chancers, racists and would-be authoritarians like Nigel Farage and his crew. There is little a social democrat, socialist or even liberal, should find fundamentally objectionable to its contents. State intervention to reduce exploitative employment practices is a good thing; government insistence that employers invest in skills and training goes some way to rectify the shocking retreat of business from its responsibilities in this sphere, and could result in the restoration of apprenticeships and technical training on which the regeneration of our towns requires; there nothing objectionable about Fair Pay Agreements within the care sector, a change arguably long overdue. An insistence on language competence on the part of migrants and their families is entirely reasonable, both in terms of improving societal cohesion but also enabling full participation of migrants in wider society, particularly women. By its determination to “take back control” and manage both domestic and migrant workforces we may be seeing the first faltering steps of a Labour re-set - the return to a managed economy and the final break with neoliberalism.

But let’s not get carried away- some of the proposals carry huge risks. In particular, the startling intention to end Health and Care visas with almost immediate effect. Whereas some care home employers are indeed exploitative, for many the reliance on migrant workers is a direct result of squeezed margins brought about about by parsimonious tariffs set by austerity-hit local authorities. In many areas there are not hundreds of unemployed U.K. citizens just waiting for care home wages to rise so they can apply for care vacancies: there is a very real risk in parts of the country the care home sector could collapse, with catastrophic consequences for the elderly and the wider NHS. Even Farage has acknowledged that health and social care will continue to require immigrant labour. If mishandled, the suspension of care visas could become a political millstone for Labour that will dwarf the devastating impact of the winter fuel allowance cuts. Similarly, the universities, forced to recruit internationally by government cuts to their funding, could find themselves financially unsustainable if the ending of dependents’ visas result in a collapse of foreign applications. The family financial thresholds that foreign spouses of British citizens have to meet in order to join their partners in the U.K. are unnecessarily harsh and will continue to prevent many from ever joining their husbands or wives, which is cruel, legally challengeable and must be rethought, preferably rescinded. After all “mixed” marriages of this nature are perhaps the epitome of the integration Labour says it wishes to achieve.

However, these very contradictions may push Labour much “further and faster” in the direction of a social democratic economy than Starmer actually intends or anticipates. Subsidy of some key industries in terms of training, recruitment and location costs will be essential if foreign visa applicants are significantly reduced by these measures. Is Rachel Reeves ready for the interventionism, possibly the nationalisations, with particular reference to the care sector, that may inevitably follow? It would be ironic indeed if the immigration White Paper led to the overthrow of the hated fiscal rules and the abandonment of outdated Treasury “orthodoxy”.

Politically the proposals may, for once, also work. They comprise a rules-based programme unlike the unachievable “Stop The Boats” nonsense of the previous regime (and of course is focused on legal migration and avoids the inappropriate conflation with asylum seeking, so beloved of the populists). By linking the desire to reduce immigration to the management of the wider economy, Labour is throwing out a challenge to the Tories and Reform which is not part of a racism bidding war, but a practical set of proposals to de-incentivise the default position of so much of British-based business to look to low wage migrant workforces first to keep their costs low and profits high. There is calculation - net migration is projected to fall again in 2025 - but in tandem with the implementation of social democratic policies already legislated for, a new interventionist narrative could be set. Labour have a lot of ground to make up after its major missteps, but having the determination to meet the most divisive issue in the U.K. head on without simply aping the divisiveness of the far right, the government is evidencing a level of political courage that has hitherto been absent.

There will be pitfalls and misjudgments, but if Labour’s immigration policy succeeds in improving pay and conditions, providing employment opportunities to working class communities and encouraging social solidarity across all national and ethnic groups, it may yet be judged as one of the most substantial achievements of this beleaguered administration. It may even be the beginning of a new recognisably Labour narrative.

16th May 2025

Source for some of the White Paper detail: summary by Richard Chambers Immigration Barristers (immigrationbarrister.co.uk)

[hjohn3]

Reform Breakthrough?

The Populist Surge and Labour’s Self-Inflicted Woes

Source: The Communist

By Honest John

THE UNDOUBTED winners of last Thursday’s local elections were Reform U.K. The insurgent party secured control of ten councils, it won 677 council seats, far and away more than any other party contesting the locals, and won two of the five Mayoralties being fought. In addition, Nigel Farage’s party won the Runcorn and Helsby by election from Labour, albeit eye-wateringly narrowly, but it still succeeded in what was Labour’s forty ninth safest seat on a swing of 17% from the governing party. The Reform surge can no longer be dismissed as a media concoction or wishful thinking by disaffected commentators on left and right. Reform are now a party of government and along with the Liberal Democrats and Greens, who are also on the rise, would appear to threaten the continuance of the Labour government after the next general election, and possibly the continued existence of the Conservative Party altogether. How have we reached a pass where a party credibly described as far right is now discussed as the potential largest grouping within a future right wing government and its leader, until recently dismissed as a blowhard chancer, is now viewed as a potential Prime Minister?

Reform have certainly tapped into a widespread disaffection with the two main parties, particularly with their focus on immigration, but more generally they have prospered as a party not tainted with the fourteen years of destruction and failure associated with the Conservatives or the tin-eared amateurism of the current Labour administration. The roots of this lie in the disenchantment first discerned, to the apparent surprise of the commentariat, in the vote to leave the European Union in 2016, and then followed up with a surge of support for the leftist populism of Jeremy Corbyn a year later, and the easy falsehoods of Boris Johnson in 2019. The unifying theme of all three votes was a profound dissatisfaction with stunted living standards, crumbling public services and a low wage, high immigration economy seemingly focused more on maximising shareholder value than providing a decent standard of living for British citizens. In short, however seemingly contradictory, the votes of the last decade have all arguably been votes against economic neoliberalism and a perceived metropolitan social liberalism more concerned with marginal activist causes than the bread and butter issues of wages, public services and inflation. Labour’s victory last summer has rightly been described as conditional, not just because of its relatively low share of the vote, but because Keir Starmer’s party, with its promise of change and renewal was taken at its word: and failure to deliver would not be accepted by a palpably suspicious electorate.

