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In retrospect, the budget that Rachel Reeves gave last fall was almost a firing violation. Britain’s Chancellor for ExCuer was warned not to come so much from the increased tax burden on business. She was told that the rich people with super were not unclear about the movement of their jobs elsewhere. But she knew better, and of course not.
A couple of things have saved it. First, a change by the Minister of Finance may have communicated panic for sprinkled investors, even if its borrowing had made most of the spraying. Second, there are more than 400 work deputies who would be worse at work. Through default, Reeves survives.
In balance, this is right. But can we at least remove the pretense now that work wants economic growth above all? This was the party line before and after its Landslide election victory last summer. You hear it less and less over time. Data – which indicate a job weakening market, among other problems – make a regular ridicule of it. So does government actions.
This week, Sir Keir Starmer announced a plan to reduce immigration. Some of them are sensitive. The problem is that this includes another round of cargo for employers, who already face an increase in national insurance costs. In other words, growth is the number one advantage of the government, but so is Nigel Farage’s beating.
Last month, Tony Blair warned of the economic cost of carbon emissions targets in Britain. Downing Street rebuked the former prime minister without deciding enough that he was wrong. In other words, growth is the number one priority of the government, but so it is zero.
Soon, in what can come down as its worst misunderstanding, work will throw a pile of additional rules in the workplace for business, except those related to migration. Unlike the tax increase, which were drafted with some truly gloomy public finances in the mind, there is not even an expressed need for the red ribbon. In other words, growth is the number one advantage of the government, but so is the sweet keeping of the unions.
This is a government with half a dozen the number one advantages. If growth is no longer primary, the problem is not that Starmer and Reeves lie the nation. Each would say what was said at the time. Like all parties that spend a long time from power, the “only” work underestimated the government’s trade.
No, the fault is attached to those who ever took these people with their word. I have not seen a less examined government at the entrance than Starmer’s. Work would never resolve the increase in short -term political pressures or its favorable interest groups, at least not when it came to crisis moments. Because conservatives tend to govern for such a long time, and to be ashamed near the end, it is understandable that the cultural defects of the work itself never regulate themselves in the national mind. The main thing is a nonsense of life outside the public sector, the movement of the Union and the world of Quango. The number of businesses living in small borders, which it will delete, was really news of even the world parts of the left of the work center.
After all, British politics is a choice of condolences to stagnant living standards. National Sovereignty and unwanted village? For this, vote conservatives. A better -funded public sector and a sacrine climate agenda? Work offers them balm. Even the “Pro-Business” reform in the United Kingdom really trades migration and other cultural causes.
At one point, we must conclude that voters want it this way. Their “discovered” preference for things other than growth is not unique to Britain. Look at most of Western Europe. It can even buy a social peace that we would not notice until it disappeared. (SH.BA has been a phenomenon of growth, with little benefit of his politics.) But let’s at least be clear about it. This government must be the last to promise to establish its first growth without arousing a national thorn.
Marking forever, then? Well, there is a trace of hope. Starmer often reaches the right place, late. He removed Jeremy Corbyn from the work movement after campaigning for several years to make him prime minister. For gender and other cultural questions, he is ready these days to oppose the difficult left, now that he is losing anyway. During the prolonged peak era, you cannot find it with a flood light.
Let me then predict another conversion of eleven-hours. Near the end of this parliament, which promises to be an economic flop, Starmer will make drastic reforms to improve growth. These will include some or all of the following: a zero net mitigation, a deep step towards the EU, a tax change to restore mobile wealth in Britain, a number of exceptions to new workplace laws, and perhaps even a smooth unblock of the same immigration curves it has just announced.
These policies can tease many animals to see work through future elections. Or, as I have suspected Starmer to be chosen before, this is just one of those history pockets when a big change in public sentiment is coming, but it still does not come. In such cases, more of a leader can do is prepare the soil. The first boosters of thatcherism occurred under the work government that preceded it. Many of what we think as Reaganite began under Jimmy Carter. Starmer has that kind of historical role written throughout it. He can still set economic growth above everything else – but too late for him, and for a lost generation of his compatriots.
Janan.gans@ft.com
