The Economist magazine has declared itself for Labour in this election.
In an email sent this morning by its editor, it declared the reason for its support:
Since 2020 Sir Keir Starmer has transformed Labour, expelling his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, rooting out many of his fellow travellers and dragging the party away from radical socialism.
It added:
Sir Keir has also correctly identified Britain's single biggest problem: its stagnant productivity.
Then it expressed its hesitation:
The question is whether he will be a sufficiently bold reformer to overcome it.
So, Starmer is a good Labour leader for having destroyed the Labour Party its membership wanted.
Then the UK's biggest problem is not the NHS, social care, education, inequality, climate change or the myriad other things destroying the quality of life in the UK. No, the big problem is that the return to capital on labour employed is not big enough.
And, The Economist's only doubt is whether Starmer can deliver the required increase in the return to capital, at cost to working people, the environment, and so much else.
The foxes really do look like they have taken over the chicken run. And millions of people are going to vote for the slaughter that will ensue.
I despair.
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Hmm: “The return on capital” – let me tell you a story…. tick – toc – tick toc……….. it is all about a time bomb.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/28/landfill-sites-across-england-could-be-leaking-harmful-toxic-ooze-warn-experts-forever-chemicals-pfas
I have visited some of the sites listed on this link: https://watershedinvestigations.com/home/find-out-whats-polluting-your-local-rivers-lakes-and-coast/
As you can see there are plenty of them. I will pick one example to illustrate what might happen. Romsey sits next to the River Test – an expensive place to fish – chalk stream etc just near Southhampton. Sitting on a hill above the river are two large dumps one owned by a company called Viridor, whose ultimate owner is KKR a company very very keen on “return on capital”. The dump is capped etc & gas is extracted & burnt to produce elec. What could possibly go wrong? Couple of dumps sitting above one of the UK’s premier fishing rivers & owned by a company keen on ROC. One wonders if any of the people owning/producing the Economist fish there? I am very confident that “better regulation” will sort things (is that howls of laughter I hear in the distance?). & they all lived happily ever after.
You really should tell us what you think sometime, Mike…
If you wanted to make a serious, effective start as a Government to provide a framework for economic growth; the obvious, real, effective and immediate starting place is to start with dismantling Brexit. But it will not happen. Labour (Reform, Conservative, even LibDem) are too frightened to tell the electorate they made a disastrous, irreparable mistake. they wrap it up in the excuse that the EU no longer trusts us. This is true, but that is because the EU knows that the real problem is the British are insincere negotiators over Europe.
The EU also knows that the Scots have been loyal to the EU idea, tried to stay in; were lied to by their British government to keep them trapped in the catastrophic mess Britain is in, and dumped Scotland out of Europe, with disastrous consequences for the economy, for the liberty of the young, and for Scotland, that has an existential demographic crisis.
These are facts. Britain floats on a sea of self-deception and lies.
“the obvious, real, effective and immediate starting place is to start with dismantling Brexit”
@John S warren – I will always believe the final nail in the coffin of the UK is/was BREXIT.
Why do I believe this? I have not had one English person, who I know personally and voted for BREXIT, be able to explain to me how BREXIT is suppose to work. The problems they gave as reasons they voted for BREXIT will not and can not be fixed by BREXIT.
They don’t have a rational explanation; it isn’t rational, but it is human, deeply flawed and it expresses deep, long held prejudices built out of a highly selective history chosen as a story of aspiration and liberty; constructed from a reality steeped in piracy, and the opportunism of a moment in history that gave Britain the capacity to exploit the whole world, and those unable to defend themselves, without let or hindrance, and with complete indifference to the consequences, short or long term. We have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the experience, save to bathe it in the soft focus lighting of utter self delusion and create an enduring myth about what we have done.
And Brexit is the proof that the self-deception and the myth simply goes on, and on, and on; at any price.
I’m sick of hearing about the need for “economic growth” and “growing the economy” for the simple reason that they all lead to one, chilling inevitability – a collapse of the environment on which we rely for ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING.
You want economic growth? Well that needs inputs – energy inputs. Where are you going to get those energy inputs? From existing energy infrastructure which is already maxxed out? So you’ll need to increase energy production. But how? Oil production has peaked so how are we going to run all those diesel engines to deliver all these additional required inputs? How are we going to deliver the steel required to manufacture the wind turbines and EVs and all the components required for all those built-in-obsolescence white goods as well as the parts required to feed the voracious appetites of AI and computing? And how are we going to manufacture the steel, assuming we can get the raw material? Well, we’ll have to use gas or coal because they’re the only energy sources that burn at the required temperature to do the job. And we can’t just simply turn to recycling old steel because the stocks of that are completely insufficient to meet our needs and the energy input required to do so is going to require yet more energy. Energy that we don’t have or can’t generate without bringing us to total global collapse.
Politicians are afraid to tell the truth, or are too stupid to recognise it. Either way, they’re not fit to deliver what we actually need for a better, sustainable, healthier future. But because they’re all we have and we have no mechanism to replace them (forget our electoral process – it guarantees more of the same), then what we’ll actually get is a deliberate foot on the pedal to get us over that cliff into the great big abyss of oblivion.
So please, let’s stop talking about the need for economic growth or growing the economy. Let’s talk instead about growing the things that really matter, namely:
– health
– education
– food security
– emotional well being
– affordable, accessible housing
– community
– the natural world
the list of possibilities is endless. These are the things that matter and they don’t need the economy to grow to deliver them. But they do need a complete rethink on how we act and behave as a society and as individuals. I wish I knew how to deliver that, but I’ll chew the ears off anyone who’ll listen to get them thinking along these lines, and perhaps, if more of us do that, perhaps change might come, though, to quote Yeats, “dropping slow”, and I suspect too slow to outrun the troubles that are heading our way.
Agree
Much of my book ‘The Courageous State’ was about this
There’s some sound degrowth arguments there.
I think politicians are basically in denial and really are just too stupid, as suggested.
Yet green growth, where all externalities, including carbon, are priced, and there is rational and efficient resource utilisation, can only be a brief transitional step.
There can be no infinite GDP growth on Earth.
I see no option but to replace GDP growth as the key political target, which only feeds wealth-being, with much wider well-being goals, as Jason Hickel and Kate Rowarth propose.
I wish that oil, gas and coal had peaked, but the huge development of renewables 2000-2019 globally came nowhere near remotely covering the even larger emissions increase from the continued expansion of fossil fuel extraction.
Richard,
I suggest that you and The Economist are possibly both t=right in different ways.
I suggest that if the UK Government were to adopt some or all of your ideas we would end up more productive while were The Economist having to take the reins of power then they may end up having to do some of the things you advocate to improve productivity.
Whichever given the global demographic shift we are now facing I suggest that ‘productivity’ in its broadest sense is something that needs to be looked at as we cant have hand car washes if we end up with a shortage of labour as the working age population shrinks
So, Starmer has dragged the Labour Party away from ‘radical socialism’, has he? These are such radical policies, most of them wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Tory manifesto up to the late 1970s!
Do they really believe the crap they write?
So when did Corbyn’s manifesto become radical socialism ?
It was fully costed ( unlike Johnson’s)
and to the right of most Scandinavian countries, who seem to be a lot more successful than the UK, with Denmark often described by its citizens as a great place to live.
The belief that Corbyn’s manifesto was radical socialism was shared by many Corbynistas themselves. I well remember a discussion I took part in in which in reply to some of the points I made about the manifesto I was told this was the first time they had come across Corbyn being criticised from the left.
I always recall the time I told Polly Toynbee that John McDonnell was nearly not lfft wing enough
I can’t recall if she has called me since