In their own way, Reeves and Starmer are as stereotypically Labour as their more left-leaning colleagues, but they are statist technocrats rather than merchants of social change: their shared quest, it seems, is to put the government machine back in working order and cling on to its orthodoxies in the hope that they can be restored, while somehow sparking renewed economic growth.
This is really a bureaucrat’s prospectus, all about such apolitical concepts as competence and efficiency.
And its most vivid illustration is the three-pronged insistence that will define the immediate political future: that supposed fiscal rectitude must prevail, that no really ambitious thinking can be brought to the tax system and, as a consequence, that meaningfully lifting the country out of the hole it has been stuck in for 14 years is going to have to wait. Treasury spreadsheets, it seems, have decided our fate – and the national malaise may be about to deepen even further.
I disagree with his framing of ‘efficiency as an apolitical concept’, but you can’t have everything I suppose
Nice to see this kind of analysis in the Guardian. The centre now appears to be realising that Labour’s orthodox position is becoming a problem:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/10/keir-starmer-rachel-reeves-britain-pensioners-winter-fuel-allowance
I disagree with his framing of ‘efficiency as an apolitical concept’, but you can’t have everything I suppose