Labour’s current woes are almost entirely self-inflicted. The Tory legacy was so dreadful it should not have been difficult for a left of centre party to describe a programme of rebuilding and social renewal, while being frank with the electorate about the time such a programme will take and the need to bring more cash into the economy through increased borrowing and taxation. The public would have been at least receptive to such a message and it would have had the novelty of for once treating voters as if they were adults. Instead Labour’s messaging has been consistently catastrophic. Despite legislating for a range of recognisably social democratic policies, all of which have a degree of popular support, the messages Starmer and his team have sent out, and have been heard by the electorate, is that Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules are “ironclad”; there is therefore no money thanks to a £22bn black hole left by the Tories; borrowing is out, increased corporation tax is out, a wealth tax is out and Labour’s only priority is to grow the economy, with no indication of how this is to be achieved or what that practically means in terms of people’s lived experience. Along the way we have had never-ending freebies scandals, an entirely unnecessary cut to winter fuel payments and, most disgracefully and baffling of all, cuts to disability payments. The public can be forgiven for their oft-quoted conclusion that the parties are “all the same” when Labour almost wilfully is providing prima facie evidence that in terms of its economic priorities and fiscal planning, it is indeed little different from the Tories.

The challenge of Reform to Labour is not a new phenomenon. The positioning of Farage’s previous vehicle, the Brexit Party, to stand down in seats where Johnson’s Conservatives were head-to-head with Labour in 2019, was a major factor in the collapse of Labour’s support in the so-called Red Wall. Johnson’s message of regenerating post-industrial Britain outside the EU is not dissimilar to that of Reform now as Farage begins to tilt left. However, Labour’s response to Reform has not been to emphasise its genuinely transformative and growth orientated policies, such as the workers’ rights bill, the renters’ charter, increases to the Living Wage, more money for public services, the planned housing programme, the large investment in the NHS or rail and bus nationalisation. Instead, Labour has gone down the political rabbit hole of stigmatising migrants and asylum seekers, as if the very neoliberal economic model apparently so beloved of Reeves and Starmer does not require large numbers of immigrants to fill the low paid work that is so characteristic of the extractive model of modern British capitalism.

Labour has begun to outline the contours of a new economic model but it never talks about it - crippled by its own increasingly unsustainable fiscal rules and utterly hemmed in by the pre-election commitments the party made concerning taxation. The much-lauded (and utterly overrated) Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's Chief of Staff, cut his political teeth fighting the far right in Barking and is on record as stating that one should never give credence to the views of the extremist right by mimicking them. McSweeney now seems incapable of following his own advice as Labour gives every impression of cosplaying Reform with its "migrants in chains" videos and boasts about deportation numbers. Any hope a Labour government might begin to detoxify what passes for the immigration debate in this country has been long extinguished.

If this dreary and predictable positioning worked, then at least there would be some cynical justification for it, but what last Thursday’s results demonstrated is not only are the “Reform curious” voters not interested in this posturing, preferring the alleged authenticity of “Nigel” on the issue, but it actually drives core Labour voters to the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, both of whom made significant gains in the locals. Labour have managed to get themselves into a position where they are pleasing nobody - disappointing the general voter looking for positive change in the social fabric of the country while also infuriating its own voter base.

If Labour are floundering in its response to Reform, the Conservatives are simply collapsing. Whereas it is true that Reform took votes from both Conservatives and Labour on Thursday, in terms of number of council seats lost, the damage was overwhelmingly felt by the Tories. In fact the number of Reform seat gains (676) and the number of equivalent Tory losses (674) is startlingly similar, indicating that for all the talk of Reform being an existential threat to both parties, Reform switchers are still found disproportionately in the ranks of former Tory voters.

Unlike the Labour Party (whose premature death is foretold with wearisome regularity), it is rare that such a fate is predicted for the Conservative Party - even in 1997, the year of Tony Blair’s great General Election victory, the Tory defeat was certainly described in apocalyptic terms, but the question was never seriously raised as to whether the Conservatives would disappear as a viable political force. However, 2024/25 is a very different political moment. As stated above, Reform continue to grow its voter base at the expense of the Conservatives, particularly among those Labour-to-Tory defectors that characterised the 2015 and 2019 General Elections and who voted for Brexit in such large numbers. Under the confused leadership of Kemi Badenoch, the Tories seem unable to grasp just how fundamentally bad their political position is. The bizarre set of policy stunts perpetrated by the fag end Tory PMs - Johnson’s “oven ready” Brexit deal, the lunacy of Truss’ mini-budget and the hopeless mix of Thatcherism and populism served up by Sunak, symbolised by the unloved and unworkable Rwanda offshoring scheme - indicated a party that had lost its governing purpose after the destructive energy of austerity, which in itself did so much ultimately to drain Tory votes and created the desperate environment in which Reform has thrived. Until Badenoch’s party demonstrates at least insight as to the fact that it is previous Tory policy offers that have turned the party into a political leper, the rehabilitation of the Conservatives in the voters’ eyes cannot even begin. Like Labour, arguably with more justification, the party remains obsessed with chasing the the Reform vote and ignoring the fact the Liberal Democrats demolished the Tories’ southern blue wall last summer and continues to do so a local level - the Lib Dems made 163 council seat gains last week, mostly at the expense of the Conservatives. The opportunist moderate-turned-populist, Robert Jenrick hopes to unseat Badenoch and “unite the right” through an electoral pact with Reform but at present, the insurgents aren’t playing, not wanting to be associated with a party that remains politically untouchable.

However, we mustn’t get carried away by Reform’s success and overinterpret it. Last Thursday’s breakthrough, if indeed it was a breakthrough, came about through a number of factors that will not necessarily be repeated at a General Election. The councils up for grabs were located predominantly in the Brexit-supporting heartlands, those areas that enthusiastically voted for Boris Johnson in 2021, which explains the scale of Tory losses and, to a lesser extent, why Labour was always going to struggle too. The First Past The Post electoral system unusually worked for Reform at these locals due to the concentration of its vote in post-industrial towns whose councils were being contested. This will not be the case in a General Election and Reform’s voter base, despite some evidence that younger people are taking an interest in the party, remains overwhelmingly white, male, late middle-aged and elderly and culturally working class. Equally Reform’s rightist populism remains a major turn-off for much of the electorate: it is significant that Reform achieved their success on a 30% turnout- even the much derided 2024 General Election saw a turnout twice that. The Tories are unlikely to fall below 100 seats at the next General Election, meaning the right wing vote in the UK will remain fatally split. Those who predict Labour will lose power to a Reform/Tory coalition at the next election fail to grasp that Reform’s reach still remains limited and just how far the Conservatives have fallen. As matters stand, Labour's majority will certainly go, but Starmer's party could afford to lose 150 seats to a variety of opponents and still end up with probably 100 seats more than the Conservatives, its nearest rival, be by far the largest party in the House of Commons and be able to form its own left of centre coalition, in likelinood with the Liberal Democrats.

