well, that and the fact that they sold out the students and didn't stop Austerity.
What worries me, Doodledog, is that a Labour government aren't going to stop Austerity, either.
One of their flagship policies was to invest £28billion in developing renewable energy and a Green economy. In the past week Rachel Reeves has been rowing back fast on that, saying that it might be possible a couple of years into a Labour administration but not right away because of the current state of the economy.
Which is bonkers, but it accords with the economic milieu she has worked in. That is a milieu which says that a country is like a household or a business and must not run into massive debt. As if the nation has a finite quantity of money. Even though, with complete lack of recognition of the contradictory nature of what they are saying, most economists will also assert that a national economy is not like a household or business economy because a country which issues its own currency can do just that.
I know I'm always banging on about this and it bores people rigid, but most of the money in our country is issued by the government by way of spending it on state services, or by banks, under licence from the government issuing loans; mortgages or loans to businesses. Spending on state services makes up a large part of the money put into the economy and promotes a great deal of economic activity. When the government restricts its spending economic activity diminishes; people become poorer and businesses lose revenue. The government itself loses revenue by doing this as it reduces its tax take.
I realise that the rationale that governments use for cutting state expenditure is that it encourages individuals to set up their own businesses rather than depend on working for the state, but how are these businesses supposed to succeed when there is less money available, because of government cuts, to be spent in them?
The rationale has always seemed like magical thinking to me. It's like a child who says they're going to be rich and famous when they grow up but have no idea of what practical steps they would have to take to achieve riches and fame.
As for attracting foreign investment, what business, whose objective is to make money from selling goods and services to people and other businesses, is going to invest in a country whose domestic and business consumers have little or no money to spare to buy those goods and services? Unless, of course, as when we were in the EU, they have access to a far larger market than just the domestic one? (think Nissan!)
Austerity is self defeating nonsense, as we know to our cost over the past 13 years. It has gutted public services and has made people poorer without doing much to increase our 'national wealth'. An awful lot of economists will tell you that, but they don't seem to be the ones that our government listens to. And neither, it seems, do people like Rachel Reeves.
Ironically, Reeves says that one of the economists she admires is Mariana Mazzucato, who has written book after book about the vital importance of state investment to a national economy...
This is why I believe that we've got to stop thinking about 'how are we going to pay for it?' and worrying about the country going bust (which it can't because we have a sovereign currency) and look at proposals for state investment and ask 'is it something that needs to be done, or is worth doing?' Also, 'who will get the monetary benefit from it?', because it's no good if the invested money ends up in the hands of the already wealthy, rather than contributing to increased prosperity at all levels of society.
