BY STEWART SLATER
Small children have much to recommend them. They are willing and indeed eager accomplices in any trick parent A wishes to play on parent B. They have a labrador-like desire to lavish affection on those whom they like. They are the perfect dimensions to keep chimneys clean.
But they are not without their disadvantages. They are extremely competent at producing all manner of noxious substances. They are utterly incompetent at cleaning them up. Nor is their grasp of reality all that it might be. One of my acquaintances spent the entirety of a 3D screening of Alice in Wonderland hopping on and off a parental lap, unable to grasp that what she could see with the glasses on had the same ontological status as what she saw with the glasses off – donning eyewear did not transform the cartoon butterflies into a clear and present danger to her person.
For it takes a child a while to realise that what might be is not always the same as what is. And it takes a child a further while to realise that adults are rather better at making this distinction than they are. Few parents make it through without at least one tale of transparent implausibility delivered with the most earnest sincerity, and fewer still without resorting to that old fall-back, “You’re just being silly now.”
Most of us grow out of this phase. We come to accept that reality is what it is, not what we would like it to be, and we realise that others base their beliefs on what they perceive, not on what we might prefer. We generally adjust our behaviour accordingly, trying in our communications to say things which bear some plausible connection to reality. Some, however, do not make this journey and for them we have a special name: politicians.
For, like every five-year-old, our ruling class has an unfortunate habit of saying what it would like to be true without much consideration for whether it is true, and even less for the ease with which it might be shown to be untrue.
It will not have escaped your notice that Rachel Reeves recently found a “black hole” in the nation’s finances of around £20bn. Doing her best impression of Capt. Renault in Casablanca, she was shocked, shocked at this discovery.
Everyone else was shocked too. By the fact she was shocked. For a figure of around £20bn had been widely bandied around during the election campaign and Ms Reeves had herself confessed during it that the transparency of public book-keeping meant that she would be unable to pull the trick she attempted last Monday.
More forensic minds noted that, of the shortfall, £9.4bn was accounted for by the new government’s pay settlement for public sector workers. This did not, of course, lead Ms Reeves to applaud her predecessors for leaving a better fiscal inheritance than had been feared but to blithely push ahead, ignore what was clear to all, and accuse the Conservatives of the governmental equivalent of maxxing out a friend’s credit card on “hookers and blow” before scarpering.
Financial holes need to be filled and the obvious place to start was by removing the winter fuel payment from wealthier pensioners. That’s the winter fuel payment which the current Chief Secretary to the Treasury had written to the former Chancellor just six months ago to demand be kept because “pensioners mustn’t be forced to bear the brunt of Tory economic failure.” A sentiment echoed by his leader who described pensioner fuel poverty as “awful” and “the biggest thing in the world” in a campaign video.
£20bn is, of course, no small amount, so merely taking some money off some pensioners will not be enough. Out too must go the social care cap, the social care cap to which, during the election campaign, Wes Streeting said his party was “committed…We’re not planning to come in and scrap that.” Even so, it will not be enough. Taxes will have to rise, opined the Chancellor, having spent the election declaring that they would not. Presumably she will turn to the “10-12” tax rises she was, according to The Guardian, planning during the election campaign, the election campaign during which, just to make it perfectly clear, she said she would not raise taxes.
Blithely asserting something which is transparently implausible is nothing new for Labour politicians. The small boats crisis will be solved by a new policy involving rebranding a unit of the Border Force and talking to the French – an idea which the electorate is expected to believe had never crossed a Conservative mind. The new government is unique in putting country before party, as if any disagreement should be explained solely by greedy self-interest not by genuine political differences. For the government is “non-ideological”. That its policies announced to date – taking money from pensioners to give to public sector workers, concentrating housebuilding in blue and yellow rural areas where it is least needed and does less to benefit the economy than it would in large, productive, Labour-friendly cities– clearly put the interests of the party’s supporters ahead of the country at large is purely coincidence no matter its similarity to the iron law of electoral politics – take stuff from their side and give it to our side.
They are not, however unique in this. Kamala Harris was America’s “Border Czar” up until the moment she became the Democratic Party’s presumptive Presidential nominee. At that point, immigration became someone else’s responsibility (exactly whose is unclear) and, indeed, it had always been someone else’s responsibility. She was not, and never had been, the “Border Czar” you were looking for.
We tend to forgive children their rhetorical flights of fancy because they know not what they do. No five-year-old’s threat to leave home is taken seriously because no five-year-old is remotely capable of doing so for more than about 10 minutes even if they are unaware of this fact. But politicians, being, to all intents and purposes, fully grown adults, are expected to be aware of what they say, and the context which surrounds it. Rachel Reeves was expected to know the state of the public finances because there were reams of publications telling her (and us) about them and she had access to the Treasury civil servants for several months in the leadup to the election. She knew, she knew that we knew and still, she persisted. As did her boss when he insisted he had never been Jeremy Corbyn’s friend despite having given an interview, footage of which was widely shared, describing the Worzel Gummidge of Islington in just such terms.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command” wrote George Orwell in 1984.
This is what Labour is doing. Believe what they say because it is them saying it. Put aside what you know, what you’ve read, what you’ve seen and believe what they say. Believe what they say even though you know you should not. Believe what they say because they’re going to keep on saying it. Believe what they say because you can’t do anything about it. Believe what they say because you live in their world and they make the rules.
That’s not silly, it is sinister.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.