There are structural problems with Reform too. Fundamentally it remains a Farage vehicle and pressure group, obsessed with immigration and a membership and leadership that consists mostly of dissident right wing Tories. It has no comprehensive policy offer - no one knows what Reform’s health policy, education policy, transport policy or fiscal policy is, for example, because it doesn’t have them. Policy formulation consists of little more than the overexposed Farage musing on social media and in interviews. The Rupert Lowe affair illustrates that for all Reform’s attempts to “professionalise”, it remains a cultish one man band whose supporters vote “for Nigel”. If Reform is to became a serious contender for national power then it will need to get serious about its policy offer (even on immigration it remains infuriatingly vague) . If its growing base is the disaffected former working class, then it will have to ultimately drop its performative right wing populism and start describing what it will do to improve living standards and public services, something that eluded Farage’s populist predecessor, Boris Johnson, to the Tories’ cost. Reform are now in government in ten local authorities and two Mayoralties so its test in this respect may arrive sooner than it might wish.

The foregoing illustrates that there remains both time and space for the Labour government to rediscover its governing mission and begin to deliver for the voters who so comprehensively rejected the Tories less than a year ago. The rise of Reform is, intriguingly, of a piece with Brexit, Corbynism, Johnson’s boosterism and even Labour’s own message of “Change” at the last election. All the electoral evidence is there that the voters wish to see a return of an interventionist, protecting state that will rejuvenate local communities and build the public infrastructure that can boost the growth that Labour claims it wants. Labour can yet renew itself by rejecting the neoliberalism that has been dispiritingly on display under the catastrophic Reeves, and its numbskulled political messaging promoted by the busted flush that is Morgan McSweeney. Starmer’s initial response to the local election and by election losses was typically ambiguous - to pursue the change that voters want “further and faster” - and could indicate more aping of Reform’s simplistic verities rather than the rebuilding of the public realm which is probably the best way to blunt the salience of Farage’s message. Labour’s fate remains overwhelmingly in its own hands and the choices it makes over the next couple of years will define whether the Reform surge of 2025 will eventually be viewed as a false dawn, or if Starmer’s government, through wilful adherence to an economic dead horse, will effectively enable the British far right to stride towards national political power for the first time in the UK’s history.

5th May 2025

[hjohn3]

A good illustration of how an economically illiterate Labour Chancellor, cosplaying as a Tory one, will, through her Spring Statement, fail to do anything to address the skewed structure of the British economy inherited from the real Tories. These cuts and borrowings will simply push more people into poverty, do nothing for public services, except reduce them, and please no one. If Labour want to get re-elected in four years time, as Murphy says, Reeves has to go: she quite simply doesn’t know what she’s doing - or even why.

[hjohn3]

‘Not A Labour Thing’*

Labour’s Defining Welfare Moment

Source: Nichola Jennings/Guardian

By Honest John

YESTERDAY, AFTER the story being trailed for the best part of a fortnight by most major news outlets, Liz Kendall stood up in the House of Commons to announce the government would enact over £5bn of cuts to disability benefits, principally to the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), currently claimed by 3.6m people, to be fully achieved by 2030. These cuts have caused consternation on the Labour back benches (concern not confined to the usual “left” suspects), among poverty and social support charities and lobby groups, and amongst Labour voters. It would seem that Keir Starmer’s confused and contradictory government may have reached its defining moment, when the Blairites and neoliberals who have allegedly predominantly had his ear since the election, have finally won out over the social democrats of the “soft left” and introduced a policy even George Osborne at the height of Cameron’s austerity shied away from. It has enacted a measure that will symbolically as much as practically, remove support from some of the most vulnerable members of society for no other reason than to save money. As even Ed Balls remarked on Political Currency, the podcast he co-presents with Osborne: ‘cutting the benefits of the most vulnerable in our society, who can’t work… it’s not a Labour thing to do… It’s not what they’re for’. What greater demonstration of the reassertion of neoliberalism as Labour’s governing creed and the supremacy of Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules, than to pull resources away from the most needy, to the consternation even of New Labour’s former Chancellor?

Let’s however examine the government’s reasoning behind these cuts. Although the emphasis has shifted more recently - particularly with regard to Starmer’s own justifications - in her announcement to the Commons, Kendall repeatedly couched the logic behind making savings to the disability and long term conditions budgets as being part of a programme to get people capable of doing so, back to work. She asserted, as had repeated Department of Work and Pensions and Downing Street briefings in the run up to her speech, that the welfare bill, with particular reference to disability payments, has risen exponentially and is unsustainable, with many claimants not being encouraged sufficiently to re-enter the workforce, despite many being capable of doing so.

Let’s be clear: welfarism does not equate to socialism, or even social democracy; it has more in common with liberal Toryism or Social Liberalism. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher was notoriously comfortable with growing welfare payments as the price of deindustrialisation and breaking the power of the trade unions. There is a respectable left-wing argument that a social democratic government should not simply allow citizens to fester on benefits and should encourage and enable them to contribute their labour to the economy. The much remarked upon sluggish growth of that economy would indeed be boosted by what we used to term “full employment”. The Welfare State, as originally envisioned by its Liberal and Labour architects in the mid twentieth century, was intended to be a safety net for those citizens temporarily fallen on hard times, not a final destination for the economically inactive.

