Overall I think Labour will be a bit disappointed with how the ‘relaunch’ has started. Labour have given themselves a mountain to climb anyway through a year of inaction but the speech today lacked coherence, purpose and distinction from the government.

Starmer is (funnily enough) making a lot of the same mistakes Corbyn made in 2019. He is listing a ‘bold’ set of policy proposals that come across as disjointed and lacking connection to Britain’s priorities.
The policies themselves were basically good, I wouldn’t argue against them. But I would cringe whenever Labour came out with spending proposal after spending proposal in 2019 without any rationale or connection to a larger economic strategy. That’s what Starmer did today.
The questions that voters will have about Starmer’s speech are the same ones that voters will have had about Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto: why are these policies your priority, how can we afford them and why aren’t we doing these already?
The first one needs to be answered by diagnosing Britain’s problems and their causes. He doesn’t have to diagnose all of them. For the purpose of today he could have picked three that feed off each other: inequality, stagnant income growth and stagnant productivity.
How is government policy causing these? Austerity creates low bargaining power for workers and cuts incomes and demand for business output. This reduces wages’ ability to grow and reduces firms’ incentives to invest, which causes productivity and income growth to stagnate.
Why are businesses not investing? Why are we not at the frontier of new technology and research? Because unlike countries that are, we do not direct investment towards new technologies and research. Government needs to assist business in alleviating the uncertainty of innovation
So Starmer’s policies to support wage growth, invest in partnership with business to direct British industry towards innovation, to end cuts to public services, local authorities etc will boost investment, demand for business’ output and wages and productivity
Now his policies have a rationale, a purpose. But how will we pay for them? Well you have to make the case that Britain has not been achieving its potential. Unemployment, productivity and wage growth stagnation all show we are nowhere near our limit.
Appeals to “interest rates being low” do not answer this question because the public have no idea how interest rates are administered, and probably worry that this is just some lucky coincidence and we will run up debt that will later become unaffordable as rates rise.
The message has to be that Britain has not reached its potential for a very long time, we have been living below our means and that Labour’s polices will mean we will reach our potential.
The speech itself wasn’t the worst part though. The Q&A was frankly poor. Had no answer on nationalisation, no answer on how his industrial policy differed from the government’s, no answer on the purpose of the recovery bonds. These are the key planks of his platform.
The problem is that Labour are trying to cram an activist policy platform into an orthodox framework. Interest rates are treated like the weather, fiscal sustainability is still dealt with under the assumption the government is a money manager or household.
Starmer has no story about why British capitalism isn’t working. Why do investment and productivity decline? Why does outsourcing not deliver good outcomes? Why are interest rates low?
Starmer focused on attacking the government’s competence. But Test and Trace wasn’t about incompetence. It was about the ideology of outsourcing and privatisation. Now government can bask in the glory of the vaccine rollout, but really it demonstrates the flaw in their model
So yeah, I think Labour are still in a lot of trouble, and I don’t think Starmer is up to the task of beating this government.

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Patriotism is an interesting concept in that it’s excepted to mean something positive to all of us and certainly seen as a morally marketable trait that can fit into any definition you want for it.+


Tolstoy, found it both stupid and immoral. It is stupid because every patriot holds his own country to be the best, which obviously negates all other countries.+

It is immoral because it enjoins us to promote our country’s interests at the expense of all other countries, employing any means, including war. It is thus at odds with the most basic rule of morality, which tells us not to do to others what we would not want them to do to us+

My sincere belief is that patriotism of a personal nature, which does not impede on personal and physical liberties of any other, is not only welcome but perhaps somewhat needed.

But isn’t adherence to a more humane code of life much better than nationalistic patriotism?+

Göring said, “people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”+
This is a piece I've been thinking about for a long time. One of the most dominant policy ideas in Washington is that policy should, always and everywhere, move parents into paid labor. But what if that's wrong?

My reporting here convinced me that there's no large effect in either direction on labor force participation from child allowances. Canada has a bigger one than either Romney or Biden are considering, and more labor force participation among women.

But what if that wasn't true?

Forcing parents into low-wage, often exploitative, jobs by threatening them and their children with poverty may be counted as a success by some policymakers, but it’s a sign of a society that doesn’t value the most essential forms of labor.

The problem is in the very language we use. If I left my job as a New York Times columnist to care for my 2-year-old son, I’d be described as leaving the labor force. But as much as I adore him, there is no doubt I’d be working harder. I wouldn't have stopped working!

I tried to render conservative objections here fairly. I appreciate that @swinshi talked with me, and I'm sorry I couldn't include everything he said. I'll say I believe I used his strongest arguments, not more speculative ones, in the piece.

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