The complicity of the Guardian

A headline that portrays what Rachel Reeves is doing as distinct from austerity, rather than a continuation of it, is a demonstration of the Guardian's complicity.

Rachel Reeves is planning the most destructive round of austerity cuts since the peak of George Osborne’s austerity mania, but the government and the Guardian are keen to pretend that her agenda isn’t just more of the same austerity madness.

The government position is beyond absurd. Their claim is that because Rachel Reeves’ cuts agenda is about half as destructive as George Osborne’s between 2010 and 2015 (the biggest in history), what they’re doing doesn’t count as austerity.

The only people who seem to be buying this absurd narrative are Starmer loyalists and Guardian hacks.

Anyone with any sense understands that Reeves’ economic agenda is a continuation of austerity.

More social security cuts (heavily aimed at disabled people); more infrastructure under-investment; more public service cuts; and another massive round of cuts to already ruined local government finances, all justified by a myopic obsession with balancing the books, and undeliverable promises of budget surpluses by the end of the parliament.

Economists are not buying it, especially since Reeves’ austerity agenda is being imposed when living standards, public services, and local government finances have already been catastrophically eroded away by 14 years of Tory austerity ruination between 2010 and 2024.

Loads of Labour MPs are also well aware of how bad Reeves’ austerity agenda is, but they’re afraid to speak out publicly because they’re familiar with the culture of control freakery and enforced conformity that Starmer has imposed.

They know that the country desperately needs investment economics not more of the same austerity ruination, but they’re unwilling to rebel, because they know there will be serious retributions for anyone who contradicts the government line that Reeves’ austerity isn’t austerity because it’s not yet quite as damaging as George Osborne’s austerity.

The Guardian’s complicity with this absurd narrative is explained by the fact that they worked so hard, and for so long, to topple the Labour left and replace them with Starmer and the Labour right.

They can’t admit that Reeves is continuing the Tory austerity ruination that caused so much damage and economic stagnation, because it would be an implicit admission of how wrong they were to back Starmer’s right-wing takeover of the Labour Party.

They can’t admit that Starmer, Reeves, and the Labour-right cabal are just Tories in red ties, because then they’d have to admit their own complicity in allowing such people to seize control of the party that is supposed to invest in workers, ordinary people, and public services, not impoverish them.

Thus we’re being led to believe that Reeves’ austerity somehow doesn’t count as austerity because she’s not cutting, under-investing, and impoverishing quite as harshly as George Osborne did (yet).

The obvious danger is that Labour is going to get walloped at the next election if they continue the Tory agenda of impoverishment and managed decline, meaning hundreds of the cowardly Labour MPs who keep refusing to object will lose their seats, and the country will be subjected to some kind of diabolical Tory-Reform coalition, and even more cuts and impoverishment.

We’re not even a year into this government, but time is already running out for them to change direction away from austerity ruination, so there’s sufficient time left to actually make material improvements to people’s lives.

Sadly, neither Labour’s cowardly MPs nor the liberal capitalist hack pack are willing to even question Reeves’ absurd lies that what she’s doing isn’t just more austerity, let alone insist on an urgent change of direction before it’s too late.