It is also true that claims for PIP and other disability benefits have ballooned in recent years, particularly since Covid. Since 2018/19, the disability budget has risen by £20bn and is forecast to hit over £70bn over the next five years. These are genuinely huge numbers. The impact of the pandemic, particularly on young people’s mental health, has indeed been dramatic. There is a legitimate argument that the level and extent of claims for disability and long term condition support should be investigated and verified, and if claimants can be supported back into work, then they should be. However, this is not where the government has either started or finished in its rationale. In truth, for a real reassessment of the continued veracity of each claimant’s payments, to be carried out accurately and fairly, then there is little alternative to a case-by-case review, involving the individuals themselves, employers, social services and, probably, the NHS. Such a review would be time-consuming, probably taking years to complete, but at the end of it, the government could be confident that those supported back into work, even against their better judgement, would be capable of working and that no one in genuine need would be disadvantaged. This is not however what the government propose.

The cuts will manifest themselves as a tightening of the eligibility criteria for PIP, which is, for many recipients, ironically the very supplementary payment to core disability allowances that often enable disabled people and people with long term conditions to continue to work at least part- time. This reduction of eligibility will take effect from November 2026 to explicitly reduce government expenditure and prevent any further weakening of Reeves’ fiscal rules or Labour’s pre-election promises not to increase direct taxation. The proposal will be a cornerstone of Reeves’ Spring Statement. In other words, for all Pat McFadden’s grand claims that this measure is part of his wish to “reform” the British state, and Kendal’s increasingly desperate bid to frame the cuts as somehow supporting the dignity of labour, the plain fact is that this is entirely a fiscal decision and made for fiscal reasons. It is a political choice to ensure that Labour’s fiscal rules remain “ironclad”, regardless of how the decision punctures the government’s social democratic purpose, appalls its allies and risks plunging thousands of already vulnerable and needy citizens into poverty. Absurdly Starmer talks of “tough decisions” when removing financial support to the poor has been the easiest and most crushingly predictable decision of every Tory government since 1979. It is an ignoble tradition and shames this supposedly reformist left of centre government.

The only conclusion one can draw is that, at least while Reeves remains Chancellor, Labour will not countenance raising money through any source going forward other than by reducing public expenditure. Reeves has already promised the Conservative media that she will not present another tax-raising budget; she has set her face against any further borrowing; there will be no loosening of the self-imposed restriction on direct tax rises, even VAT and Corporation Tax; the blindingly obvious solutions of a wealth tax and/or a revaluation of council tax is not even deemed worthy of discussion. Both Starmer and Reeves also promised that there would be no return to austerity, but on the basis of the PIP decision and what it means for Labour’s management of the public finances, it is hard to see how this can be avoided - at least by this doctrinaire neoliberal Chancellor.

There is also a cynical political calculus to all this. The Labour high command of Starmer, McFadden and Morgan MacSweeney, remain transfixed by the rise and rise of Reform U.K. Their calculation is also that the “Reform Curious” Labour voter quite likes the idea of benefits claimants being victimised and this proposal could be spun as yet another “tough” action by our fearless Prime Minister, meeting the aspirations of the hard-working majority at the expense of the work shy. However, the Labour strategists behave as though the threat to Labour’s electoral position comes entirely from the Right. They seem to fail to appreciate that England is now a multi-party democracy with six political groupings capable of winning Parliamentary seats; in Scotland and Wales that number rises to seven. Of those parties, four (five in Scotland and Wales) are recognisably on the left. Labour assumes the 33.7% of the vote it achieved last time is solid, apart from possible defectors to Reform. In fact, by plunging itself into right wing policy, Labour is just as likely to lose votes to the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the Nationalists and left-wing independents, as they are to Reform. Actions taken that give precedence to invented fiscal rules over what Starmer was elected to do - make people better off, repair public services and increase social solidarity and fairness - could blow Labour’s voting coalition apart. I have been of the view since the election that given the dire state of the Tories and the split Right, it is virtually impossible for Labour to lose the next election under First Past The Post. That probably remains the case, but by being so cavalier with its alleged values and so presumptive about its voters, this politically numbskulled government is opening up a pathway not just to the loss of its majority, which would be spectacular enough, but even to the emergence of a right wing populist grouping, perhaps in some unholy alliance with the populist left, that could challenge Labour for power at the next election. If this transpires, it will be entirely Labour’s own fault.

If Labour maintain this trajectory, it will be unable to fulfill even its relatively modest Manifesto commitments, on the grounds that there is “no money”, let alone those areas desperately in need of repair not included in the King’s Speech, such as social care, criminal justice, the prison system and the toxic water industry: that’s without even mentioning defence. If Starmer continues to allow his government to be defined by impractical and absurd fiscal rules, which no one, not even the bond markets, care about, it will simply tread the same doomed Thatcherite wasteland into which sank his hapless Tory predecessors. This is not inevitable - different political and economic choices can be made (the real “tough decisions”), but as matters stand, both its supporters and its enemies look at the current government and ask themselves if Labour does not believe even the disabled should be protected from disadvantage and poverty, then what on earth is this government for?

19th March 2025

*Ed Balls on his Political Currency podcast in relation to the government’s planned disability cuts.

[hjohn3]

Why a Wealth Tax is Essential if Labour are to Deliver

‘Only the little people pay taxes’ - Leona Helmsley

Source: Bright Graeme Murray website

By Honest John

LABOUR ARE in a pickle. A pickle of their own making of course, but a pickle nonetheless . The huge majority that the party won last July, and now apparently under threat from a surging Reform U.K., was predicated on two explicit promises: to restore public services to at least functionality after 14 years of Tory assault, and to improve working class and lower middle class living standards after well over a decade of stagnation at best and retreat at worst. Much is made of Labour’s low share of the vote at the General Election to de-legitimise its actions, but the truth is, in our newish multi-party democracy, whether the public voted Labour, Liberal Democrat, Nationalist or Reform, they were united in a desire to get rid of the Conservatives, and they knew that the Tories would be replaced by Labour: getting on for 80% of those who voted therefore have a stake in a non-Tory future for the country, and that future is defined above all else by a restored public realm.

