British Labour’s election victory looks very unconvincing when we dig into the data

The UK General Election was held on Thursday, July 4, 2024 and the British Labour Party stormed home winning 411 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons to take a huge simple majority of 174 seats. The awful Tories were cleaned out well and truly and only managed 121 seats a loss overall of 251 seats. The Liberal Democrats improved their seat holding by 64 to end up with 72 (a rather dramatic reversal after they were shunned for siding with the Tories in past Parliaments). So for those who hate the Conservatives this was, on the face of it a huge win, surely. Not quite. In fact, despite the simple statistics above, Labour only gained a 1.7 per cent swing despite 14 years of shocking Tory rule, while the Tories endured a swing of 19.9 percentage points. In fact, the result highlighted the failed electoral system used in Britain – first past the post – when there are more than 2 parties involved, not to mention the demonstration of national apathy as captured by the 59.9 per cent turnout in the voluntary system, which was down by 7.4 percentage points on the last election. In other words, British Labour, despite all the hubris from the leadership actually performed pretty badly gaining 33.7 per cent of the 59.9 per cent who bothered to vote. And, into the bargain, their total vote dropped from 10,269,051 to 9,708,716. When considered in terms of the total registered voters then Labour was preferred by only 20.4 per cent. From the perspective of an outsider, these numbers are simply stunning and do not resonate with any reasonable concepts of representative government. The joker in the pack was, of course, the entry into the election of Reform UK, which effectively split the conservative vote and in this sort of electoral system grossly distorts the overall outcome. I conclude that British Labour can hardly claim to be in a safe position and less people wanted them to govern than when Jeremy Corbyn was leader.

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The new British Labour government will have to abandon its fiscal rule or deliver very little

It’s the Wednesday pot-pourri – British politics, self promotion, events, sport and music. Politicians invariably claim that the situation they inherit when they take office following an election is untenable and that the ‘public finances’ are worse than they had initially thought. Of course, the idea that ‘public finances’ can be good or bad or somewhere in between is a misnomer and just reflects the ignorance of the fiscal capacity that governments have (that is, currency-issuing governments). There is no such thing as a deteriorating public finance situation. So when Rachel Reeves got up after being elected the new Chancellor of the UK she was just posturing and telling the British people that they should not expect much better than what the Tories delivered. What can be good or bad or somewhere in between is the state of public infrastructure and public services. And after 14 years of devastating Tory rule, one can safely conclude that there is a huge deficit in the UK in that context. The question then is what can be done about it. My reading of the situation is that if Labour want to actually improve things significantly in terms of public service provision and the viability of Britain’s infrastructure then it will have to abandon its mindless fiscal rule. And it would be better that they do that quicksmart while they enjoy such a large domination of the Parliament.

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Government debt fears – more fiction from the mainstream media

After all these years of trying, the insights provided by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) still haven’t cut through. One doesn’t even need to accept the complete box of MMT knowledge to know that, at least, some of it must be factual. For example, how much brainpower does a person need to realise that a government that issues its own currency surely doesn’t need to call on the users of that currency in order to spend that currency? Even if we could get that simple truth to be more widely understood it would change things. But every day, economists and the journalists demonstrate a lack of understanding of how the monetary system actually works. Are they stupid? Some. Are they venal? Some. What other reason is there for continuing to use major media platforms to to pump out fiction masquerading as informed economic commentary? And the gullibility and wilful indifference of the readerships just extends the licence of these liars. Some days I think I should just hang out down the beach and forget all of it.

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ECB demonstrates that groupspeak is not dead in Europe – the denial continues

On February 10, 2024, a new agreement between the European Council and European Parliament was announced which proposed to reform the fiscal rules structure that has crippled the Member States of the EMU since inception. I wrote in this blog post – Latest European Union rules provide no serious reform or increased capacity to meet the actual challenges ahead (April 10, 2024) – that the changes are minimal and actually will make matters worse. Now the European Central Bank, the supposedly ‘independent’ bank that is meant to be outside the political sphere, has weighed in with its ‘two bob’s worth’ which is ‘sometimes modernised to ‘ten cents worth’) (Source), which would be overstating its value. Nothing much ever changes in the European Union. They have bound themselves up so tightly in their ‘framework’ and rules and jargon that the – Eurosclerosis – of the 1970s and 1980s looks to be a picnic relative to what besets them these days. The latest input from the ECB would be comical if it wasn’t so tragic in the way the policy makers have inflicted hardship on the people (many of them) of Europe.Today’s blog post is Part 1 of a critique of the ECB’s input into the Stability and Growth Pact reform process that is engaging European officials at present. It is really just more of the same.

