Keynes and funtional spending will grow Labour's plans

 Consumers are the engines of the economy. Our wages are the fuel. If the government uses its muscle to stimulate demand through prudent functional spending, the 'market' will look after business.

Labour should follow Richard Murphy

 

Why Labour Should listen to Richard Murphy

dump Thatcherite austerity and follow his economic path

1: The Myth of "No Money"

• Sovereign States Are Not Households

• The Treasury is not a piggy bank that needs tax revenues before it can spend.

• A government with its own central bank creates the money it spends into existence.

• Key Takeaway: Believing "the cupboard is bare" is a political choice, not an economic reality

 2: Focusing on Real Capacity

• Money vs. Physical Resources

• The true limit on state spending is not digital numbers, but real inflation constraints.

• If idle labor, materials, and equipment exist, the state can and should put them to work.

• Key Takeaway: You can't fix an NHS staffing crisis by withholding paper funds.

3: Tax as an Inflation Drain

• Rethinking the Role of Taxation

In a modern sovereign economy, taxes don't "pay for" spending—spending comes first.

• Taxes exist to control inflation, reduce inequality, and shape social behavior.

• Key Takeaway: Taxing wealth prevents financial overheating and rebalances power.

4: Unlocking Trapped Wealth

• Redirecting ISAs and Pension Capital

• Trillions of UK wealth sit in unproductive, speculative global stock markets.

• Murphy’s proposals show how small tweaks to tax-free ISA/pension rules can mandate domestic investment.

• Key Takeaway: The capital already exists; it just needs a direction home.

5: Closing the Real Tax Gap

• Collecting What Is Already Owed

• HMRC vastly underestimates the tens of billions lost annually to tax evasion and avoidance.

• Investing modestly in tax enforcement staff yields immense returns in recovered public revenue.

• Key Takeaway: Tax justice doesn't require taxing workers more; it requires making wealth pay its share.

6: Public Services as Productive Assets

• Austerity Destroys Growth

• Cutting healthcare, transport, and education shrinks economic output.

• A sick, poorly housed, and undertrained workforce cannot generate productivity.

• Key Takeaway: Rebuilding public infrastructure is the precondition for private sector success.

7: Taming the "Bond Market" 

• Escaping the Treasury Straitjacket

• Mainstream policy panics over bond market yields, ceding control to financial speculators.

• Strategic policy coordination between the Treasury and the Central Bank maintains market stability.

• Key Takeaway: Elected governments, not bond traders, should decide democratic policy.

8: Funding the Green Transition

• A Real Green New Deal

• Climate action requires direct, long-term state capital, not hand-waving market incentives.

• Investing in insulation, public transport, and renewable grids creates secure domestic jobs.

• Key Takeaway: Environmental survival and economic renewal are the exact same project.

9: The Electoral Imperative

• Caution Breeds Political Defeat

• Managing decline under conservative fiscal rules guarantees voter disillusionment.

• People vote for tangible improvements in daily life, not tidy balance sheet spreadsheets.

• Key Takeaway: Bold economic governance is the only path to long-term political survival.

10: The Bottom Line

• A Policy for Real Renewal

• Murphy provides Labour with a rigorous, practical, post-Keynesian roadmap.

• Abandoning self-imposed fiscal rules frees the government to rebuild the nation.

• Key Takeaway: The tools exist—Labour simply needs the political courage to use them.

The parachute problem in the Labour Party

 

The Parachute Problem and 

why Andy Burnham’s Vision Requires Local Working-Class Candidates

The political landscape is shifting beneath our feet. 

With Andy Burnham's decisive victory in the Makerfield by-election and his clear trajectory toward the party leadership, the public appetite for a different kind of politics is undeniable. Burnham doesn’t talk down to working-class communities; he builds them up. He understands that real economic growth requires secure foundations for the workforce and consumers.

But as we look to a future shaped by regional devolution and wealth retention, we run into a glaring roadblock: the centralized, top-down machine that governs how Labour party political candidates are chosen.

