Yep but, of course, the asset management corps' lobbyists will have pushed at the LP's open door to impress on them how "in-house" operations make no profits, returns or value for the private sector.
But without "all this GDP growth".
Yes and no. Yes that this is their neoliberal agenda. But no in that the neoliberal project does indeed see economic growth (and the unregulated markets that supposedly create it) as the fundamental thing that must be protected at all costs, even over and above all other considerations. So I can well believe that they wouldn’t even understand the question, if you asked them “why growth?”
Yes and no. Yes "growth" is the only aspect of the neoliberal agenda that might still elicit positive favourability responses in their focus groups. But no; if you asked Robot-Reeves "why growth" she'd automatically intone in her flat delivery the mantra that it is only through growth and the higher tax revenues that might generate that we can have nice things.
She could have the mellifluous tones of hattie jacques and it'd still sound like shit
Then that’s just “yes”. Growth is the thing that creates all other things, in neoliberalism ideology. That’s the point. The growth is upstream of everything else. Growth first, all else follows.
I agree with much of this. They seem so disorganised and ridiculous. I don't know, after 6 months, what they're really "for". Heathrow Expansion has come from nowhere, local government reorganisation from nowhere, it's very improvised and messy.
I think what strikes me most about the Starmer administration is it's lack of visibility or media impact. Clearly the backbenchers have been gagged, but even the front benchers are only striking by their almost complete 'submarine' presence. Before July 2024 it was impossible to watch/listen to any mainstream media without a whole cast of appalling vermin spouting their lies, but this lot? Apart from McFadden's Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda tribute act, where the fuck are they?
Yes, they wouldn't understand why anyone might question the need for/benefit of growth but, having partaken of the Kool-Aid, they'd have that knee-jerk, ready prepared response to hand.
They think they know fucking everything but they know fuck all
Denis healey's name's been touted
Appropriately enough, as he was the UK's first Thatcherite chancellor of the exchequer
Part of the reason why the NHS was so starved of investment/resources by the early 1990s; by then it had been subjected to two successive periods of thatcherite austerity, one by thatcher herself.
Yep. Healey was a semi-competent career bureaucrat (like Reeves) who was finagled by Treasury economists into borrowing dollars unneccessarily. He/they hadn't understood that the Bretton Woods currency regime had ended when Nixon decoupled the dollar from gold, so sterling was a floating currency. At no point did the economy "teeter on the brink of collapse", and most of the borrowed dollars were given back, unspent.
Yep, the first deployment of the 'household budget' analogy to justify neoliberal austerity.
