Every time Chancellor Reeves delivers yet another knock-down blow to the economy, she is accused of economic illiteracy.
The implication is that ‘Rachel in accounts’ tries her best to invigorate the economy, failing only because of some unfortunate lacunae in her economic education. This charge is unfair, and even if there is some truth to it, it’s an irrelevant truth.
Failure means inability to achieve the intended result. My contention is that our Labour government, with Rachel in charge of the Exchequer brief, is succeeding famously. The current state of the economy, about which one can say nothing that hasn’t already been said about Stage 4 cancer, is precisely what they were trying to achieve.
If you don’t believe me, take the word of Rachel’s front-bench colleague, Education Minister Stephen Morgan. As she is putting the final touches on the economic coup de grâce, otherwise known as the Autumn Budget, Morgan allayed the interviewer’s fears: “I want to make sure that our Budget is based on our Labour values, and that is what Rachel Reeves will deliver.”
What’s there not to understand? The operative words are ‘Labour values’, and Comrade Morgan is honest to a fault. The upcoming budget, along with everything Labour have done since taking over a year ago, is Labour, which is to say socialist, values in action.
Rachel, her boss Keir and all their accomplices in the cabinet are commendably loyal to their principles, which is more than one could say for the Tory opposition. Unlike them, Labour uphold their values. Rachel Reeves isn’t economically illiterate. She is principled and consistent.
If you wish to contest this conclusion, I suggest you look at everything the Chancellor has done in the past 12 months, along with things she has announced she’s going to do in the upcoming budget.
If you recall, during the election campaign Rachel kept pointing an accusing finger at the Tories’ record in government. Due to their mismanagement, she thundered, the incoming Labour government was stuck with a £20 billion hole in the public purse.
Even though the Tories tried to dispute her calculations, the charge was fair. During their 13 years in office, the Tories did manage to produce that £20 billion hole in public finances. Rachel promised to do something about it, and she has fulfilled her pledge. The hole is now £51 billion.
In a mere year, Rachel has managed to go the Tories 2.5 times better – and those nincompoops took 13 years to achieve their result. This alone is sufficient proof that such a staggering performance had to be deliberate.
Anyone who tries to shoot down Rachel’s economic record will misfire unless he realises that the government is beggaring the country on purpose. Rachel, Keir and Ed are acting in character, and the character is Marxist.
The Chancellor is about to impose the National Insurance tax on rental income, which, in the fine Marxist tradition, she calls “unearned”. When accused of breaking her campaign promise not to increase NI on “working people”, she parries such slings and arrows with enviable legerdemain. She isn’t increasing the NI rate, is she? She is only extending the group to be hit by NI taxation.
Job done; promise kept. Such are Labour values.
First, “working people” earn wages for their labour, ideally physical. Rather than belonging to that category, landlords, on the other hand, suck the blood of “working people” by forcing them to pay rent. Rachel didn’t say so in as many words, but this is the standard Marxist line.
And not only Marxist. Marxism in its purest form calls for the abolition of all private property, and any self-respecting Marxist will tell you that making money from investments (including those in rental property) isn’t just immoral but criminal.
Yet this is echoed by other, ostensibly non-Marxist, doctrines. It was the founder of anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Prudhon (d. 1865) and not, as many mistakenly believe, Marx who uttered the famous phrase, “Property is theft”.
However, the most vociferous argument against private property specifically of land was made by the American Henry George (d. 1897). He was perhaps the most influential economist in the last quarter of the 19th century, whose books sold millions of copies worldwide.
Leo Tolstoy was one of his followers who repeated ad nauseam George’s maxim, “We must make land common property.” Tolstoy went only as far as trying to give up his own estate, but various champions of George converge with Marx and Prudhon by having other people’s property (not their own) in their crosshairs.
Enmity to private property in general, but specifically property producing ‘unearned’ income, has been encoded into the DNA of all socialists, and certainly those gravitating towards the extreme end of that evil doctrine.
That’s why it’s pointless arguing that adding NI to rental income will have a negative effect – mainly on those ‘working people’ who live in rented accommodation.
Their rents, already sky high, especially within striking distance of London, will go up immediately. Some landlords will have to sell, reducing the number of properties available for rent. Since Rachel hasn’t yet repealed the law of supply and demand, this will drive rents further up.
She knows all that and doesn’t care. With socialists in charge, the main purpose of taxation is punitive, not pecuniary. The important thing is to punish the fat cats and, if ‘working people’ become collateral damage, then so be it. You don’t believe that socialists are really out to improve the lot of the poor, do you?
Where many critics see madness in Labour’s sustained assault on the economy, I see method. No one is so mad or so ignorant as to do what the government has been doing for a year now.
Any first-year student of economics knows that extortionate taxation throttles the economy into death by suffocation. I’ll give Rachel credit for knowing this economic primer. She keeps devastating the economy with some of the highest peacetime taxes in history not because she doesn’t know what that does. She knows – and likes it. It’s those ‘Labour values’ all over again.
The same goes for the government’s regulatory strangulation imposed on manufacturing, financial and labour markets. That alone would have been sufficient to bring the economy to its present standstill, but there’s also the noose of net zero woven out of crypto-Marxist strands.
Only Marxists are prepared to use a pseudo-scientific, in fact larcenous, ideology to impoverish large swaths of the population – emphatically including those who work, the ‘working people’.
The government is using, systematically and deliberately, every mechanism at its disposal to discourage the kind of economic behaviour that’s known to produce prosperity. Working hard, spending frugally, investing readily yet prudently – all such practices are punished by Labour’s tax, spend and regulate policies.
Idleness, on the other hand, is encouraged: 6.5 million working-age adults in Britain receive benefits not to work. This is part of one of the most promiscuous spending sprees in British history, and the country hasn’t paid its way for a long time, whichever party was in charge.
But at least the Tories made some token gestures to make deficit spending less rapacious. For Rachel and her merry men, public funds are reins to be used to control the public, making as many people as possible dependent on the state and therefore receptive to its diktats.
And I haven’t yet mentioned the black hole of the socialist NHS, into which the government is throwing sackfuls of freshly printed (or borrowed) cash without even coming close to filling the hole – or making our health service perform to civilised standards.
No one can possibly cause so much damage so fast out of ignorance, and I’d like to absolve Rachel Reeves of this charge. She isn’t a hapless ignoramus running into blind alleys. She is a malevolent Marxist, steadily moving to her desired destination.
This realisation ought to be the starting point of any criticism. For no one can cure a disease if he doesn’t understand its aetiology.