The right wing press announced last month that Britain is on 'recession watch', following the economy contracting by 0.1% in both September and October....
It's probably fairer to call the economy stagnant, rather than in decline, but stagnant is hardly a success story.
The Right Wing press are obviously blaming Rachel Reeve's autumn budget as the main causal factor for economic stagnation, and there's probably some truth in that, there do seem to a couple of logical correlations...
- private sector employment has fallen at its fastest level since the Pandemic, with employers put off hiring by the national insurance increase, and improving worker's rights won't help there either.
- Reducing the inheritance tax on agriculture and business property inheritance was also maybe short sighted. This applies to all businesses, not just farms, of which there are 4.8 million, employing 14 million people.
The first of these policies will have a direct and immediate effect on the economy, a negative effect, the second maybe won't have such a huge direct effect, there aren't that many businesses that are going to fold as a result given the £3M threshold, however the protests and lack of confidence this has engendered will probably harm investment.
The business world is basically now looking at Labour and thinking 'what the fuck is next....'?
The problem....
Well we do have massively underfunded public services.... and those tax hikes have been designed to fund healthcare, education and so on.
And the simple truth is these require tax.
And what is the point in delivering growth if that growth isn't distributed in the form of social benefits for the majority, rather than just a tiny handful of people at the top....?
The problem we have is that this idea of redistributive economics isn't popular at all. Mainly because people have the impression that the state redistributes benefits to the undeserving.
And then there's the tricky issue of social care, maybe on that front Labour has learnt its lesson... that's gonna need even more tax, probably, but they've successfully booted that back to 2028, pending a review launching this year, just what we need, a PhD on how to fund social care in three years time and until then, just carry on!