Which was worse?

Which was worse? Seven weeks of Liz Truss, or six whole years of World War Two.

When Clement Attlee’s transformative Labour government came to power in 1945 they had an almighty mess to clear up.

There was all of the obvious bomb damage to Britain’s cities: Vast tracts of housing, thousands of factories, masses of infrastructure, loads of vital transport links, and even the houses of parliament had been reduced to ruins, and needed to be rebuilt.

The cost of all-out war meant the national debt had risen to 237% of GDP, which is way more than double the scale of the current debt (even after the bankers’ meltdown in 2008, over a decade of wanton Tory austerity ruination, covid, and the inflation crisis).

A significant chunk of the working-age population had been killed, severely injured, or brutally traumatised. And then there were literally millions of personnel who needed to be brought back from overseas and redeployed into civilian life.

Despite all of these challenges, Attlee’s government achieved incredible things:

⚪ Foundation of the NHS with the principle of free health care at the point of need at the core of it (a system that inspired universal health care systems across the rest of the world).

⚪ Creation of Legal Aid in order to help ordinary people access a justice system that had always been the preserve of the rich.

⚪ Nationalisation of core industries and services such as rail, energy, steel, and coal.

⚪ Reconstruction of Britain's war-shattered infrastructure.

⚪ Introduction of the modern welfare state, improved access to pensions, and expanded support for families with children.

⚪ Dramatic improvements in workers' rights and workplace safety regulations.

⚪ Construction of hundreds of thousands of affordable council houses per year, to replace the slums and bombed out inner city ruins.

Amazingly Labour did all of this investment after inheriting a war-shattered economy, a national debt more than twice the scale of today's, and a workforce reduced by the death and destruction of war.

The outcome of all of this investment was that the national debt fell dramatically (by over 40% of GDP in the space of just six years), and then the post-war economic consensus that Attlee’s government established ended up delivering over two decades of unprecedented economic stability and rising prosperity for all (known as the "golden age of capitalism") before Thatcher used the chaos of the 1970s as an excuse to rip it up and usher in a new age of inequality, de-industrialisation, privatisation mania, and ever-increasing economic instability.

Fast-forward to the present and a very different kind of Labour leader keeps insisting that Liz Truss did so much damage to the UK economy during her seven weeks as Prime Minister that an incoming Labour government would now be unable to increase investment; unable to rescue the NHS from the Tory privatisation profiteers; unable to nationalise core infrastructure and services; unable to guarantee inflation-matched pay raises for public sector workers; unable to repair any of the Tory vandalism to the social safety net; and unable even to find just £1.3 billion to reverse the malicious Tory two-child limit and immediately lift 250,000 children out of needless poverty.

Instead of investing in Britain and creating a new era of prosperity like Attlee did after the Second World War, Starmer insists that there's no alternative but to carry on with the Tory ideology of self-defeating austerity penny pinching.

It's cowardly economically-illiterate rubbish, but the excuse is the worst thing about it.

Yes, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng did a lot of damage by ignoring the danger warnings to launch their insane mini budget of vast handouts to corporations and the mega-rich and austerity for the rest of us, but Clement Attlee inherited the wreckage of the Second World War!

Starmer and Reeves are not just ignoring one of the biggest economic lessons from Labour's history - strategic investment is the way to bring back prosperity - but they're also making the quite frankly ludicrous case that seven weeks of Liz Truss was substantially more damaging to the UK economy than six years of outright warfare, death, destruction, and the Blitz!

The Labour Party is in a terrible mess because it's being led by people with more in common with Margaret Thatcher than with Labour's greatest ever Prime Minister.

The current leadership are a bunch of economically-illiterate austerity addicts who have as little regard for Labour's historic achievements as they do for the millions of victims of Tory austerity that they've clearly got no intention of helping if they do manage to lie their way into power as easily as Starmer lied his way into the Labour leadership.

It's an absolute embarrassment to the Labour left, the so-called soft-left, the Labour social-liberals, the (rapidly dwindling) Labour membership, and the trade unions that bankroll the Labour Party, that between them they've allowed the leadership of the labour movement to be usurped by such a cowardly bunch of delusional, historically ignorant, austerity-addicted, profoundly illiberal, right-wing liars.

The last thing Labour needs to do is to try to resurrect the insipid and uninspiring austerity-lite agenda that cost Ed Miliband what should have been an absolute walkover of an election in 2015, but that’s clearly what they’re intent on doing, and nobody else within the Labour Party seems to even want to stop them, and point out that Clement Attlee led Labour’s greatest ever government when the economy was in a much worse state than it is now, because he invested heavily rather than resorting to penny-pinching.

And even if austerity penny-pinching made sense, which it absolutely doesn’t, there’s still no excuse for it unless you’re delusional enough to believe Starmer’s ludicrous contention that Liz Truss did so much damage to the economy in seven weeks, that it’s effectively left Britain more broke than it was in the wake of WWII!