I believe Keir Starmer’s Labour is schizophrenic at heart, which explains much of its catastrophic messaging since it was elected and some of its more bizarre decisions, seemingly calculated to annoy as many voters as possible. The King’s Speech of July 2024, which receives far too little attention from political commentators and receives very little promotion by the government itself, reveals a social democratic impulse at heart of the Labour administration - whether it is a better funded elective NHS, improved workers’ and renters’ rights, a publicly owned railway and green energy provider, higher pay for public sector workers or a commitment to devolve political and fiscal power from Westminster to a local government defined by Mayoralties, the democratic socialist direction of travel is clear. Yet within the soul of Starmer himself, and a number of his ministers, most clearly represented by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, there is a neoliberal instinct. It is as though the new government can’t quite bring itself to believe that the old orthodoxy is dead, and that its job is to dust off Wilsonian and Keynesian social democracy and to upgrade it for the 2020s. It is this instinct that is behind the witless and repetitive messaging about the “£22bn black hole” in the public finances which Reeves claimed to have “discovered”; the politically suicidal retention of the cut to the Winter Fuel Allowance on the grounds of “affordability” and the head-scratching decision to support a third runway at Heathrow which, outside the Airport itself, no one seems to want. It also explains the constant parroting of the need for “growth”, like Liz Truss on steroids, without ever explaining how this growth will be generated, or even what it is for.

Crucially however, it is the neoliberal instinct of Starmer and Reeves that explains the allegedly “ironclad” fiscal rules the government has saddled itself with and the extraordinary commitments to raise neither income tax, National Insurance, VAT or even Corporation Tax in the run up to an election defined by the public’s wish to see more government spending on public services. Hence the pickle. I argued after October’s Budget that Reeves had produced an artful financial statement that maintains those fiscal promises, but still raised over £60bn through increased taxes on businesses and increased borrowing in an effort to meet those manifesto promises already legislated for. But how much easier would it have been if Reeves had not made commitments more suited to the austerity governments of David Cameron and Theresa May, than one whose stated purpose was to repair the damage inflicted on the country by the Tories and to “restore” Britain? In fact Reeves compounded her dilemma in the autumn by promptly taking to the airwaves to apologise for her Budget and promising never to do it again, which must be a first for a Chancellor and probably one of the most politically stupid promises to make when there were over four years of this Parliament to run.

The Budget, and for that matter, Labour’s legislative programme, only scratches the surface of the rebuilding of society required after probably the worst period of governance this country has seen since before the Second World War. Social care, criminal justice, the corporate con that is the British water industry, the green agenda, and now, of course, defence, are just some of the underfunded, neglected and yet crucial areas of public policy barely touched by the Budget. Therefore, of course a Labour Chancellor (probably not Reeves) will have to find a way to raise more revenue in order to deliver the change the public voted for. If reneging on the income tax, NI and VAT promises is out of the question, at least for now, then where does the government go? The answer, advocated for many years by left wing economists and, more recently by some not necessarily on the left, is for the U.K. to introduce a wealth tax.

The American businesswoman Leona Roberts Helmsley notoriously remarked, when being prosecuted by the US federal government for tax avoidance in 1989: “We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes,” and so summed up an entire social creed on the part of the wealthy. The long-deceased Helmsley was in fact ahead of her time: over the last 20 years, the net financial worth of the hyper wealthy either resident, or domiciled in, the U.K. has rocketed, particularly since the 2008 crash and the period of Tory rule since 2010. Aided by the side effects of the quantitative easing introduced by the Bank of England during the 2010s to keep inflation low, the rich shifted their wealth primarily from taxable cash, cash-realisable possessions, stock investments and shares dividends into assets - land, property and digital assets held in offshore accounts, most safely beyond the half-hearted reach of HMRC. Whereas tax on work (income tax) increased by nearly 3.5% between 2019 and 2024, the tax on business transactions, assets, land ownership and capital transfers remained static or, in the case of Corporation Tax, was actually reduced until May 2024 when Rishi Sunak belatedly increased the CT rate to 25% from its historically low rate of 19% which pertained for most of the Tory years. This flight of the hyper rich from income earned through salaries or dividends and into speculative assets has turbo charged wealth inequality in the U.K. in an almost unprecedented way: the wealthiest citizens are no longer millionaires but billionaires. According to the Equality Trust, the richest top fifth of the citizens and domiciles of the U.K. own 63% of the country’s wealth compared to 0.8% owned by the bottom fifth. The United Kingdom is believed to to be the most unequal country in Europe in terms of wealth distribution.

Social justice is an extremely good argument for the introduction of a wealth tax, but the urgent need for the taxation of wealth and assets is derives from the requirements for the government to increase its revenues in order to re-fund public services to the level it promised and to stimulate real growth and inward investment to improve the prospects of higher paid employment and improved living standards. Growth at the scale needed to refloat a British economy and its degraded public infrastructure outside the frictionless open markets of the EU, requires far more assertive and interventionist fiscal policy than anything thus far proposed by Reeves, with her increasingly desperate chatter about her growth mission which, it is now abundantly clear, is underwritten by precisely nothing.

The options for wealth taxes were set out most persuasively by the LSE report A Wealth Tax For The U.K. published in 2022. Put simply, the main different models of wealth tax which could be introduced in the U.K. according to the report’s authors include:-

a recurrent tax on personal wealth per individual;

a recurrent tax on assets (e.g. property, land, shareholding);

a one-off tax on the basis of wealth and asset value at a point in time (this would be to obviate tax avoidance behaviours).

The LSE report recommended a one-off tax on the grounds of acceptability to the public and because to the precedent of windfall taxes on the utilities which had attracted general public support. The authors estimate at a taxable rate of 1% on cash holdings and open market value of other assets, commencing at a wealth total of £500,000 per individual, up to £240bn could be raised as exchequer revenue. This figure would dwarf the sums raised by the Chancellor so far and provide major flexibility for the government to invest productively and end the tediously repeated assertion by commentators that “there is no money”. Personally, I would favour raising the wealth tax threshold to £2m worth of cash or assets, but levy the tax at 1% of calculated wealth over two years, raising close to £150bn each of the years concerned, which would affect less than 4m citizens out of a total U.K. population of 66m people. £300bn over two years would give the government a huge contribution to restoring in year budgets (including the notorious “black hole”). It could also provide the necessary stimulus to capital projects, businesses, the Green Prosperity Plan and inward investment that would boost the growth the country needs to make good the vandalism of the the Tory years.

