Rachel Reeves' pyramid of economic deception

The incoming Labour government's pretence that they've suddenly found a £20 billion black hole in the Tory books is yet another deception on top of a stack of other economic lies.

Labour Party spin doctors have briefed the press that Rachel Reeves is set to announce a shock £20 billion Tory black hole in the public finances, as if this revelation comes as some kind of unexpected surprise.

The reality of course is that Labour knew all along that the public finances are in a diabolical mess, but they promised to stick to Tory spending plans regardless, knowing full well the numbers didn’t add up.

Furthermore Rachel Reeves deliberately decided to tie herself up in an economic straight jacket of "fiscal rules", adherence to Tory spending plans, and promises not to increase taxation on corporations and the mega-rich, knowing all along that the her sums would never add up.

Labour’s refusal to explain how they’d deal with the screwed up state of the public finances during the election campaign prompted the Institute for Fiscal Studies to accuse both main political parties of operating "a conspiracy of silence" and "refusing to acknowledge some of the most important issues and choices to have faced us for a very long time".

Labour can’t pretend to have been unaware, after all Keir Starmer glibly dismissed the damning IFS report as "defeatism", so there’s no doubt that they already knew about the problems in the pipeline.

They were also warned about the Tory black hole in the public finances by former Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell back in October 2023, and during the election campaign by journalists like Owen Jones.

They chose to ignore these warnings and stick to botched Tory spending plans, and now they’re pretending that they’ve only just found out that the plans they promised to stick to never made any sense.

This story that they’ve just stumbled across this shortfall now, upon inspection of the Tory government’s books is an absolute fabrication.

However this farcical pretence is far from their only economic deception.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have repeatedly resorted to using deceptive economic baby talk like "maxed out national credit cards", "no money left", and "no such thing as magic money trees" to defend their refusal to reverse Tory austerity ruination, and give the British economy the long-overdue dose of investment economics that it so desperately needs.

This is because they’re adherents of the exact same austerity ideology that tells us the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

There’s no acknowledgement that Britain desperately needs to invest in the drivers of future economic prosperity like education, infrastructure, quality public services, modernisation, and transportation upgrades.

In fact under Starmer’s leadership the party has repeatedly scaled back its investment commitments like the Green Investment Plan.

There’s also no acknowledgement that state investment recirculates around the economy, or attempt to quantify which forms of public spending generate the strongest returns on investment in order to prioritise them.

They’re operating with the same myopic penny-pinching mentality as the Tories, that public spending needs to be restrained in order to prioritise short-term balancing of the books.

How well did this book-balancing mentality work for the Tories?

Well, they literally tripled the national debt within fourteen years and still left a £20 billion black hole in the public finances, and at the cost of ruined public services, stagnated wages, local governments all over the country teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, a dystopian shambles of a social security system, crumbling infrastructure, and the widespread feeling that Britain’s locked into perpetual economic decline.

Of course the newspapers have uncritically regurgitated Rachel Reeves’ absolute fiction about having just discovered that the Tory sums don’t add up, because it makes a nice simple baby story to bamboozle the gullible with.

But it’s beyond absurd that Labour went into the general election promising to stick to Tory spending plans knowing how much damage this economic approach has already done, and knowing perfectly well that their sums didn’t add up either.

And their reliance on these economic deception tactics throughout the election campaign, and into the first few weeks in government too, illustrates their outright unwillingness to be honest about the economy.

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