Why is Keir Starmer fostering economic illiteracy?

Keir Starmer insists he's going to maintain the ruinous Tory austerity agenda that's bankrupting councils across the country, and using economically illiterate baby talk to justify it.

Since 2010 the Tories have absolutely smashed local government finances to pieces with massive austerity cuts to central funding for council services, driving dozens of councils across the country to the verge of bankruptcy.

These austerity cuts are one of the main reasons Britain feels like it’s falling apart at the seams and locked into terminal decline.

Council services like libraries, sports facilities, and public toilets have been closed down and flogged off to developers; funding for museums and the arts has been choked off; the roads are full of potholes; bin collections have been reduced to skeleton services; thousands of bus routes have been scrapped; youth services have shut their doors; rape crisis centres and women’s refuges have lost their funding; almost all councils have slashed spending on social housing … and it’s all down to the Tory austerity agenda that Keir Starmer belligerently refuses to reverse.

Keir Starmer has been attempting to portray himself as a decentraliser who wants to give more power to local communities, but it’s beyond obvious that the simplest way of actually empowering local communities is to reverse the disastrous Tory austerity agenda and restore local council funding to where it was in 2010.

But Starmer is vehemently opposed to reversing these ruinous austerity cuts, and he’s intent on deliberately fostering economic illiteracy to justify it.

Just listen to Starmer responding to a question about reversing Tory austerity cuts by wittering on about how there’s no "magic money tree", and compare what he said to Theresa May’s patronising economically illiterate drivel during the 2017 general election:

Starmer’s rhetoric is almost indistinguishable from May’s: The same condescension; the same tactic of blaming the previous government; even the same framing of "shaking" and "waggling" this supposedly non-existent "money tree".

The problem of course is that everyone who knows anything about economics knows that the state does have the power to create money.

Take the £875 billion in Quantitative Easing cash created by the Bank of England since 2008 to prop up the value of assets held by the rich.

Consider how the Bank of England magicked up money to credit into the accounts of private banks, and how their decision to dramatically hike interest rates has left the UK state on the hook for an estimated £40 billion in interest payments on the the money they invented out of nowhere and simply handed to the banks!

The state didn’t just "waggle" the so-called "magic money tree" to hand hundreds of £billions to the banks, they’re now paying tens of £billions in interest on the money they gave away for nothing!

It’s also worth remembering how there’s always money to pay for war. Whether it’s the hundreds of £billions squandered on Britain’s catastrophic interventions in places like Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, or the £billions that the UK is chucking into Ukraine’s unwinnable war with Russia.

In reality the "magic money tree" has been repeatedly waggled when it comes to protecting the assets of the rich, bailing out the capitalist banks, or to fund disastrous imperialist warmongering overseas … but when it comes to stuff that would actually benefit ordinary people such as paying public sector workers properly, or reversing Tory austerity ruination, Keir Starmer and the Tories adopt the exact same patronising tone to insist that the so-called money tree doesn’t exist.

And then there’s the fact the state doesn’t even need to resort to money creation to fund stuff like decent wages and functional local government services.

They could simply tax the rich a bit more.

The government could properly clamp down on tax-dodging and go after the estimated £570 billion hoarded by wealthy Brits overseas; they could equalise Capital Gains Tax and Income Tax so that the rich pay the same on their unearned profits as workers pay on their earned incomes; they could reform property taxes so that mansion dwellers and property hoarders pay substantially higher rates than those living in a single family home; and the Bank of England could save the country tens of £billions just by scrapping interest payments on the vast sums that they created out of nothing and gave away to the private banks for free.

And then there’s the fact that money invested in local services and workers’ wages doesn’t just simply disappear, it circulates around the economy, generating economic prosperity and tax revenues every time it’s spent.

It’s such an absurd misunderstanding of how things works to pretend that funding stuff like decent wages and functional public services is a net drain on the economy, when the opposite is true, because people with more money in their pockets spend more and create greater economic demand, and businesses obviously benefit dramatically from being located in places with quality public services, and healthy well-educated workers.

Starmer’s belligerent refusal to reverse Tory austerity cuts constitutes a decision to lock Britain into the terminal economic decline of failing local governments, failing public services, low pay, and low economic demand.

And justifying the continuation of Britain’s economic decline by condescendingly recycling economically illiterate Tory baby talk about "magic money trees" is proof that Starmer is just as deceptive and dishonest as they are.

If the state wants to create money to fund investment for the future rather than handouts for the rich, it can.

And if the state wants to tax the rich a bit more to bring prosperity back to our austerity-shattered communities, it can do that too.

The problem is that, just like the Tories, Keir Starmer is ideologically opposed to doing either of these things, and just like the Tories, he’s deliberately fostering economic illiteracy to justify his economically illiterate and nauseatingly unappealing "more of the same" economic agenda.

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