Naturally there would be scepticism on the part of the public as to whether this additional government revenue would be spent wisely and on the priorities that the voters want. To mitigate this distrust I would hypothecate the wealth tax to be spent on social care, criminal justice, improving water industry standards leading to progressive nationalisation, and defence. The expenditure of the revenue raised through the wealth tax could be made publicly available to any citizen on request and would be subject to annual audits to ensure value for money. In time I would make a wealth tax on cash and assets over £2m an annual tax, but at a rate of 0.5% - reducing revenue to £75bn a year, but making the funds available to recurrent public sector budgets to help rebuild austerity-ravaged public services across the board.

The rich would find this mild intrusion on their fortunes intolerable and there would be ferocious attacks on the policy from the Right, claiming that a wealth tax would force “wealth creators” out of the country, destroy jobs and kill aspiration. All self-serving nonsense of course because the one thing the hyper wealthy are very good at is gaslighting their fellow-citizens as to their essential worth and value to the economy, when in fact private sector investment in the U.K. is the lowest in the G7 and has been for years. A Labour government who last summer proudly proclaimed that those with the widest shoulders should bear the greatest burden should have nothing to do with such “arguments” and dispense with the verities of neoliberalism once and for all.

In reality, Labour have little choice. Discernible improvement to living standards, pay and public services are essential if the government is to be re-elected four years’ time. I accept that significant increases to income tax are not politically possible; increases to NI contributions and VAT are also insufficiently progressive to be a long term solution. But, in conjunction with other recurrent revenue-raising measures such as increasing Corporation Tax to the same level as much of the EU and revaluation of Council Tax (which currently disproportionately favours the better off and has not been revalued since 1991), a one-off wealth tax over two years, followed by its annual continuance at a reduced rate could provide the billions needed to deliver the government’s King’s Speech and the raft of other measures needed to make the U.K. , once again, a more prosperous, fair and contented country with a public realm to be proud of.

A wealth tax could enable the real social transformation Labour says it wants and be emblematic of the end of a worldview, in the U.K. at least, so arrogantly articulated by Leona Helmsley all those years ago.

11th February 2025

Source: The LSE report A Wealth Tax For The U.K. by Arun Advani, Emma Chamberlain and Andy Summers.

[hjohn3]

Go figure…

[hjohn3]

Worth reminding ourselves!

Boris Johnson: Get Brexit Done - Unleash Britain’s Potential

Well that worked out well…

[hjohn3]

This News Agents podcast is well worth a listen. The take of Lewis Goodall and Emily Maitliss is that, contrary to my assertion in my latest blog that the British Conservative Party are now a directionless and ideology-free zone, they have in fact adopted an ideology - as faithful followers of the far right.

[hjohn3]

Bleak Midwinter

How Worried Should Labour Be About Reform?

Source: The Telegraph

By Honest John

AS THE New Year begins, things do not seem to be getting any easier for a Labour government not yet six months old. The established narrative that Keir Starmer’s administration is essentially clumsy and clueless seems to be set: a regime in search of a purpose that has already alienated half the electorate. Talk of a one-term government seems everywhere, not least within the Parliamentary Labour Party itself. And just in time for Christmas, The Independent published a seat-by-seat poll of 11,000 voters across the country that indicated if a General Election were held tomorrow, then Labour would lose its majority and, between them, the Conservatives, Reform U.K. and the SNP would win an additional 180 seats, most of them at Labour’s expense. The usual suspects at the Mail and GB News then gleefully produced their own “analyses” which predicted on this trend, Nigel Farage would be in a position to become Prime Minister at the next election. Is it really only last July that Starmer’s party won a 174 seat majority and 411 MPs in the second best General Election performance in its history?

Labour have certainly made some inexplicable decisions, notably retaining the cut in the winter fuel allowance, despite raising over £60bn through additional taxes and borrowing in October; its refusal to meet the recommendations of the Ombudsman in respect of the so-called WASPI Women, despite the adjudicator having reduced the womens’ compensation claim to less than a tenth for most cases; the blatant cronyism of appointing Peter Mandelson to the post of Ambassador to the USA, despite Mandelson having no diplomatic experience and Donald Trump’s returning administration likely to be the most unpredictable and capricious in recent history, and the announcement that the Royal Mail is to be sold off to a Czech billionaire in a dreadful and lazy reprise of Thatcherism’s worst moments, despite all the government’s talk of seeking to return public services to transparency and accountability. These unforced and needlessly politically damaging decisions have encouraged the public’s view that this government hates pensioners, is racked by unseemly factionalism and is, essentially, at best, being politically schizophrenic and at worst, no different from the hated Conservatives.

These politically costly decisions, which have served to deepen Labour’s unpopularity and crashed Starmer’s personal ratings, despite its impressive left of centre policy and legislative programme that broadly meets voters’ priorities, have been compounded by an awful communications strategy that has proclaimed the (largely invented) Tory legacy of the “£22bn black hole” to the point of absurdity, along with the fallacious and dispiriting slogan of the “broken” NHS, to the exclusion of any optimism and positive messaging about what is in truth the most radical programme of planned economic and social transformation since the 1980s. The political operation in Downing Street under the overrated factionalist Morgan McSweeney, seems flat-footed, old-fashioned and desperate to placate the Right - an impossible task and an utter waste of political time. So does this mean that Starmer’s government, characterised by missteps and naivety, is doomed to fail, assailed to oblivion by the malevolence of the right wing media and the “insurgency” of Reform? Well, probably not.

It is perhaps significant that during all the fevered chat about the inevitable rise of Reform at the expense of Labour, no one is mentioning the Conservatives very much. It shouldn’t need stating, but for all the extreme collapse of the Tories at the last election, they are still the largest opposition party in the House of Commons by some chalk. Despite the comprehensive nature of their defeat, the Conservatives remain His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and are still the political party most likely eventually to replace Labour in government, not Reform. That said, the Tories’ political prospects remain dire. The defeat last July was the worst ever suffered by the Conservatives since they became a recognisable political party - no iteration of the Tories or the Conservatives has ever seen their seat numbers in the Commons fall to just 120. The aura of the Tories as the most successful vote harvesting machine in Europe has been shattered - perhaps forever. The malaise however goes deeper than simply Parliamentary representation. After the May 2024 local elections, the Conservatives have fewer councillors than Labour for the first time ever (5,148 Tory councillors compared to 6,562 councillors for Labour); they hold a single English Mayoralty (out of 25), and although the Tories continue to hold the majority of Police and Crime Commissioners in England and Wales (just), they lost ten to Labour in May. The Conservative collapse is comprehensive in terms of tiers of administration, geographical spread and political influence.

