Apologies for posting twice on the same day. I had thought to place this as an extension to my earlier offering, Corbyn on Starmer’s resignation speech, but it raises a sufficiency of separate issues to nudge it past the high threshold imposed by the standards demanded of a standalone steel city post.
Like this morning’s, its featured podcast is under twenty minutes. From the Duran duo, it sticks with their usual format of Alex Christoforou putting questions to Alexander Mercouris. Ground covered? One, why we can safely say Burnham’s administration will be “continuity Starmer” – aka Blair 3. Two, why Britain has had so high a turnover of prime ministers in so short a period.
(Sir Keir’s two year tenure an epoch at side of Lettuce Liz Truss‘s forty-five days.)
The first is easily addressed by reference, inter alia, to the likelihood of Wes Streeting replacing Rachel Reeves as Chancellor, but adds colour and insight – such as that Burnham, a normally outspoken champion of EU re-entry, fell silent on the matter during the Makerfield by-election which – The king is dead. Long live the king! – sealed Starmer’s fate. Predominantly working class Makerfield had voted overwhelmingly To Leave, well, gosh … must be ten years ago now, almost to the day! 1
The second cuts deeper and an adequate answer involves two parts. One is political, which Alexander does a decent job of addressing, making so brief a podcast worth viewing on that count alone. The other is economic – or I should say, political-economic – where he’s out of his depth as evidenced by:
- His conflation of GDP with wealth creation, which has him tell us a wealth tax would be a bad idea – which it likely would be, though not for the reason he gives – on the ground it would depress house prices!
- His related but more serious error in saying a UK government, with a fiat currency, could only invest in economic regeneration by borrowing or raising taxes. Such junk economics – which confuse money with the actual means, natural resources plus human labour, of wealth creation – are manure to the neoliberal tree whose fruits he rightly finds bitter.
I’ll say no more for now on economic mythology when it’s one of several subjects I want to take a deeper dive into as soon as “events, dear boy, events” – aka ruling class devilry – allow me a breather. I’ll close by saying a weak grasp of political economy is insufficient reason – babies and bathwater – for ignoring a podcast which gets a good deal right.
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- The pros and cons of Brexit aren’t the point here – Burnham’s nimble footwork is – but FWIW my position, stripped of nuance, is that (a) the EU is corrupt, a junior imperialism captured by the US as the political wing of NATO; (b) Brexit was disastrous for British working people on account of its timing, political context and spectacularly inept manner of implementation. This was my view at the time and, though my understanding would deepen over the decade to follow, still is.