The Labour Party Is Promising More Misguided Austerity
The Labour Party’s chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is arguing for austerity on the grounds that the government is broke. In fact, the UK’s economic woes are due in large part to a decade-plus of insufficient public investment.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s speech at the Treasury on July 8, 2024, in London, England.(Jonathan Brady / Getty Images)
Britain is broke. This is the message that Rachel Reeves has just delivered to the nation as she announced forthcoming cuts to public spending and investment. Reeves claims that the Tories left the country in a much greater fiscal mess than the Labour Party could have realized while they were in opposition — and it’s now up to her to fix it.
Her claim is reminiscent of that made by the Tories in 2010. David Cameron and George Osborne justified their austerity agenda based on the argument that Labour’s reckless spending had damaged the nation’s economy and that tough choices would have to be made to get things back on track. Pat McFadden echoed Cameron’s language today, when he said that the chancellor was going to have to make some “very difficult spending decisions.”
A swathe of proposed infrastructure projects are set to be axed — including plans to build forty new hospitals laid out by Boris Johnson and plans to sell off yet more publicly owned property.
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