The Westminster Production Line

For decades, the candidate selection process has felt less like a local democratic choice and more like a corporate placement scheme. The central party machine regularly shortlists and "parachutes" middle-class, professional political insiders into regional seats, ahead of local working-class people who have spent their lives building the community.

This isn't just a complaint about fairness, 

it is an economic and cultural failure. 

When you populate parliament exclusively with people whose entire careers have been spent inside the Westminster bubble, think tanks, advisor jobs and the like, you lose the practical, ground-level understanding of what makes economies tick. When these bodies are filled with graduates who have never done a days work they can never be in touch with the reality of working class life and the lived experience.

the Labour party was founded to represent working class people

this requires working clas MPS

The View from Bournemouth

We see this dynamic playing out right here on the south coast. In Bournemouth West, our MP is Jessica Toale. To be absolutely clear, this is not a personal critique of her character or her work ethic. She is a highly educated professional with hard hard earned PPE degree doing her job.

The issue isn't the person it is the system that brought her here.

Prior to standing for Bournemouth West, Toale was a member of Westminster City Council in the heart of London. To the local electorate, this creates an undeniable friction. It sends a message that regional towns are merely career destinations for a mobile, metropolitan political class, rather than places that deserve to be represented by their own local people.

What We Lose: The Value of Local Roots

When the selection process closes its doors to local workers, it closes its doors to people like David Stokes.

Stokes the previous candidate for Bournemouth West is a local man, a member of Unite the Union, and someone deeply embedded in the social and economic fabric of Bournemouth for decades. A person with that background doesn't need a briefing pack to understand the housing pressures, the infrastructure bottlenecks, or the employment challenges of the BCP area. They live it. They have spent a career measuring out the costs of building a community.

When a top-down selection process freezes out people like David Stokes in favour of London-centric elitist professionals, the party detaches itself from the very working class reality it claims to represent and protect.

Rewiring the System

If the UK is to truly decentralize power—the very thing Andy Burnham has championed through the Bee Network and regional devolution then that decentralization must include candidate selection.

We don't need a political class that views local government or regional seats as a stepping stone on a career ladder. We need a system that actively recruits, supports, and values the working class people who are already on the ground doing the work. Until the selection process changes, Westminster will continue to feel miles away from the realities of towns like Bournemouth.

what can Andy Burnham do for Bournemouth?

 Burnham and Bournemouth.

If Burnham become Prime Minister BCP council won't get a blank cheque to go and build council houses.

But they will get something like a reformed public works loan and low interest rates ring fenced to council house building. This is likely to be combined with the planning powers to build on council owned land like the old power staion or the old winter gardens.

Building council houses will in due course be an income stream for the council that will help in multiple ways.

Land owners can hang on to land or make outlandish claims about the value of vacant land. The Starmer government was making changes to allow councils to purchase land at realistic values and not at inflated claims.

In essence and it really is this simple, the government borrows money to build council houses at low (sovereign) interest. Then lend councils money at slightly higher but still low interest. Councils then buy the land and build the houses. In due course the loans are paid off and the council gets an income stream that goes to lowering council tax and/or paying towards other essential services.

Problem is Rachel Reeves said borrowing to build council houses isn't borrowing to invest. Well the nect chancellor should have more sense.

And Burnham is right. A decent house, a good place to live gives a family the security to build a good life on.

With council housing every body throughout the whole process wins.

The 'market' can look after the so called affordable homes, councils can look after families who have low incomes and insecure jobs where they can't get mortgages.

The one drawback. Building council houses could reduce private sector demand as people who could manage a mortgage prefer to rent from the council. This could reduce house prices and millions depend on the equity value in their homes.

But during the periods of major council house building such as after WW2 the private housing market was bouyant with a high demand for houses in both sectors.

Two of the biggest financial burdens on BCP Council is SEND and adult social care. The council are having to borrow £96 million to cover SEND. Adult social care takes up £165 million of the budget. It would take a while but income from council house rents could go towards and even cover these cost burdens.

(accuracy checked by and image generated with the help of google gemini)

So lets get building...