The Tories are also appallingly led. Kemi Badenoch, the sixth Conservative leader in nine years, manages to be both arrogant and fragile, smug yet out of touch, filled with self-belief and yet politically inept. Badenoch has been dealt a tough hand but has played it clumsily and without insight. She seems unable to accept, along with her fellow survivors, the extent of the voters’ rejection of Toryism and all its works. I have blogged before about the cavalcade of clowns that masqueraded as the political leadership of the U.K. between 2010 and 2024, and the succession of unserious, but devastating, ideological experiments foisted on the British people by an arrogant clique who assumed they would rule forever - until the voters literally could not stand it any longer. Badenoch symbolises this peculiar combination of insouciance and hubris better than most. She offers no contrition for the decimated public services, the unaccountable and failing market state, or the shrunken living standards of the British people resulting from the fourteen years of Tory rule. Until some acknowledgment of the damage the Tories wrought is made - as a first step on the road to recovery - the voters will not forgive them.

The Conservative problems go deeper than this however. It is not simply a matter of competence or presentation that holds the Tories back: it is the gaping hole at the heart of Conservatism where ideas, principles and ideology should reside. For forty years the Conservatives have slavishly followed a British version of Chicago Economics neoliberalism, with its advocacy of a small state, low taxation, non-unionised poorly paid and “flexible” workforces, privatisation and marketisation of public services and deregulation of anything that could get in the way of corporate profit. For forty years what this country termed Thatcherism became the economic orthodoxy and the primacy of the market over all other social enterprise became entirely dominant. Like all hegemonies do eventually, Thatcherism has at last failed - damaged beyond repair by the 2008 crash, and given its last rights by the double whammy of Brexit and Covid. In a world of national economic protectionism and great power geopolitics, “globalism” has collapsed as any coherent form of economic analysis and with it has collapsed the intellectual hinterland of the Tory Party. The Conservatives now have nothing to offer the British people, at least nothing that they want, but such was the dominance of Thatcherism that it obliterated all rival strands of thinking within the party. Toryism needs to be completely rethought if the Conservatives are ever to rule the U.K. again, and there is no sign that the traumatised Tories have even appreciated this reality, let alone are setting out to do anything about it.

But if the Conservative Pary is out for the count for the foreseeable, then what of Reform? Farage’s populist vehicle did well in the 2024 election, obtaining over 4m votes, 14.3% vote share and winning five Parliamentary seats from the Conservatives. Now it is being asserted that Reform are taking votes from Labour and the Right is looking eagerly at May’s local elections and a possible by election in Runcorn before that to demonstrate Reform’s new found reach in Labour’s heartlands. The current opinion polls record an average Reform vote of 22% as opposed to Labour’s 27%, so something would indeed appear to be in the air.

However there are fundamental problems with the easy narrative of Reform eventually puncturing Labour’s majority and enabling the right to sweep back into power in four years time. The first is demographic. Reform may apparently rival the two main parties for political support but raw opinion polling numbers can be deceptive. Reform’s vote remains disproportionately strong among male voters over 55 and is located at scale mainly in post industrial towns in the north and Midlands of England and in parts of Wales. This is a restricted demographic that runs the risk of shrinking every year as nature takes its toll unless the party can widen its appeal. Reform’s vote is also poorly distributed nationally. If it can only rarely breach its 20% ceiling in most constituencies, then it will never win very many seats under the First Past The Post electoral system, emphatically demonstrated last year when 4m votes garnered it just five seats. Equally, Reform’s messaging, which is divisive and frequently racist, alienates a great many voters as we saw during the summer riots: in other words the Reform “common sense” rhetoric arguably puts off more voters than it attracts. In any circumstances, the politics of grievance alone will only take you so far and Reform may already have peaked. Then there is the issue of the essential silliness of Reform. Its roots lie in single issue protest and, led by an egotistical but fundamentally lightweight loudmouth, the group (it is not actually technically a political party at all) does not possess the sort of total ideology or depth that animates more organic parties. Reform is basically a pop-up, built entirely around one man and his wealthy backers. If Farage ever gets bored and decamps to the States, Reform is likely to dwindle into irrelevance like Ukip did before it once deserted by its founder.

When it comes to Reform’s political programme its one consistent vote-winning message is anti-immigration. It blames all the social woes of the nation on migrants and asylum seekers, implying that if we could somehow rid ourselves of them, public services would improve, jobs and housing would be plentiful, living standards would rise and British culture would be safeguarded. As a set of slogans and dog whistles, this can work to a degree, but in terms of practical policy is it wholly inadequate. Reform’s policies in their 2024 Manifesto were a ragbag of right wing Toryism, populism and crankiness - including attacks on “transgender ideology” in schools and net zero, scrapping the TV license fee and committing to tax relief on private school fees. Even on its big ticket issue of migration, it promised to ban “non essential” immigration without ever defining what this phrase meant or describing the economic costs to the country of sweeping cuts to the number of migrant workers. Fundamentally, Reform is a fraud and the closer the party gets to power, the more the unsustainablilty of their policy offer will become apparent.

It would therefore have to be an extraordinary set of circumstances that would lead to a massive Labour seat loss to Reform in a General Election. Labour of course cannot be complacent about the populist right as the Democrats found out to their cost in the recent US Presidential Election. The threat of proto-fascist populism is real, and could become a serious danger to British democracy if a more serious politician than Farage was able to harness the prevalent disillusionment and protest and forge it into a new far right ideology. The key to preventing this is in Labour’s own hands. The government must noticeably improve public services over the course of this Parliament, particularly the NHS, expand the economy, improve standards of living, reduce the reliance on high immigration the longstanding neoliberal economic model bequeathed it, and reset the debate on asylum seeking. Labour also needs to stop doing and saying stupid things and to start to advocate proudly for its social democratic policy programme, rather than looking and sounding embarrassed or dishonest about it. Reform have essentially nothing of substance to offer beyond predictable conspiracy theories and racist dog whistles. If the grievances that drove 2024’s destruction of the Tories are addressed, Reform will disappear as a significant force and this midwinter flurry of interest in this so-called insurgent party will be seen in the future for what it was: exaggerated nonsense by malign vested interests. Labour simply needs to focus delivering what it has promised.

