It was me who posted these quotes, that you have copy and pasted here.
Reeves was clearly lying. Everybody with half a braincell knew she was lying at the time. It was repeatedly pointed out by every reputable economic organisation of which I’m aware. However, voters prefer to believe in free cake than to face reality which is why: a) why she made these clearly false claims in the first place (although this was actually quite stupid because the Conservatives had behaved so appallingly in office that Labour would have won anyway and, arguably, they might have been better off winning with a slightly smaller majority without some of the slightly more extreme and incompetent candidates becoming MPs and therefore causing difficulty now in power to pass sensible legislation which would have been easier to pass with a smaller majority but fewer extremist MPs); and b) why she is now handicapped from doing what needs to be done to fix things. She has sufficient economic education to know that what needs to happen is for income tax to rise, but alongside large-scale reform of the tax system to restore the social contract as I’ve said on other threads, but she is being torn between the economics and reality, and political and optics issues caused by these plainly absurd promises made pre-election which cannot be kept and should never have been made in the first place but Labour MPs do not want to be broken because they know that it will be fuel for future election campaigns to claim that nobody can trust a word they are saying.
It’s quite astonishing that in a situation where it would have been almost impossible for them to lose the last election they made these ridiculous and unnecessary pledges, goaded by the Conservatives’ claims that they’d raise tax, when they didn’t need to do so in order to win. We can see that by the fact that they managed to win without putting forward any economic policies at all of any substance beyond not raising taxes (which it was clear ANY Government was going to have to do, as was pointed out repeatedly pre-election).
They fell straight into the trap and now we’re all suffering the consequences with lots of “small” but for the specific groups to which they apply very significant and economically damaging tax rises being made instead, causing this doom loop, because politicians will not level with the public and state the plainly obvious fact which is unequivocal which is that if they expect the level of services available in continental Europe then our lower and middle earners must pay far more tax than they are doing. This is a mathematic fact: there is no other way to fund it and milking higher earners (but who are not wealthy) has already reached its limit and passed the peak of the Laffer curve some time ago. HMRC data demonstrates this, with bunching below each threshold, falling tax revenues when taxes are hiked further, highly skilled people cutting working hours or retiring early or emigrating, resulting skills shortages requiring more immigration, productivity falling etc.
We have an extremely top-heavy system with our higher PAYE earners paying some of the very highest tax rates in the world and receiving third-world services in return or, indeed, being excluded from receiving many of the services that they fund at all. They are voting with their feet. There is no faster way to destroy the country’s future or any prospect of future growth than to convince its most talented and high-potential young people to leave. Meanwhile they cannot tax the actually wealthy properly because the UK investment prospect is now so poor through decades of underfunding and underskilling and poor infrastructure that FDI - upon which we’ve become reliant - needs them not to make yet more of these people run for the hills.
A European model of Government with state services that people in the UK expect requires low and middle earners to pay far more than they are. Politicians need to level with them and tell them that this is the choice: pay a fair share (clearly still much, much lower even proportionately than higher earners are paying) OR accept far fewer services and keep your low taxes. The top-heavy tax system has been pushed to its limit and the social contract broken and the effect of continuing that path further will be a further acceleration in decline.
We need actual leaders who can articulate a plan for the future, give people some hope that these supposed “hard decisions” actually have a purpose and WILL lead to an improvement, but no it won’t be immediate. Otherwise the cakeists will continue to rise and the decline will get even steeper and become a freefall from which there is no way out.
Sadly much of the electorate prefer to vote for promises that it’s quite clear cannot and will not be kept than to face reality, so politicians will continue to serve them what they demand: promises that they’ve articulated no credible way whatsoever to keep. A lot of the electorate prefer this to a credible plan which might not be nice in the short term but actually WILL lead to a long-term improvement. Even better if you can chuck some scapegoats in (immigrants, disabled children etc) to blame when your never-credible promises are broken. Nigel Farage is the caricature of this on steroids which at one point would have been so ridiculous it was beyond a joke but now a significant number of voters are, unbelievable,. actually taking him seriously when quite obviously electing Reform would be 100 times worse and make the doom loop of falling living standard a sheer drop at terminal velocity, very obviously much worse and faster than the incompetence we’ve seen from Labour and the Conservatives.
This Labour Government are as disappointing and economically illiterate as the Governments for the last few decades so there is little hope in my opinion, because they electorate are served what they demand and they demand incompetent leadership promising them unicorns which will never arrive. There are steps that could be taken to start to improve things - the only way of doing so being to take the steps needed to increase productivity - but not one political party has anything resembling a leader who is prepared to try to articulate this to the electorate and the electorate do not want to hear it and would prefer to spend their time fighting over the division of the remaining, mouldy-looking cake crumbs. So expect more of the same, and ongoing decline.