(accuracy of the post checked by and image created with help from google gemini)

M27 trapped at 50 mph

 

The Endless Roadworks: 

Why is the M27 Still Trapped at 50mph?

The cones are gone, the tarmac is clear, and yet the brakes are still on.

Back on April 21st—nearly two months ago—the long-running roadworks on the M27 east of Eastleigh were finally declared finished. For drivers who endure this route daily, it felt like the light at the end of a very long, very frustrating tunnel.

This isn't just any stretch of road. The M27 is a vital artery connecting the south coast traffic, linking two major cities, and supporting a massive social and economic network. We endured years of delays, missed appointments, and gridlock with the promise that a better, faster link was on the horizon.

Yet, weeks after the heavy machinery departed, a frustrating reality remains: 

the 50mph speed trap is still live.

The Real Cost of False Finishes

National Highways seems to view these lingering restrictions as a minor administrative detail. But for the people using the road, it represents a massive, compounding economic drain.

Every single day that these unnecessary restrictions stay in place, they inflict a measurable cost on:

• Local Businesses: Couriers, freight handlers, and logistics companies losing billable hours idling in artificial traffic.

• The Tourism Economy: Visitors heading to the coast trapped in pointless bottlenecks.

• Everyday Consumers: Commuters losing precious time out of their days for no visible reason.

"Testing the System" is No Longer an Excuse

When pressed for answers, the standard bureaucratic line is that they are "testing the system."

Let’s be reasonable: weeks have gone by. In the digital age, that is a lifetime to run diagnostics. If a system requires months of empty-lane testing while actively choking the flow of a major motorway, then the system itself is the problem.

A Call for Transparency

Drivers deserve clarity, not compliance for compliance's sake. If there is a legitimate danger on that road, National Highways needs to be transparent about it. If not, the signs need to come down.

We are asking two straightforward questions:

1. What is the precise, technical justification for maintaining the 50mph restriction today?

2. Where is the specific safety data that proves this restriction is still required?

It’s time for National Highways to either publish the data that justifies holding us back, or change the signs and let the south coast move again.

it is safer to cruise at 70 than choke at keeping to 50

Over to You

Have you been caught in the M27 post-work bottleneck? How much time is this "system testing" costing your weekly commute? Let us know in the comments below.

Conservatives created the National Grid and then corrupted it.

 We are told that public ownership is inherently inefficient.

Yet, when Britain needed a modern electricity network to survive the 20th century, it was a Conservative government in 1926 that realized private enterprise was too fragmented, parochial, and inefficient to build it.

The National Grid wasn't born out of dogma; it was born out of absolute practical necessity.

Here’s a brief history of the National Grid up to the time of the disastrous election of Margaret Thatcher. Yes, there is no doubt that the election of Margaret Thatcher was and still is a disaster for Britain. The worst of it is the current Lino - Labour in name only government are carrying on the essentials of Thatcherism!

Brief history of the National Grid

The pre 1926 chaos

(and have we returned to this)?

It was an engineering supply nightmare. Electricity generation was entirely split between roughly 600 incompatible, localized private companies and municipal bodies.

The Problem

There was no standard voltage or frequency. If you moved a few streets over, your machinery or appliances wouldn’t plug into the wall. Because stations couldn't share power, every single local station had to keep a massive surplus of spare generating machinery sitting idle just to handle local peak times.

The Diagnosis

The government’s Williamson Report (1918) and the Weir Report (1925) both reached the same conclusion: Britain was falling way behind industrial competitors like Germany and the US because its power supply had a ‘parochial stamp’ on it. It was fragmented with too many localised generating suppliers.

The Failure of Voluntary regulation

The government tried to pass an Act in 1919 asking companies to voluntarily cooperate and merge. It failed completely. Private companies refused to surrender their local monopolies or invest in standardising their equipment and output.

The 1926 Act and the Taming of the Market

In 1926, Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government realised that the state had to intervene.

They passed the landmark Electricity (Supply) Act 1926, which created the Central Electricity Board (CEB).

