When Labour first announced
their plans to spend £28 billion a year, including in the very first year of a
Labour government, on action to stop climate change, it was a bold step. It’s
true that there was a certain paucity of detail (why is it that politicians and
the media like to concentrate so much on the amount of money being spent rather
than on what it’s going to achieve?), and the idea that they could get from a
standing start to the whole £28 million in less than a year always looked more
than a little dubious, but it was setting out a serious ambition to tackle the
number one problem facing humanity and raise UK prosperity levels in the
process. Or so it seemed.
In an amazing stroke of good
luck, their own-goal announcement yesterday that it might actually not happen
quite as quickly as they had previously claimed was overshadowed by the Tory
own-goal scorer in chief announcing that he was departing in a huff because
people were being nasty to him rather than accepting his lies and dishonesty as
absolute truth. But Labour’s discharge of a firearm aimed unerringly at one of
its own extremities deserves rather more attention than it has been given. The
party could have backtracked gently, by saying that whilst the ambition
remained unaltered they had always known that they could never deliver that
level of spending as rapidly as they might wish, simply because, in practical
terms, it would take time to set up schemes and put people and organisations in
place. Instead, they chose to say that they would be deliberately deferring action on
financial grounds, in order to abide by their self-imposed fiscal rules.
One of Starmer’s aides spelled
it out in these terms: “If it’s a choice between the green prosperity plan
and the fiscal rules, the fiscal rules would trump the former”. Aditya Chakrabortty
of the Guardian has helpfully translated
that as “In a choice between planetary life and some bullshit notion of
fiscal credibility, we will always choose the latter.” It’s an entirely fair
reformulation of what Labour are saying. The fiscal rules by which they insist
they must abide are rules they themselves have written. They aren’t laws of
nature or even laws of economics, they are rules which have been invented to
convince the Tory press that the Labour Party will govern as though they were
Tories, in the hope that the Tory press won’t be too hard on Labour in the
run-up to the election. It would be nice, comforting even, to believe that it’s
all a ruse and that Labour will abandon the self-imposed shackles once in
government, but it appears as though they really do believe that they must
abide by the rules which they wrote. They really do prefer austerity to prosperity;
misery to hope. Perhaps they think that things are so bad they really don’t
want to win.
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