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Tracing the British Labour Party’s fears of The City – Part 1

When I met with John McDonnell on October 11, 2018 at his Embankment office block in London he was then the Shadow Chancellor. The theme of the meeting was dominated by the concerns (near hysteria) about the power of the City of London (the financial markets), expressed by his advisor, a younger Labour Party apparatchik whose ideas are representative of the bulk of the progressive side of politics in Britain. The topic of the meeting centred on the fiscal rule that the British Labour Party chose to apparently establish credibility with the financial markets (‘The City’). I had long pointed out that the fiscal rule they had designed with the help of some New Keynesian macroeconomists was not just a neoliberal contrivance but was also impossible to meet and in that sense was just setting themselves up to failure should they have won office at the next election. Essentially, I was just met with denial. They just rehearsed the familiar line that the British government has to appease the financial interests in The City or face currency destruction. That fear is regularly rehearsed and has driven Labour policy for years. It wasn’t always that way though. As part of preliminary research for a book I plan to write next year I am digging into the history of this issue. What we learn is that the British government has all the legislative capacity it needs to render The City powerless in terms of driving policy. That raises the question as to why they don’t use it. All part of some work I am embarking on. The reason: I am sick to death of weak-kneed politicians who masquerade as progressive but who bow and scrape to the financial interests in the hope they will get a nice revolving door job when they exit politics. A good motivation I think.

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Degrowth will require humans shovel less energy … into our bodies

I haven’t much time free today and with the federal government’s fiscal statement coming out tomorrow night and wage data and the labour force data coming out Wednesday and Thursday, respectively, it is going to be a full week. Given I am using all my time to finish the manuscript for my next book which has to be delivered to the publisher on June 1, I am writing very little here today. But there was some interesting data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) last week that bears on my general theme of degrowth, in a roundabout sort of way. The data from the – National Health Survey 2022 – is very revealing and shows how far people will have to go to adopt degrowth behaviours at a personal level. And just so you know, while I wrote about health matters last week and will again today, I don’t intend to make it a regular habit on a Monday.

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The fiscal lunancy reaches peak levels this time of year

In the last week, as the Federal government comes towards next Tuesday’s annual fiscal statement (aka ‘The Budget’ although we don’t use that terminology around here, do we?) and the State Government’s are progressively delivering their own Budget Statements (they being financially constrained) we have witnessed the absurdity of the system of public finances that pretends the Federal government is a big household and that somehow monetary policy is the most effective way to deal with an inflation that is sourced in supply side constraints. Earlier this week, the Victorian government released a fairly shocking fiscal statement, which cut expenditure programs in many key areas such as health care (while the pandemic is still killing many people), public education, essential public infrastructure maintenance and upgrades, and more. Why? Because it built up a rather large stock of debt during the early years of the pandemic and is now in political jeopardy because the state debt is being weaponised by the conservatives who claim the government is going broke. Similar austerity agendas are being pursued by other state and territory governments although Victoria leads the way because it provided more pandemic support to offset the damage that the extensive restrictions caused. Meanwhile, the federal government is boasting that it is heading towards its second consecutive surplus, as unemployment rises, hours of work fall, and the planet requires massive investment to attenuate climate change. The madness compounds when we realise that around 85 per cent of all state and federal debt that was issued between March 2020 and July 2022 was purchased by the Reserve Bank of Australia – that is, effectively, by the federal government itself. If citizens really understood the implications of that they would never agree to the swingeing cutbacks in public expenditure and the user pays tax hikes etc, that have been justified by an appeal to the debt build up. Its just madness.

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