Labour's infuriating economic illiteracy

If they're lying to you about their reasons for doing something, you'd be a fool to believe what they're doing is good.

Darren Jones isn’t just some pipsqueak Labour backbencher, he’s Labour’s shadow chief secretary to the treasury, so deliberately spouting economically illiterate drivel is completely unforgivable.

Just listen to the absolute rubbish he recites to defend Keir Starmer’s decision to ditch all the pledges, policies, and promises that he obviously never had any intention of keeping.

It doesn’t seem to matter how often people complain how absurdly misleading it is to compare public borrowing with credit card debt, Starmer’s right-wing version of the Labour Party are clearly intent on deliberately fostering economic illiteracy by invoking these deceptive and discredited Tory austerity tropes.

The reality is that these tropes are so economically illiterate and misleading that an independent review advised BBC presenters not to use them, because to continue doing so would be to foster economic illiteracy.

However the right-wing ghouls Keir Starmer has surrounded himself with are absolutely intent on misleading the British public with economic nonsense, because it apparently suits their purposes to spread economic illiteracy, just like it suited David Cameron and George Osborne in 2010.

It isn’t just utterly misleading to compare very low interest government borrowing with extremely high interest credit card debt, it’s extremely deceptive to pretend that government budgets are anything like household finances.

If you whip out your credit card and spend borrowed cash on a restaurant meal or an expensive pair of shoes, that money is gone from your budget and not coming back. When a government borrows to invest in a rail upgrade or a new hospital, a load of that money comes back immediately via factors like income taxes on the workers’ wages, business taxes on contractors, VAT on supplies and materials … Then there’s the long-term economic benefits of having a country with better transport infrastructure and public health too.

Misleading comparisons between government budgets and household finances perpetuate the false impression that government spending is essentially waste, rather than investment in the economy, which is an economic myth that should have been well and truly busted to pieces after fourteen years of failed "let’s cut our way to prosperity" Tory austerity ruination.

This asinine austerity nonsense isn’t just at the root of economic stagnation, failing public services, bankrupt councils, and soaring poverty rates, but it’s literally tripled the national debt that the Tories said they were going to "pay down"!

Who would have thought that fourteen years of deliberately repressing workers’ wages so they have less money to spend into the economy whilst savagely and indiscriminately slashing investment in the things that generate future economic prosperity would end up making things worse?

And then we have Darren Jones and other senior Labour front benchers like Rachel Reeves pointing to the inflated size of the debt after 14 years of austerity ruination and invoking the exact same economically illiterate tropes as the Tories did in 2010, in order to argue for more of the same austerity rubbish that caused the economic damage they’re highlighting!

And what’s so infuriating about Daren Jones’ use of economically illiterate tropes is that he’s invoking this arrant nonsense to defend cutting investment in things that would be good for the economy in the long-term.

Taking our energy, water, and transport out of the hands of greedy corporations and overseas governments would obviously be better in the long run because the obscene profits these parasites have been idly extracting out of our crucial infrastructure and services have acted as a drain on the real economy.

Imagine if these utilities were run as public services with a remit to maximise Britain’s economic potential, rather than to maximise profits for the parasitical profiteering owners, and if wherever they generated profits, those profits would be reinvested back into the system for maintenance and upgrades (to stop raw sewage flowing into our rivers and coastal waters for example).

Labour keep invoking these economically illiterate tropes about all the money being gone and the national credit card being maxed out to try and justify not investing because we supposedly can’t afford to, when in reality we can’t afford not to.

Letting private profiteers and foreign governments siphon unearned £billions out of the infrastructure and services that they’re deliberately underfunding is quite obviously stupid.

Condemning hundreds of thousands of kids to destitution purely because their parents had more than two children is economically stupid because deficits in nutrition, educational materials, decent housing, and opportunities mean they’ll never grow up to achieve their full economic potential.

Lumbering university students with literally unpayable tuition debts on rip-off inflation-busting repayment terms is economically stupid because it stifles their full economic potential by ripping a 9% aspiration tax out of the income they should be using to start businesses, buy houses, raise families, or just passively spend back into the economy.

Slashing investment in green technology and home insulation schemes is economically insane because wastefulness and lack of self-reliance leaves the UK economy open to more economic shocks like the energy price inflation crisis that we’ve still not yet even recovered from.

Jones can’t admit that Labour dropped all of these policies because they never really believed in them, never intended to implement them, and that they only ever existed at all to help Starmer defraud his way into the Labour leadership, so he’s forced into recycling second hand Tory tropes to deceive people into believing nonsense.

He can’t say that Starmer’s Labour is intent on serving the interests of capitalist profiteers and overseas governments above the British people and the British economy, or admit that Starmer’s inner circle are a deluded bunch of investment-phobic austerity-obsessives who don’t give a damn about lost economic potential. So he’s resorting to the kind of deceptive nonsense that has the economically aware shaking their heads in disbelief, and which would get a BBC reporter reprimanded if they tried to invoke such drivel.

Labour’s deluded and brazenly deceptive economic positioning is a house of cards built from deliberate lies, inexplicable austerity-obsession and investment-phobia, and a load of economically illiterate tropes designed to convince the hopelessly gullible that the solution to damage caused by 14 years of Tory austerity ruination is simply more austerity, but with a red rosette pinned on it this time.

So don’t be surprised if the whole thing blows down at the first sign of economic trouble.