Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has reiterated his commitment to ‘wealth creation’. Speaking to BBC Breakfast, he said:
It is unusual for a Labour leader to sit here and say the number one mission is wealth creation and growth of our economy, but that is the number one mission
So Starmer’s new diagnosis for a country with extreme arbitrary inequality is more ‘wealth creation’ not redistribution. As the Guardian reported, Labour has not actual policy on “wealth creation“. Professor Michael Ben-Gad, professor of economics at City University, said:
There is a lot of rhetoric about increasing economic growth but not much detail. If there were a cost free way of achieving higher rates of sustained economic growth, the UK and other developed countries would have adopted it by now.
So, it’s fair to conclude that Starmer hopes that by making businesses more money, the wealth will be passed on to workers. You could call this ‘trickle down economics’. Yet in 2022, he called such an approach a “piss take”, meaning its yet another U-turn.
In the UK, the Trussell Trust alone handed out around three million foodbank parcels in 2022-23, up from around 60,000 in 2010. Meanwhile, the wealth of UK billionaires has skyrocketed by £600bn from 1990- 2022, in an increase of 1000%.
A “piss take”. Quite.
Starmer said:
That’s their politics: make the rich, richer; make the super rich even richer. The theory is that if they are made even richer, some of it may one day trickle down into the pockets of other people. It didn’t work last time. Trickle down – it’s a piss take.
Now, Starmer has effectively slammed his own policy of growth with zero redistribution as a joke.
As of 2021, the economically lower 50% of the UK population owned less than 5% of the wealth. The top 10%, meanwhile, owned 57% of the countries’ total wealth and, as of 2022, the top 1% held 23%.
Still, there’s no commitment to a wealth tax in the Labour manifesto. By contrast, the Green Party has a policy of taxing assets worth over £10m at 1% and assets worth over £1bn at 2% per year. The Greens also want to equalise capital gains tax with income tax. This would mean people aren’t paying more tax for working than rich people do for living off wealth. The party says its tax changes would rebalance the economy by up to £70bn per year.
RMT’s Mick Lynch has said:
There are more rich people than there’s ever been, so the problem is the distribution of wealth not the creation of it. Our members, like all working people, create the wealth of society.
Hard right Republicans, meanwhile, have praised Starmer’s approach. Senator Chuck Grassley likened Labour’s commitment to “wealth creation” to the views of Ronald Reagan, calling it “very Reaganesque”.
US president Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the UK brought in an era of neoliberalism (austerity, privatisation and deregulation) that led to the rampant inequality seen today.
Both the Conservatives and Labour want to continue this framework, despite Starmer himself calling it a piss take. It’s time to break away from the two party consensus.
Featured image via Sky News – YouTube
