Of Rachel Reeves' July 29, 2024 Speech in Parliament

While no sane person expects that politicians will keep their promises to the broad working public (their promises to the elite interests that own them are a different matter), and expects less and less of politicians the more and more as they have "Establishment approved" seals, centrist sensibilities, technocratic pretensions, and a penchant for whining "I want to be Prime Minister" when called out for every disappointment of their supporters, Sir Keir Starmer's brazenness is still something to behold, with his Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves' speech a scarce month after the election that brought Starmer into 10 Downing Street living down to the lowest expectations those who voted for him with noses held, or did not vote for him at all, would have of a Starmer government. Pretending that the state of the country's finances had somehow been kept from them in spite of the fact that no observer of these matters of any intelligence would believe such a story, Starmer's Chancellor--mere weeks after her party's publishing a General Election Manifesto that, if still pathetically watered down from the pledges that Starmer made back when becoming party leader was the step he had to take in order to hope to someday "be Prime Minister," still promised that "There will be no return to austerity" in black and white (you may find this in the section "Economic Stability," specifically on page 19 of the document)--announced the "discovery" of a £22 billion hole in the budget and an assortment of "tough" and "difficult" decisions, including the following:

• The abandonment of plans to institute the "Advanced British Standard" in education (Reeves dispensing with funding efforts to improve teacher recruitment and retention, and student outcomes in math and English).

• The abandonment of £800 million of "unfunded transport projects," including work on the A303 and A27 motorways, and canceling those "Restoring Our Railways" (I assume she meant "Restoring Your Railways") projects to restore railway system lines and stations "which have not yet commenced."

• A "complete reset of the New Hospitals programme" supposed to deliver forty new hospitals to the country.

• The cancellation of plans "to introduce . . . charging reforms" in the adult social care aiding the aged, disabled and ill that would have "increased the generosity of means-tests."

• The cessation of "the Winter Fuel Payment" that helps older people with their heating bills to those who are "not in receipt of Pension Credit . . . from this year onwards."

• The extraction of "at least" another £3 billion in savings from government departments to compensate for public sector pay increases in a manner as yet undetermined.

Reeves announced other "tough" decisions, like the alteration of the planned terms of privatization for its holdings in NatWest bank, but simply sticking with those more obvious items--drawing back from previously promised funding in education, the country's physical infrastructure/transport system, hospital-building and adult social care, cutting off winter fuel payments, a government turning its departments upside down to shake change out of their pockets, and all that in the name of transparent bad faith assertions about unexpected budgetary shortfalls--quite suffices to justify Ms. Reeves as having presented a full-blown austerity program, with all this maybe just the beginning as governments these past many decades have had a habit of overdelivering when it comes to what has been euphemistically called "Reinventing Government," just as they underdeliver on their social promises.

Moreover, even setting aside Reeves' apparent inability to speak to the British public in any but the most insultingly patronizing tone--as seen in her her past references to the nonexistence of "magic money trees" and her making a refrain out of the phrase "If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it" in this speech--this did not augur well for those fearful of more to come, maybe much more.

Nor did her gratuitous reference to "the unacceptable levels of fraud . . . in our welfare system," with its evocation of right-wing rants that welfare cheats are somehow the ones bankrupting the country.

It also seems worth noting that within the brief statement she twice blamed industrial action for contributing to the non-magic money tree government possessing's problems (in the National Health Service, and in the rail services) to the tune of almost £5 billion. The result is that this Labour government is blaming not just the Tories but the workers as having compelled these "tough" and "difficult" decisions--which is something to remember when they consider just what this government will be like dealing with the country's unions as well as what it will be like dealing with the country's finances.