It wasn’t their finest hour. As Labour MPs filed through the no lobby Wednesday evening to vote against George Osborne’s budget surplus wheeze, 20 of our number sat on their hands. These included Liz Kendall, late of the Labour leadership contest, a couple of former front benchers, and backbench loyalists-no-longer like Mike Gapes. In all, their showing […]
Posts Tagged ‘Fiscal Charter’
Labour’s media strategy should be unspun but not unravelled
Oct 19th, 2015 by Luke Barratt.Labour has had a difficult week, politically. Though Corbynites will obviously want to support the leadership as far as possible, it is difficult to deny that John McDonnell fell right into the clumsy Osborne trap that was the Fiscal Charter. The Shadow Chancellor’s naïvety on this issue speaks to one criticism that has been levelled […]
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Putting the Political back into Political Economy
Oct 7th, 2015 by Ewan Gibbs and Nathaniel Blondel.The reaction to John McDonnell’s announcement that he would aim for a balanced current account, whilst maintaining borrowing for capital investment, revealed a recurrent fault line within left-wing economic thought. At its most banal McDonnell was accused of signing up to George Osborne’s ‘austerity charter’, whilst more sophisticated critics argued such policies would weaken demand […]
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How Labour should deal with the Fiscal Responsibility Act
Oct 5th, 2015 by Michael Burke.Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are frequently in advance of many of their supporters on economic matters, including their supporters in academia and economic commentators. They are correct to argue against permanent budget deficits and in favour of the central role of public investment as the path out of the crisis, identify People’s Quantitative Easing […]
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Labour should be cautious of adopting Osborne’s fiscal charter
Sep 27th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.There is now a strange air of unreality about the handling of the deficit. Osborne has made it centrepiece of his political narrative, although his prime motivation is not to reduce the deficit, but to shrink the State and the deficit gives him the pretext to do it. Even if it was his prime objective, […]
