Rachel Reeves' Rancid Rhetoric: A Few More Thoughts

Recently taking up the issue of Rachel Reeves' first speech in Parliament about the new Labour government's fiscal "inheritance" my primary concern was establishing the hard specifics--just what it was that her government meant to do, and how it looked from the standpoint of the Labour party's promises and image. Quite predictably it affirmed the view of Starmer's government as promising to be the most right-wing in the century-long history of his party--and perhaps one of the more right-wing of any party.

Going over the rhetoric only reaffirms that, not only in such ways as the gratuitous reference to welfare cheats so dear to those who believe stupid lies about "welfare queens" living in luxury bankrupting the nation, or the none too subtle attacks on organized labor (with Ms. Reeves twice attacking public sector strikes as causes of the "inheritance"), but the way in which she broadly raised the matter of fiscal discipline, and situated what remain Britain's two principal political parties in relation to it. Making of "unfunded" the dirtiest word in the English language and throwing it about in the fashion of the pseudomature after they have just discovered swearing as she went down the list of "unfunded" Tory programs, she made it seem as if the Conservatives who presided over the country's brutal, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights-condemned austerity regimen of the 2010s were a pack of government program-mad lovers, upholders and extenders of Big Government and the welfare state who had to be reined in by stern Labour budget balancers in a profound reversal of the simple-minded stereotypes ceaselessly promulgated by Establishment media and expertise.

Much of this, of course, was the sort of cynical grandstanding that the politics-loving courtiers of the powerful, to their great and eternal discredit, absolutely admire and adore, and much prefer to cover as against the policy that is actually the end of all the nonsense, and really affects people's lives. Still, for a moment take it at face value and think--What if this really is, if only in some slight degree, how the world looks to Ms. Reeves, Keir Starmer and their colleagues? If by the standard of these persons Tory austerity really was spendthrift welfare statism, with all that implies for what the British people can expect under Starmer?

Really, really think about it.