It’s crept back in! That ever so patronising (condescending? I always get the words mixed up) phrase ‘hard working families’ is back. Here’s a sentence from the Toolmaker’s Son’s speech at some photo-op in the Midlands: ‘It’s time for change. My Labour government will be different. We’ll run a patriotic economy where Britain’s interest is centre stage and Britain's hardworking families reap the rewards.’ I wonder about these hard working families. How shall we measure the productivity of the two year olds amongst them? Perhaps in the over-arching ‘patriotic economy’ they will be given a say on whether yet another American hedge fund should snatch yet another chunk of the NHS, or whether some Indian conglomerate should decimate the British steel industry—such as it is. Does a ‘patriotic economy’ have anything to do with repatriating core industries—not just their location but their ownership? I doubt that Starmer has got this far, even if Biden is seeking to e.g. rebuild USA’s microchip manufacturing capacity. We’ll have to wait and see what, if anything Starmer lifts from the Biden patriotic economy plan, even if Starmer’s grand investment in the green economy has already been shredded, unlike in the States where Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act survived its passage through Congress, albeit a wee bit battered. I have just watched an interview with Yanis Varoufakis on a You Tube show hosted by ‘Joe’ (sorry I’ve lost the link) where Yanis tells viewers that Starmer has got nothing between his ears, which translates as no analysis. For Starmer to use the phrase ‘patriotic economy’ precisely encapsulates what living in an analysis-free world means. On the other hand, I suspect President Presumptive Trump has a clearer idea, but he just happens to be congenitally incapable of delivering it, having built his empire on fraud and Russian oligarchs’ money.
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