The Starmer government has been trying the patience of Labour members from MPs downwards, ever since the 2-chid allowance and winter fuel payment things, not to mention the freebies. Their mealy-mouthed stance on Gaza enrages further tranches of their base. Kow-towing to Trump - and who knows what that might entail - won't go down at all well in many quarters. But now Rachel Reeves seems to have cut loose altogether, and must surely be moving onto a whole new patch of extremely thin ice.
Growth as a panacea for, well, everything, has a moderately respectable economic pedigree (even if achieving it has seemed to be beyond UK politicians - and there are respectable theories about that, too). Months ago we noted that the Starmer regime seemed to have come to it fairly late, and there's no doubt it's the only thing that matters now - to Reeves, at least. It's also top of Starmer's rhetoric just now, but soon he may find he has a few competing priorities to juggle. And ahead of any ultimate, actual growth-derived economic benefits arriving - a long-term prospect, at best - manic growth-stimulating policies come with a lot of near-term political downsides.
This all comes to a head when, last week, Reeves explicitly said growth takes priority over Net Zero etc. Well, in that case, we can suggest several cost-saving measures right away! That's after weeks of "the Cuts are Coming!", which is hardly music to the ears of the rest of the Cabinet - and the Party. Then, to cap it off, LHR3 seems likely to be given the thumbs-up.
Apparently, Miliband says he won't resign over LHR - and we know how exceptionally "loyal" he is. OK, LHR might not technically be within his brief, so he might feel able to let it go. But, seriously, if NZ is to be downgraded as a priority, there really are several material savings to be made there: Sizewell C is a current cash drain for no immediate gain[1], and numerous other smaller, stupid projects too (hydrogen for heating, this includes you - and many more besides). Reeves' axe must surely swing in his direction as well as every other. These cuts and blunt Go-for-Growth bulldozer measures will be pissing off Labour swing voters and NIMBYs everywhere on a big scale - and there's one helluva big, restive, worried labour backbench cohort.
Now I may be getting ahead of myself here, but I feel we see some of the bigger players starting to position themselves for genuine internecine strife. Streeting is the one who caught my attention last week with his big, heavily-trailed "battle of ideas" speech - a sure sign; and of course Khan is always on the lookout for cues to work his passage back into Parliament and the leadership he fondly imagines is his by right. They say Lammy is boundlessly ambitious. Rayner is a joke, of course, but for completeness I feel it must be noted that Miliband is seriously radiating dynamic confidence & competence (that's "radiating", not "actually delivering"), and looks like leadership material [2] if anyone was in the market for it. In a country like France, he'd have no difficulty in being a candidate to go round again. Mandelson, of course, is always on expert manoeuvres and his favours are fairly fickle.
Popcorn time, then. And sooner than we might have expected.
ND
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[1] Not in energy terms, anyhow. Of course, many say the underlying purpose of the whole civil nuclear programme is to subsidise the military nukes. And I persist in viewing it as part of the overall craven France-mollifying strategy which of course involves the Small Boats issue.
[2] If you want to judge for yourself, view his performance at the ESNZ committee in Parliament two weeks ago - masterful stuff.
13 comments:
Labour were like the eponymous fat women starving herself for six months before the wedding to fit into the dress. Once the wedding, or, here, the election victory, was over, back to the cake and PiƱa Coladas.
Too many competing ideological factions clenched their gritted teeth for too long. It’s all going to have to be satiated in a big bust up.
Nick, this is a can of worms!
Politicians, by nature, always want to climb the greasy pole. So, Starmer’s worst enemies will not be the Conservatives, Reform or the Lib Dems. His worst enemies are those in his own party willing to stab him in the back to get his job, or keep their own jobs.
There is no doubt that this Labour government has botched everything it has touched. In my lifetime of voting – 55 years or so – I’ve never seen a government turn into such a shambles so quickly, almost from Day One. Thus it isn’t going to take long (this year?) for Labour MPs to become restive; a couple of quarters of bad economic data and they’ll all be thinking about their place on the gravy train come the next election.
The Labour back-benchers will demand change, and the first step is a new leader/prime minister. Or so they will think. The proverbial ‘smoke-filled rooms’ will be a hive of activity, and then the grey suits will pay Starmer a visit. We’ve seen it all before (eg Maggie).
Quite what how a new leader – likely Wes Streeting in my view – will pull them our of the nose dive, I don’t know. Me, I would do a Trump. I would slash and burn all the excess expenditure and even close down departments, and then cut taxes. I would ditch Nut Zero. I would open up the North Sea and ‘frack, baby, frack’. I would withdraw from the ECHR and turn the boats back mid-Channel. I would reject all asylum claims and send claimants home. I would fix the NHS through partial privatisation via insurance. I could go on, but I think you probably get the picture.
However, the possibility of Labour under a new leader doing anything substantive is probably near zero.
Cheers Yet Another Chris
Is that like the eponymous fat woman Lawrence Chaney who so cheered up TTK on Burns night? I told him he should have used the Vaseline…
OT but there's a lot going on
China knocking 15% off NVidia , admittedly its insanely overvalued but this should really concentrate minds re Chinese capability.
And if the Graun are right, few to no quick and easy AI wins for UK government admin.
And Terry Smith unloading Diageo because Wegovy seems to reduce the desire for half a bottle of Chardonnay each night.
China knocking 15% off NVidia , ... but this should really concentrate minds re Chinese capability.
The important thing here re share price falls, is this isn't primarily about China, but the realisation that so many v.expensive chips (currently mostly from NVidia) aren't essential for modern AI to work. Even if AI hosted in china is blocked off in the west, investors now know demand for NVidia etc will be lower once similar more efficient AI algorithms/training approaches are developed in the west.
I read the same thing this evening. Fascinating observation by Terry, but I suspect it will be some time before the drugs are ubiquitous enough to make a dent.
Are AI companies - hyper competitive with each other - seriously going to settle for less powerful chips?
They’ll use the efficiency gains in the Chinese code with the more powerful chips and drive even faster development in AI
You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.
That was a problem for the Tories, they pussy-footed around growth and went nowhere. Now Labour is having a go a few eggs are being broken. As ever with change 'someone won't like it'.
But I doubt there will be much trouble. Labourites need to be in power to keep their nice jobs - principles are for the children. Trump is useful here, he is a useful bogey man who makes Rachel & Starmer look like political angels.
They pussy footing around and dithering over the past 30 years has I think killed off extending Heathrow. Just too much cost and disruption that could have been avoided by a few feet of guts.
See Rosie Duffield raised question of Drax at PMQ today and got short shrift from two tier Starmer
The Drax thing is complicated. Folks round here - me included - are pretty hostile to Drax for good reasons, and increasingly MPs and peers are, too, which ought to be a Good Thing. But some of the accusations the MPs are making - under Parl Privilege - are just plain wrong, & thus easy for Drax / Starmer etc to swat away. And If you were to say some of them yourself (as opposed to carefully citing the remarks made in Parl) you could easily be sued.
It's quite fun looking at the educated Brits dissing Trump in the Guardian comments, then reading
car production at 1954 levels
kids in reception class who can't climb stairs
kids in reception class in nappies
shoplifting at record and organised levels, some of which is due to a Tory moneysaving wheeze of 2012
I see that our new Attorney General, Hermer, was a contributor in youth to Searchlight magazine in its campaign against the BNP. So we can be assured demonstrators can receive fair treatment from our courts when wrongly arrested, as long as they were demonstrating for the correct cause.
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