Healey’s Dull, Cliché-Ridden Claptrap Can’t Hide an Economy Entering a Doom Spiral

Whilst our gimmick loving PM is easy to mock, it would appear to be the case that irony is alive and well in the higher echelons of the Labour Party.

Watching our freshly minted Chancellor donning his best homme sérieux carapace to deliver a typical cliché-ridden, disingenuous and wearying speech at the MTC in Coventry, one can only sit back slack-jawed and ponder at what early juncture did he leave the bumpy road of reality?

Whoever lay behind the pen of this truly grotesque distortion of where GB plc currently stands deserves a gong the size of a dustbin lid hung ceremoniously round their head. Does Healey really believe for one moment that his rightly derided predecessor Rachel Reeves had worked “to recover Britain’s fiscal discipline”. She left behind a trail of half-baked economic interventions which, by common consent, have only exacerbated the burden on businesses and consumers up and down the land.

His homily of traveling from his constituency in South Yorkshire to the G20 in North Carolina to deliver what sounded like an ennui-inducing monologue of some magnitude, was no doubt included to burnish his international credentials.

I started to tell them a fresh story about Britain. An optimistic story. One of resilience. Of pride. Of huge latent potential. A country turning a corner. A country whose people, and businesses and communities are ready to seize the opportunity of new technologies and new ideas. I talked about the trade deals with our allies, the inward investment making Britain the place to do business. I talked about interest rates – cut six times since the election. Borrowing – at its lowest level in six years. Growth – still fragile, but the fastest in the G7 in the first half of this year. And productivity – finally ticking up after decades of lagging behind our peers.

I could only hope that he managed to avoid the graveyard after-lunch spot, where the clunking of multiple heads as they fell sleepily on the tables listening to his soothing discourse on how wonderful the UK is became deafening. Had anyone by happenstance had a look at the recent headlines to realise that this Panglossian discourse was a fairy tale of some enormity?

Perhaps the denizens of Sheffield and Doncaster could readily identify with this veritable Shangri-La located off the coast of Europe, whilst annoyingly the good burghers of neighbouring North Yorkshire and Middlesborough hadn’t yet got the message of optimism and corner-turning.

How anyone can spout such unmitigated guff on the day Jaguar Land Rover announced 4,000 job cuts is astonishing, but Healey – warming to his la la land theme – went further, though not until after wheeling out the pantomime villain Liz Truss as an excuse for the state of the economy. Quite how much more mileage Labour can wring out of this old chestnut remains to be seen, but on the current crop of MPs who appear on the box with regularity, there is still a good deal left in the tank.

Fiscal discipline was of course his first priority, and naturally “underwrites every promise the Government makes”. In case you weren’t hearing the loud warning klaxons blaring out at this point, his glib observation that he and Andy Burnham are “in lockstep in meeting fiscal rules” should have every taxpayer counting the spoons.

For all the grandiloquent talk of balancing the books, controlling borrowing and bearing down on inflation, one instinctively knows that this is risible tosh. With backbenchers primed to scupper any meaningful cut to the welfare budget, this bloviating will be rapidly proven to be hollow rhetoric.

Those whose eyes hadn’t glazed over were then treated to Healey’s vision of how Great Britain can become Growth Britain. This required hosing the audience down in ectoplasmic quantities of claptrap.

Acting at pace, in partnership with business , and with patriotism – proud to back British businesses, buy British goods, promote British exports, get British people working in the jobs we create in the process …

This is a dual mission. A dual mission for growth led by the Prime Minister and me as Chancellor: No. 10 North and the Treasury acting together. Through devolution. Through greater public control. Through a strong, strategic centre of government.

Words, words and more words that some of the electorate will correctly intuit as socialist code for higher taxes, increased state intervention and worsening public services. The spectre of devolved institutions – lauded as some magical catholicon, will in due course be revealed as merely an expensive bureaucratic diversion. burdening taxpayers with yet more shiny-trousered, well-renumerated civil servants. Or, as the Chancellor frames it:

The solution is a fundamental shift. A shift that starts with putting power and resources with local leaders – to build infrastructure, boost private investment and deliver local industrial strategies supported by derisking public investment that matches local needs. To unlock the potential in their region to do things in the best way that Whitehall can’t.

His listeners must have been lapping up his exciting discourse on how the grants from central Government will be replaced by “a share of local income tax for every Mayoral Strategic Authority beginning in 2028 or maybe our city-regions could emulate the success of those in France or Germany, growth in our country would be transformed”.

But I would imagine it was his announcement of the Northern 500 – something that sounds like a sporting tournament – that would have had them cheering in the aisles, bringing, as he promised “the North’s most ambitious mid-sized businesses into a single growth community led by the Great North partnership of Mayors, led by the Mayors, supported by the private sector and by central Government”. I can hardly contain my enthusiasm.

And as every single speech now entails we had to include the obligatory paean to Artificial Intelligence. In Ministers’ minds there is nothing whatsoever that now cannot be bettered without a large dollop of AI.

In Healey’s eyes it “will transform our economy at every level: every firm, every community, every hospital, every school, everywhere can benefit. And unlike every previous world-changing technology – from the factory to the steam engine to electricity to the world wide web – AI self-improves. And on some measures the capability of frontier models is doubling every four months.”

To which one can only realistically respond – let’s see, shall we?

But in the true tradition of Whitehall farce, he kept the figurative side-splitting finale to the end, pledging to deliver;

Good growth in every postcode. Hope in every heart. Not a slogan, but a test. One we have set ourselves, a test that  – with your help – one we will meet.

As the late John Junor would say, “Pass the sick bag.”

Alexander McKibbin is a retired media executive who worked across domestic and international media.