Austerity of Thought

Keir Starmer's promised 'decade of national renewal' is increasingly promising to be a decade of national disappointment instead

“I’ll be as bold as Attlee” Keir Starmer promised on the eve of the last general election, telling the Big Issue magazine that “I ran a public service during austerity, I saw the impact of the Tories’ decisions. There will be no return to austerity with a Labour Government.”

Fast forward to today and Starmer’s promise is looking increasingly hollow.

Not only is he failing to unleash the Attlee-style renewal of public services he promised, but the Prime Minister is actively unleashing cuts instead.

In the past few weeks, Starmer has announced big cuts to international aid and disability benefits, with more cuts to Whitehall announced by the Chancellor Rachel Reeves just this morning.

This coming week she will go even further, as she sets out plans for real terms cuts to unprotected departments of up to seven per cent.

Such is the scale of concern across the Labour party about all this, that even those on the right of the party are speaking out, with former Blairite minister David Blunkett this week describing Reeves’ insistence on unleashing Austerity 2.0 as "Treasury orthodoxy and monetarism at its worst".

Meanwhile demands for new taxes on wealth and big business are being dismissed by the Treasury, with multiple reports suggesting that Reeves is actually planning to *cut* taxes on tech bosses, following pressure from Elon Musk’s White House.

Now it’s not clear exactly what voters had in mind when Starmer promised a new Attlee-style “decade of national renewal”, but it’s unlikely that it included tax breaks for tech bros and benefit cuts for the disabled.

Yet unless there is a change of course soon, that looks to be exactly where we are heading.