English Labour's prescription - to kill the patient

Sleekit Viceroy Murray is right - the UK is broken. But he’s wrong that Rachel Reeves’ remedy to cut spending and investment will ‘fix’ it. English Labour’s prescription, more austerity, will kill, not revive, the patient.

The Viceroy should study this graph showing 330 years of UK government debt.

At a glance, you can see that the current level of what’s termed the national debt is historically low. And as Richard Murphy has pointed out, the current national debt as reported by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is overstated by £1 trillion.

Two things. First, taxes don’t fund government spending - money creation by the government’s bank, the Bank of England, does. The government orders it to create all the money needed for full employment, funding public services and investing in the future. Tax’s role is to reduce inequalities, control inflation, change behaviours and correct market failures - not to fund spending.

Second, if the government balanced its budget by taxing back all the money it spends into the economy, there’d be no money left for new economic activity. People would have no savings and no place to put their savings. Businesses would have no money to invest. There would be no new government money for maintaining or expanding the NHS, transport, education, housing, defence or any other public good. In a word - there would be no growth.

That seems to be Starmer’s goal - to not only kill pensioners who won’t be able to afford heating, but to kill economic growth. So, the ‘scary’ £22 billion black hole is manufactured to justify spending cuts and privatising what remains of the public sector to satisfy the City of London and English Labour’s corporate donors.

To fix Scotland, we must end the failing union.