After all, it is what the British people voted for.

4th January 2025

[hjohn3]

The Sound And The Fury

Judge the Labour Government by its Enemies

Source: Money website

By Honest John

THE LABOUR government, elected less than five short months ago, often gives the impression it is under siege. Ministers and their spokespeople seem to be continually on the defensive, simultaneously accused of having a lack of ambition and being overly technocratic while at the same time being criticised for making policy and fiscal decisions that have actual consequences on society, sometimes by the same people. It is a strange world indeed when broadly sympathetic outlets such as the New Statesman, the Guardian and Novara Media unite in defence of the farming lobby against a social democratic government. It sometimes feels that for all the well-analysed desire for change on the part of the British electorate - which saw that electorate systematically dismantle the Conservatives at virtually every level of government over the last two years- when Labour actually attempt to introduce that change, liberal hands clutch pearls and the gates of the hellscape that is the right wing print and online media world are opened, and righteous fire is belched out at Keir Starmer and his beleaguered crew.

Take last month’s budget. Rachel Reeves, long accused of being a neoliberal drone (not least by me), showed remarkable dexterity in ditching aspects of her treasured fiscal rules, by borrowing over £28bn and raising tax revenues by over £40bn, all without increasing direct taxation on ordinary citizens, as Labour had promised in opposition. Was Reeves praised for this fiscal achievement? Not a bit of it. Labour were accused of everything from breaking manifesto promises to launching a new class war on the rich. The general view of the commentariat was that this was a terrible budget that would spook the bond markets, depress investment and force wealth-creators to leave the country. No matter that Reeves has almost fully met the destructive funding deficit which the NHS has endured, bequeathed the government by the Tories; it would appear to matter little that education, affordable housing (including council housing), bus transport, pensions, the minimum wage and public sector pay are all to receive increases in funding, and clearly matters not at all that, post-Budget, most voters surveyed approved of the direction of social policy and the finances found to support it. After all, what do they know?

To listen to Labour’s critics in the right wing press, GB News, and the Conservative Party, Labour have somehow broken some immutable rule that taxes must never increase for the wealthy, that public services must simply put up with continued underfunding until society can “afford” to right a decade or more of ruinous austerity, and that every privilege, loophole and perverse incentive that has allowed the rich to plunder the poor in this country in a malign process that has gone on for over forty years, must be left untouched - forever. It seems these critics do not appear to have noticed, or accepted, that there has been a change of government and that Starmer’s Labour Party represents a completely different set of values to the clapped out Thatcherism of Rishi Sunak and the whacky and destructive right wing political and economic experiments imposed on the country his hapless predecessors. Perhaps they bought into the assessment of the left that Starmer’s Labour simply represents reheated Blairism and the rich and privileged could therefore go on ripping off the British people indefinitely, with no price to pay. Instead what these critics - on left and right - have to accept, no matter how much in pains them, that Britain now has the most left wing government since 1974 and, unlike its ill-starred predecessor, it has the political space to change this country permanently for the better.

Make no mistake, there are real problems with this government. It has been characterised by chronic pre-election caution, nasty factionalism, bouts of dishonesty, bizarre episodes of ministerial entitlement, a paucity in original or curious thinking, particularly in health, clumsy and slow-on-the-uptake messaging and at times wilful stubbornness. But wherever you look, underneath the sound and the fury, there is genuine, potentially transformative, change underway - whether you are an elective patient waiting for a procedure; a gig economy worker; a public sector employee; a renter; a trade union member; someone on minimum wage; someone wanting to get on the housing ladder; a rail traveller, a teacher or a pupil - there is at last hope that things may improve and that governmental priorities are not ranged against you, or that your hopes and aspirations will be met by those in charge with simply a resigned shrug. There is so much more still to do: the Green Prosperity Plan has to be revived; wealth needs to be taxed to help fund the restitution of public services not yet in receipt of government largesse; the utilities need to be brought back into public ownership and meaningful regulation; the low wage migration-dependent economy has to be transformed and Britain’s towns and former industrial communities need to to be regenerated with the pace and imagination New Labour applied to the cities. But in five months Labour has done much to reset the UK’s direction and priorities to the benefit of the less well-off.

In addition, the government’s constitutional changes range from the symbolic removal of hereditary aristocratic privilege from the governance of the country, to the potential regeneration of local democracy through the devolution of power and resources to the English regions and their Mayoralties in a way that could shut out Toryism from effective local government for a generation. Furthermore its proposals for enhanced devolution to Scotland and Wales could finally deposit sectional nationalism into the political dustbin where it has always belonged. A combination of a better resourced activist state overseeing investment where it is needed, planning the economy and rebuilding trust in public services after the cynicism and waste of the Tory years could also, over the next four years, stymie the advance of Reform and prevent the blight of the far right spreading its influence as it has in much of Europe and in the USA.

And who is ranged against this effort to secure national renewal? The list is long and ignoble: the discredited Tory Party; the conman Nigel Farage and his latest vehicle; the disgrace that is the right wing press; the unfunny joke that is GB News; disingenuous pensioners; the CBI; the preposterous Jeremy Clarkson; the hyper-rich; the private schools; the racist far right; the absurdity that is Elon Musk (part incompetent tech bro and part incipient fascist) and last, but not least, the landowners pleading poverty that represent the pampered and uneconomic farming industry.

It is said that by their enemies shall you know them. Well, on the basis of the above collection of the malign, the corrupt and the misinformed, Labour must be doing something right.

26th November 2024

[hjohn3]

An excellent and timely read. One of my enduring frustrations with the liberal left is its inconsistency in respect of the causes it takes up. Unless a clear “goodies/baddies” narrative can be set (cf Palestine/Israel) then it tends to be ignored by the anti-imperialists, campus protestors and others. The lack of interest in the Sudan conflict in terms of political outrage and public policy, shames all of us who claim to be on the left. I have always taken the view that when it comes to international conflict and ethnic cleansing, the international community tends to take the implicit view that Muslim lives don’t matter very much; the Sudan genocide proves that black Muslim lives matter least of all.

Freedland makes this point superbly.