Plutocracy rules

Trusting to luck is dumb

A former Prime Minister of Luxembourg famously said ‘we know what to do but don’t know how to get re-elected if we do it.’ That may sum up the dilemma facing all politicians throughout the ages. But not today, at least not in the U.K. The Labour government doesn’t know what to do.

One clue pointing to a policy vacuum was the election campaign itself. Labour’s proposition amounted to ‘vote for us, we aren’t the Tories’. Critics who asked simple policy questions were treated like embarrassing relatives. Even those who asked the awkward questions didn’t suspect that nobody in Labour’s backrooms had been tasked with planning what the new government would actually do.

When Starmer did occasionally talk about policy it became clear that nobody, including (or perhaps especially) the Prime Minister, had put much thought into it. The most glaring example of shallow thinking is the promise to be ‘the fastest growing economy in the G7’. This is daft on so many levels.

Yes, it is obviously a good thing to witter on about faster economic growth. Particularly after 15 years of low or no growth. But it is also important to recognise that there is no single policy lever marked ‘growth’. There are plenty of buttons to push, levers to pull, most of which involve trade-offs, none of which are guaranteed to produce the desired outcome. Growth is one of those funny things about which many of us has a strong opinion but none of us know how to deliver. And there is no policy, or set of policies, that will ensure your economy grows faster than all the others. That presupposes you can control their growth rate as well as yours. Silliness on stilts.

None of this is to pretend that putting a coherent policy platform together is easy. It’s merely to observe that Labour doesn’t seem to have bothered to at least make an effort. Growth involves you and/or somebody else upping their spending in a consistent, sustainable way. ‘Get it done’ should have been Rachel Reeve’s instruction to the Treasury. When the standard reply, ‘it’s too hard, there is no money, raise taxes first’, came back, Reeve’s simply said, ‘OK’. One of the quickest example of civil service capture of a politician in history. She will be gone by the end of 2025. (Perhaps ‘will’ should be replaced by ‘should be’ here.)

‘Getting closer to Europe’ is a great soundbite and, if delivered, could reduce or remove one of the headwinds holding the UK economy back. But ruling out every single thing that is practically possible to get closer to the EU hardly cuts it as a coherent policy framework. It’s as if all Labour knows and cares about is running for election and is concerned solely with how something looks. Getting thousands of pounds worth of freebie clothing is consistent with the idea that all they care about is how they look. Even then they don’t get it right. From The Economist:

And this, also from The Economist:

Substitute the education theme with just about anything else.

Given all of the complexities and challenges represented by Trump, war in Ukraine, China getting ready for war and a failing EU economy, it’s going to be a rough ride, whatever your policy platform. Even if the global environment was benign, ‘delivering the fastest growth in the G7’ is a dumb thing to promise.

One of the many complexities is the shift in many countries, especially the U.S., from variants of neo-liberalism to today’s plutocracy. Love or hate Thatcher & Reagan, at least they tried to take care of the interests of a large class of people. Critics of that era might say that only the interests of the well-off were catered to. By contrast, fans of neo-liberal times talk about a tide that lifted many, if not quite all boats. Either way, those days are gone. Simon Wren-Lewis writes about this here.

The BBC’s report on the above cartoon says it all (as does the image itself):

A Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist has resigned from the Washington Post after the newspaper refused to publish a cartoon satirical of its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos. Ann Telnaes, a long-time Washington Post cartoonist, created a cartoon of Mr Bezos and other tycoons kneeling before a statue of President-elect Donald Trump. She said the paper's refusal to run the cartoon was a "game changer" and described it as "dangerous for a free press".

But David Shipley, the editorial page editor at the paper, said he decided not to run the cartoon in order to avoid repetition, not because it mocked the paper's owner.

In the cartoon, Mr Bezos, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI's Sam Altman are depicted on their knees giving bags of cash to a statue of Trump.

Mickey Mouse is also depicted prostrate in the cartoon. ABC News – which is owned by Disney – last month agreed to pay $15m to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump.

21st Century plutocracy puts the interests of the billionaire class front and centre. Nowhere is this best exemplified by the rise of Elon Musk to be the world’s most powerful unelected person. The vile and inflammatory things Musk posts, almost daily, about the U.K. are greeted with only feeble responses from the British government. Wes Streeting thinks it important that we should ‘work with’ Musk. I wonder if the Health Secretary knows that Brazil recently fought Musk. And won.

The obvious train wreck between Musk and Trump - between the plutocrats and those they have bought power for - is over the New Right’s obsession with immigration. All of those people in the cartoon above rely on immigrants for their workforces. Indeed, the MAGA-ultras have already clashed with Musk over this very issue.

In the UK and elsewhere that obsession with immigration is helping the single issue parties of the right. Just look at Farage’s rise in the polls and listen to the chatter about the resulting evisceration of the Tory party. And the pundits who suggest Farage could be the next UK Prime Minister.

The salience of immigration rises when the incumbent government makes a cock-up of all the other things electorates care about. When nothing really doesn’t work in the UK, all that Farage has to say is: ‘Labour won’t be able to fix anything unless they stop immigration’. Farage is able to correlate ‘immigration’ with ‘nothing works’. Is it too simplistic to say the time has come to prove correlation is not causation?

Defeatism and Junker-style mutterings won’t do. Yes, Macron has tried to do many right things and look what happened to him. That doesn’t mean you should give up without even trying. Yes you might fail - but there is a chance you won’t. Doing as little as possible guarantees failure.

@chrisbjohns.bsky.social