Tories have tanked the economy – only Labour can pull off the rescue
It’s been a turbulent week in national politics, which affects people here in Brighton and Hove.
The Conservative government set out a disastrous “mini budget” last Friday (23 September) and the consequences have been swift.
It wasn’t just condemned by the International Monetary Fund and by the former governor of the Bank of England.
Truss and Kwarteng’s budget has tanked the pound to record lows and caused mass uncertainty in financial markets.
And now, unprecedently, the Bank of England has been forced to intervene to the tune of £65 billion in bonds to try and stabilise the markets that the government itself has thrown into turmoil.
Residents are suffering from a cost-of-living crisis, struggling to pay energy bills and buy groceries as inflation has surged ahead of wages.
Millions of households in Britain are in fuel poverty and will face the stark choice between eating and heating their homes this winter.
And what have the new Tory Prime Minister and Chancellor done? Spooked the markets by announcing a string of unfunded tax cuts.
Instead of targeting support at those in need, the Conservatives have focused on making the rich richer and plan to fund tax cuts that will benefit the top 1 per cent of earners through borrowing – meaning the rest of us will have to pay the price.
The crashing pound is making residents anxious about higher inflation, higher interest rates, higher borrowing, which affects mortgage payments, the cost of groceries and the value of pensions.
What’s most frustrating is that it doesn’t need to be this way. The government has made an active choice to put the top 1 per cent first and allow the rest of us to suffer the consequences of their tax cuts.
However, this week in Liverpool, Labour outlined a vastly different choice at their conference, with policies including
• 100 per cent clean energy by 2030 and the creation of GB Energy – a publicly owned clean energy company to deliver jobs, slash bills and help tackle the climate crisis
• free breakfast clubs for every primary school in England
• one of the biggest NHS workforce expansions in history, training 5,000 new health visitors, creating 10,000 extra nursing and midwifery placements each year and doubling the number of medical school places
• rebuilding neighbourhood policing with 13,000 additional officers and PCSOs
• building more affordable homes and targeting 70 per cent home ownership while bringing much-needed reforms to the private rental sector
• creating a national wealth fund to invest in towns and cities to create jobs and grow the economy
…
Residents in Brighton and Hove are screaming out for these policies. After 12 years of Tory ruin we are on the sharp end of the housing crisis and the cost-of-living crisis is biting.
We also have a 2030 carbon net zero target to hit and we need to give our local independent businesses the certainty and support to not just survive but thrive.
Labour will deliver transformational policies to make Britain a fairer, greener country for all of us, not just the top 1 per cent.
Councillor John Allcock is the joint leader of the Labour opposition on Brighton and Hove City Council.
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So how are you going to create this new wonderous GB energy, where is the money going to come from? And who is going to run it? You will need to do something like poach the CEO of EDF or EON for an undertaking such as this.
What are you going to do about all of the job losses within the existing energy sector when customers switch to GBE? Because GBE will, ofcourse, be cheaper, won’t they.
There are already thousands of unfilled vacancies in the NHS, where are the people going to come from to fill the posts you are going to create?
Are you going to go into partnership with the Greens? The same Greens who are in a power-sharing arrangement in Scotland with the SNP; and will ultimately oversee the break-up of the UK. The break-up of the UK will make Brexit look like a walk in the park.
In order to identify with working people, your leader needs to lose his Knighthood.
Are Labour (Momentum) still in cahoots with the Greens?
It’s a good question whilst Kier Starmer is steering a national moderate Labour Party to victory in 2 years the Brighton Labour party is still a basket case, (Hove seems to have sorted itself out). Lets hope Brighton Labour can sort itself out, understand the agreement with the Greens does them NO favours and start listening to the electorate and not it’s usual echo chamber.
Never read so much drivel. Greens hiding behind the red banner. Future looks like strikes for pay and gridlock city’s by eco warriors… GRIM
1) Now out of date – Sterling has ended up better off against a strong dollar.
2) Labour really ? – I have heard *nothing* come out of Labour. They have no solid ideas at all.
3) Labour is tainted in this rotten borough. The scene is set for independent Councillors and even the reform party.
Oh goody! Does that mean the country gets back the SIXTY BILLION POUNDS spaffed by the Bank of England trying to save the pound?
It works out at nearly a thousand pounds for each and every one of is.
I must admit it is all getting a bit silly and difficult to maintain belief in this system that just “prints” money to get out of market driven silliness.
And after all money is like a religion. If nobody believes in it, it stops being significant.
Sadly as always – Labour politics are about spending other people’s money – and no idea or system to generate income for the country.
All Labour is doing is grabbing other peoples money and then shuffling that money from left government hand to right government hand – and not creating anything of value.
If we deduct, the now completely debunked as clean energy company, DRAX – the state of UK clean energy like most other places are abysmal.
Labour wants to focus on the unreliable sun and wind and the consequences will be like Germany and Denmark – some of the HIGHEST prices of electricity in the WORLD.
Apart from that the German grid has suffered badly under their version of Labour – so the German grid can not carry excess capacity from the countries around it into german households. Denmark offered to put up more windmills to “help” Germany – but there is no grid capacity to take it.
I love wind and solar – do not get that wrong. It is a great “addition” to other energy sources. But renewable energy can not stand alone – it needs almost 100% backup to be reliable – and 100% backup is expensive and comes at a HUGE cost of extra CO2 expended to build double of everything.
in my personal life I have solar+batteries+electric car but I do also have Nat Gas heating and a fossil fuel generator – for a reason! And generator is rarely used – but have been used twice now in 2 years. That made certain we could heat the house overnight as the boiler could run.
HA HA HA HA…. “Labour save the economy” that’s the best laugh I’ve had all weekend..
They can’t even run the City. It is s dump. Weeds everywhere, junkies sprawled all over the payment destroying the retail economy in Brighton and the place looking like a dump. They are in power sharing with the Greens and they were the ones that put them in place due to issues with some of their ant-Semitic colleagues and they if anything are now more responsible for the dirty mess the city has become.