Left Labour MPs and Unite general secretary candidate combine to denounce hostile briefing by Starmer’s crew – who are now further right than most Tories on tax
Labour MP Jon Trickett and Unite assistant general secretary Howard Beckett have united in solidarity with Ian Lavery and Richard Burgon, after both MPs were the target of hostile briefings to the press by ‘senior party sources’ – for the ‘crime’ of supporting an increase in taxes paid by the businesses and wealthy individuals who have made a fortune during the pandemic while ordinary people struggle.
Lavery tweeted his own response to the sly and slimy message farmed out to Paul Waugh, a favourite of the Labour right:
Starmer and his front bench, disgracefully, are now well to the right of Tory chancellor Rishi Sunak and his boss on tax – despite an overwhelming preference among voters for immediate increases in corporation tax. So, having blundered yet again and – presumably feeling it’s too soon since Starmer’s last panicked u-turn on his dire ‘Recovery Bonds’ idea that was touted by his supporters as a game-changer – they are desperately trying to shore up the last vapours of their credibility by briefing against MPs who, rightly, oppose them.
Jon Trickett – in his second blast at the party’s purple hierarchy in three days and his third in a week – stood by Lavery on the issue:
And Unite’s Howard Beckett namechecked both men as he took aim at the ‘disgraceful’ right-wingers:
Starmer’s idiot pursuit of Tory voters has blown up in his face yet again: more than two thirds of voters want corporation tax to increase – including very nearly two thirds of Tory voters.
Yet again, leading figures from the left of the movement are right – and yet again the dreary Labour right is desperately trying to distract from the egg on its collective faces.
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We shouldn’t loose sight of the fact that this money is not destined to be used to grow our economy but is being taken out of the economy to needlessly pay down the ‘debt’.
The Left’s stance on this is misguided, Starmer is right on this occasion.
Yes really sensible when we’re going to face unprecedented unemployment and a massive benefits bill eh Einstein……ever heard of inflation?
lundiel – Don’t be silly, what inflation?
I don’t anticipate the economy overheating any-time soon, do you.
Try looking up the causes of hyperinflation and then think about the unprecedented money creation and your heroes policy of no tax rises to help remove excess money from circulation and then read econics 0.1.
lundiel – Oh dear, you don’t even understand the basics.
Yes indeed – for those of a historical bent, there is something very familiar in the current Starmerite Labour Leadership’s rigid dogmatic adherence to those Right Wing shibboleths of not daring to tax the Big Corporations, and a desperate desire to ‘pay down the National Debt, even when this means letting local government collapse, and will bring on ever worse economic recession – and further alienate its working class voter base – compared to the current Tory ripping up of the very same ‘balanced budgets above all else’ shibboleth !
All VERY reminiscent of the disastrous Labour Ramsay MacDonald Government response to the 1929 Slump – with a total, blind, commitment to maintaining , no matter what, the economic straightjacket of the Gold Standard, and as a result requiring ever-greater public spending cuts. As we know, that Labour government collapsed – with the turncoat MacDonald then fronting up a mainly Tory/Liberal ‘National Government’ – which of course DID carry out a huge programme of cuts – BUT , immediately ( following its huge 1931election victory) it also left the restrictive Gold Standard – without a backward glance. A vital move to lessen the impact of the Great Slump on UK economic activity. The gormless Labour Party Leadership under Henderson then whined that ” I didn’t know we could do that ” .
As then so now, the status-quo supporting Labour Right economic illiterates are always locked into slavishly following yesterday’s economic shibboleths – even though , today, their continued worship of the nonsense of ‘balanced budgets’ , ‘urgently paying down the National Debt’, and ‘being afraid to tax the Big corporations’ is a recipe for ever-greater Austerity and ever-deeper recession in the UK ! . The works of John Maynard Keynes (never mind Marx) are obviously an unknown foreign country to the corrupt tabloid-fodder, third-rate bozos, of the Starmerite Labour Party leadership – as they were to the then Labour government in 1929 after the Great Slump hit world trade !
You are allowed to walk and chew gum, there are more ways to balance the books than skin a cat, depends what your priorities are
Trident is neither a deterrent nor independent Michael Portillo Tory Defence Minister
HS2 Hinckley are another two, switch to council house spending
How do you think Blue Tories managed to double debt despite 10 years of austerity because they never took their snouts out of the trough
How long did it take to repay reparations to Slave owners like David Camerons family
Temporary Embarrassment like his Tory counterparts is economically illiterate
Starmer might be right if he were calling for an adjustment to the ‘debt’ including a holiday on interest payments and audits for odious debt.
But he isn’t, he is calling for lower taxation of the rich on ‘trickle down’ principles, which are a joke.
bevin – Do you have a link to some credible evidence that supports your assertions?
In economics there are only assertions.
All economic ‘truths’ are theories, but nobody pays good money for theory without a hard sell, so assertions are made.
Sometimes they appear to be truths for a while, until they don’t.
Economic and market predictions are entirely reliant on individuals and groups of individuals behaving as expected, and people don’t always do that.
If economics were a science – ie if economists actually had a clue and there was certainty – there would be no boom and bust.
Ever.
It’s that simple.
Accusing others of ‘making assertions’ implies that you think you’re not – making you more clueless than average.
Starmer is accientally right here-a clock is right twice a day- but will surely support tax increases and cuts elsewhere
Oh come on SteveH ! Starmer isn’t some planning an MMT revolution. He isn’t saying ‘taxes aren’t used for spending so there’s no point in corporation tax’ He’s thick as pigshit and probably has no opinion on MMT whatsoever. What is misguided is all forms of neoliberalism – with or without corporation tax he still believes in paying down debt, he just wants it to be the wealthy donors that back him to pay. No he wants stealth austerity.
…just *doesn’t* want it to be…
Nonsense, it should not be beyond the Treasury to come up with a scheme to tax those very large companies that have made hugh profits out of of the pressent situation while leaving companies struggling like hell to survive alone.
Starmer, as always, is wrong. He couldn’t back a winner in a one horse race.
we should no by now millionair starmer will always play along with the Tories Because the prick is one
It is easy to get drawn into a discussion that ends up revolving around taxing the wealthy and “debt”.
The argument for a wealth tax comes from the fact that, since 2008 and even during the pandemic, the wealth of the very richest has increased enormously whilst the wealth of the vast majority of the population has decreased by very close to the same amount. The argument is for making a transfer in the reverse direction.
The argument about “debt” is always presented in the terms used by Thatcher – that it is just like running a family, you have to spend no more than you get or you will borrow more and more and will have to “pay it back”. It’s simplistic. When a country has a central bank (the UK has the BoE, the US has the Fed., the EU has the ECB) then you can’t run out of money. When Mervyn King was asked how difficult it had been in 2008 to raise the billions needed he said that it was easy, all he had to do was tell one of his staff to put some big numbers into the computer.
Look at Sunak’s budget. Completely outflanked Labour.