The CEB was a public corporation, and it did something extraordinary:

·         It forced the standardization of the entire British system to 50Hz (cycles per second).

·         It selected the most efficient power stations to generate electricity, closing down the wasteful ones.

·         It didn't buy the power stations yet, but it acted as a state-mandated monopoly wholesaler buying all the electricity from generators and sending it over a brand-new, publicly owned network of high-voltage wires.

The Economic Payoff

By the time the initial grid was fully operational in 1938, the results were an unassailable proof of the efficiency of a unified public system:

·         The amount of expensive spare plant machinery required nationwide plummeted from 80% down to just 15%.

·         The capital saved by not needing all that duplicate machinery paid for three-quarters of the entire cost of building the Grid itself.

·         Production costs fell by 24%.

 

1947 Nationalisation – The Golden Era of Coordination

While the 1926 Act created the grid architecture, the ownership of the actual power stations was still split. Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government finished the job with the Electricity Act 1947.

They swept up all the remaining private and municipal assets, forming the British Electricity Authority, which later evolved into the iconic Central Electricity Generating Board (CEB / CEGB).

This unified, state-owned system could handle massive fluctuating demands:

·         The Supergrid: In the 1950s, the state built the Supergrid (275\kV and later $400kV.

 

·         Instead of digging up and hauling millions of tons of coal by train from the North down to southern cities, the state built massive power stations directly on the northern coalfields and transmitted the energy cleanly down the wires.

·         The Price Drop: By planning the system as a single machine rather than a collection of competing profit-centres, the standard price of electricity in 1989 (just before the sell-off) was, in real terms, among the lowest and most stable in the system's history.

 

May 1979. Then came Thatcher and Thatcherism

It took Thatcher ten years to get round to smashing the electricity generating system. Although Gas seemed to be her first privatisation, her first victim was the steel industry. Followed by massive unemployment. So much unemployment that people were encouraged to go sick to massage the unemployment figures. It is worth noting that we still have Thatcherism to this day despite the damage that has been done – and is still being done to you and me.

In 1989 the destruction of the stable national grid started!

Even worse was to happen, and is still happening to you now, when George Osborne came along!

 

Working Class Keynes and MMT to rebuild broken Britain

 

The Works Canteen Keynesian/MMT Action Plan: 

Labour must pick up the Spanner and fix the economy

For decades, the Labour Party has been suffering from a linguistic coup.

If you sit in a Westminster committee room or watch the evening news, you will hear a dialect that sounds like economics, but is actually a class barrier. It is what the sociologist Basil Bernstein called the "elaborated code"—a bloodless, abstract jargon packed with phrases like fiscal stability, supply-side reform, structural readjustment and other bullshit

It is the native language of Socio-Economic Groups A and B. It is the language of Magic Circle lawyers, corporate consultants, and Treasury technocrats who have spent their lives passing exams by rote. They have treated the British economy like a textbook to be memorised, completely detached from the physical reality of working class life and the everyday consumer.

And while they recite their formulas in television studios, the rest of the country—the true working-class majority spanning from Groups C1 down to E—is left holding the bill. If Labour wants to survive the next general election, the "exam machines" running the Treasury need to stand aside for a partnership that understands the dignity of a hard day's work. It is time for a Burnham-Streeting leadership to implement a Works Canteen Action Plan.

The Tool Kit: get rid of the myth of fiscal rules

The first step of the Action Plan is to completely smash the orthodox lie that the government has run out of money or is like a business or even worse is like a family. The UK government is nothing like a business or a family.

When oxcam technocrats tell you the national ledger must balance like a household checque book on a kitchen table, they are lying. The objective reality is: 

a state with its own central bank and its own currency can never "go bust".

Money is not a finite resource dug out of the ground; it is a sovereign tool kit. The only real limits on our economy are physical limits—availability of steel, energy, engineering talent, and factory space.

Instead of waiting for private venture capitalists to save our declining towns, a pragmatic Labour Treasury must use the power of the state to issue long-term, guaranteed procurement contracts. We don't fund things by squeezing more tax out of an already broken workforce; we fund them by mobilising the unlimited national credit card that never needs to be repaid to manufacture physical assets.

