The general election has been called and the respective party leaders are busy defining what it is all about.
Should we recognize and cherish a slow recovery or change course to avoid chaos and incompetence? Or from another perspective, should we tether ourselves to the submerged mast of net zero, or focus on fending off the cultural onslaught brought on by mass immigration and job satisfaction?
Yet none of these false constructs (which are not mutually exclusive) confront the key question that the broadcast media interrogators also fail to answer: what will Keir Starmer’s Labor actually do if they are lucky enough to come to power?
In the absence of clear statements of intent from the Labor leadership (other than imposing a 20% VAT on independent school fees and increasing taxes on domestic oil and gas production), I have felt compelled to write a series of articles highlighting the reality of trying to determine Labour’s economic situation. policy, because it will set the parameters for everything else it will do.
I’ve looked at Labour-leaning think tanks, Labour’s top tax advisers, and they all suggest that Labor will make no commitments but will then introduce devious and stealthy taxes by expanding the scope of existing taxes in ways that mainly hurt pensioners, savers, motorists and their own boss.
Yet I still find readers expressing doubts in the comments sections (yes, I read them) and sometimes deferring to the Conservative record (of which I have been equally critical) as if that justifies Labour’s lack of candor.
Fortunately, there is a new and reliable source of enlightenment that can reveal Labour’s real intentions. International banking and finance adviser Bob Lyddon has spent a lot of time studying Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ Mais lecture in March and trying to decipher what her apparently empty waffle and cryptic euphemisms actually meant.
He has written a 56-page report ‘Stripping away the jargon’, which goes into the details of her deliberately opaque verbiage, and then, no doubt fearing the scale of the task, has made it too much for most to digest, distilled into a shorter 16-page article “Decoding Rachel Reeves”.
Lyddon, who achieved a first in modern languages at Cambridge and is fluent in Norwegian, Dutch, German and French, has now added “Reevespeak” to his lexicon and is telling us its secrets.
By translating into plain English what Rachel Reeves has said in her own obscure language, Lyddon has established that Labor is keen to hold a general election without any democratic restrictions on its future spending plans. This can only lead to painful tax increases, not only now, but for future generations.
Phrases like “Investment through partnership between strategic government and enterprising companies” may baffle us, but in fact mean that companies and financial institutions will be forced to invest in Labor projects on the basis of taxpayer guarantees. Tell us Rachel, are you going to spend more, are you going to tax us more, are you going to borrow more? After analyzing your Mais lecture, Bob Lyddon has concluded that the answer must be yes, yes and yes.
Rachel Reeves spoke about the supposed heyday of expansionary government borrowing under Gordon Brown and in particular the use of PFI (private finance initiative) ‘investments’ that still cost us billions to repay today. The total of PFI payments from 1996/97 to the last transaction due in 2052/53 is £278.3 billion, an astonishing 555% of the capital amount of £50.1 billion.
Of those 669 PFI contracts, 588 were under Labor governments. Even the left-wing Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) estimated that £13 billion of 1998 Labor PFI-funded capital investment had cost the NHS £80 billion, with £55 billion still to be paid in 2019. By 2030, PFI payments will cost the NHS £2.5 billion annually and some NHS trusts have ultimately managed to spend a fifth of their budgets on PFI repayments alone.
Reeves acknowledges that government borrowing has already reached its limits and is unrepentant about finding ways around prudence, transparency and accountability. In her Mais speech, she outlined how she will emulate the EU’s off-balance sheet PFI-style lending, known as InvestEU, so that debt lurks in the shadows rather than in plain sight. It is consistent with Labour’s ambition to rejoin the EU and will result in the same sub-optimal levels of economic growth.
Reeves went on to explain how net zero provides all the justification needed for higher spending, which she and Labor are committed to. Pension funds will be ordered to deploy their investments to back the net-zero infrastructure that will further expand state control over our economy – regardless of the damage to pension returns in the future.
To achieve this cocktail of excessive state spending and centralized regulation, Reeves also promises to create new unaccountable institutions – yet more quangos and agencies for Labor’s nomenklatura, whose loyalty and secrecy are bought with eye-watering, taxpayer-funded salaries and pensions.
Although taxes will have to go up – but no new details have been given that could be decoded – a large part of the bill will be presented not to us, but to the generations of the future, and especially to our grandchildren, to whom can be asked whether they accept the law. burden. It’s packaged and presented as ‘securenomics’, but that’s the economic devastation it risks, there’s nothing certain about it, and where it is economic it’s just about avoiding telling the truth.
So there we have it. While Labor will continue to avoid admitting its real intentions, the direction it wants to take is clear and the means to achieve it are already known. Clear journalists have less than six weeks to ask the right questions and then, no doubt, further question the ambiguous answers until we get to the truth.
Labor speaks, deliberates and issues orders through political figures. Fortunately, Bob Lyddon has cracked Labour’s riddle code.