Govrnment bonds (gilts) are a savings scheme for banks, insurance companies, pension schemes, big corporations and the very rich. It is a liability on the government just like the savings you have in a bank are a liability on the bank to pay you the savings if you need them. let's get this straight, government bonds are not government borrowing. Government bonds are a government backed secure savings scheme.

The Holy Trinity of British Production

We don't need abstract growth lines on a spreadsheet; we need boots on factory floors. The Works Canteen Action Plan targets three concrete, heavy-industrial hubs with three immediate, common-sense commercial goals:

1. Sunderland: Steel on the water for Modern Energy

Offshore wind farms in the North Sea need a constant, massive fleet of specialized Service Operation Vessels (SOVs) to keep running.

Right now, we buy those ships from foreign yards.

• The Plan: Labour uses state power to mandate that every single wind farm service vessel operating in British waters is built with British steel in Sunderland shipyards.
• The Adaptation: The CO2 emitted from melting that steel isn't pumped into the sky; it is captured at the chimney stack and reacted with alkaline steel slag waste to turn the gas into solid calcium carbonate salts—creating a hard, stable mineral aggregate to mix into concrete for our national infrastructure.

2. Brough: putting British designed and built aircraft back on the runway

The decision to let the British aerospace industry slide was a political choice, not an engineering failure. The legendary Trident platform was beaten by Boeing because of bad state management, not bad mechanics.

• The Plan: We return to the precision engineering days of East Yorkshire to build an updated, modernised version of that short-to-medium-haul aviation platform. We use state procurement to secure a 10-year order book, giving thousands of local lads steady, high-wage (proper) engineering apprenticeships like the one I did.

Even to this day I am proud to be a Hawker Siddely apprentice, Labour can bring back that pride in young people of today.

3. Swindon: The Return of the Reliable Family Car

For years, the Hondas rolling off the lines in Swindon were rated the most reliable vehicles on earth. That reputation wasn't earned in an office in Tokyo; it was earned by the pride and skill of the Wiltshire workforce.

• The Plan: Pure electric vehicles (EVs) are a middle-class fantasy for people with private driveways. For a bloke or a woman living on a terraced street or in a block of flats, they are a non-starter. Labour will lease back the newly built manufacturing spaces on the old Swindon site to build a dead-reliable, good-looking, affordable British family hybrid. It is future-proof, common-sense engineering that fits the way people actually live.

A British designed and built car to equal the Swindon built Hondas

The 3-Year Election Countdown

A Burnham-Streeting team taking power by September wouldn't have time to wait for decades of oxcam academic reviews. But under this plan, they wouldn't have to. Because the roofs are already over our heads in Swindon, the yards exist in Sunderland, the blueprints and sheds big enough to build Tridents (again) exist in Brough, the money can hit the ground within six months.

By the time the next election arrives, Labour wouldn't be campaigning on dry statistics. The Prime Minister would stand on the tarmac at Brough next to a world beating aviation prototype, or on the docks at Sunderland with a massive steel hull rising behind him. Or drive the British build hybrid car equal to any made in China, off the production line in Swindon.

The message to working class people and consumers would be undeniable:

"The last lot told you Britain couldn't make anything anymore. They told you the money wasn't there. Look behind me. There is British steel in the water and the most reliable cars in the world are coming off the lines again. We used national power to back you. Give us five more years to finish the job."

If Labour wants to win, it has to stop speaking the bloodless, rote-learned code of the Oxford/Cambridge common room exam machine. It must return to the context-rich, direct language of production lines and the works canteen, fire up the Keynesian factory floor, and put pragmatic working class women and men in control of the Labour Party.

To see the stark reality of how the current political dialect completely fails to connect with the people who do the actual work, watch this footage of the Chancellor's speech to engineering workers, where the restless, completely disengaged reactions of the staff in the background reveal just how hollow the textbook approach looks on a real factory floor.

Working class, consumer focussed Keynes combined with modern money theory is the way to build Britain again.