The Labour Government - 2025
It's not often I go full 'Are we doomed?' but I'm certainly leaning that way.
One of the reasons I was glad to be in Scotland and not feel I had to vote Labour at the recent election was because their whole 'we will pay for better public services out of economic growth' pitch looked like obvious snake oil.
If you wanted any decent chance of significant economic growth, the realistic thing to do would be to start reversing Brexit. Brexit is such a clear and colossal case of self-harm that any politicians who start from the position that it's fine or beneficial or we should keep it are right out of the gate the political equivalent of anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers or the kind of grifter who adopts that colouration as advantageous never minding the harm it does.
Now it looks to me like they've gone full snake-oil on economic growth over AI. There's a current thread on AI itself. Some AI applications do specialist things well but the kind being pushed by the big corporate firms at the moment tend not to be of that sort and have many issues.
But two people I know who are professional IT experts both basically said the same thing to me - I give the pithier version- "Nothing makes me sweat like the three words "Government IT Project". There's a huge history of getting government IT projects disastrously and incredibly expensively wrong with a big side-order of corruption and deals for mates and donors.
Starmer himself has been quoted in the Financial Times saying
And while he pours money into this mirage, Rachel Reeves is basically going to be telling people who need public help 'Let them eat AI!' as she looks for cuts to benefits and public services, and the magic economic growth fairy promised by Starmer fails to appear.
There have been lots of posts previously tallking about how and where Labour use scapegoating to attack minorities. This is another more toxic form of snake oil and magical thinking: attacking migrants and immigration doesn't improve public services. It's immoral and acts as a distraction and a false solution to real problems when people are encouraged to blame real hardship on imaginary causes.
It also has the well-known harm seen in many other countries that if you accept the far-right framing and analysis behind scapegoating and offer a 'lite' version of that which fails to improve people's lives (because the whole framing was false in the first place), then it positions the far right with their full-fat version to win. You admitted they were right in their analysis of the problem but you just didn't go far enough. And your opponents have the advantage of not just having failed for all to see to improve anything.
The latest You Gov poll is now
LAB: 26% (-9)
RFM: 25% (+10)
CON: 22% (-2)
LDM: 14% (+1)
GRN: 8% (+1)
SNP: 3% (=)
Labour are only 1% ahead of Reform.
I honestly think this economic snake oil and social scapegoating approach is going to be catastrophic. It's the definition of a Right Wing party to me. And I simply don't know how it can be turned round by the next election because the flaws in this way of thinking go so deep.
(In depth discussion of the scapegoating side would belong in Epiphanies unless this thread is placed under dual rules)
One of the reasons I was glad to be in Scotland and not feel I had to vote Labour at the recent election was because their whole 'we will pay for better public services out of economic growth' pitch looked like obvious snake oil.
If you wanted any decent chance of significant economic growth, the realistic thing to do would be to start reversing Brexit. Brexit is such a clear and colossal case of self-harm that any politicians who start from the position that it's fine or beneficial or we should keep it are right out of the gate the political equivalent of anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers or the kind of grifter who adopts that colouration as advantageous never minding the harm it does.
Now it looks to me like they've gone full snake-oil on economic growth over AI. There's a current thread on AI itself. Some AI applications do specialist things well but the kind being pushed by the big corporate firms at the moment tend not to be of that sort and have many issues.
But two people I know who are professional IT experts both basically said the same thing to me - I give the pithier version- "Nothing makes me sweat like the three words "Government IT Project". There's a huge history of getting government IT projects disastrously and incredibly expensively wrong with a big side-order of corruption and deals for mates and donors.
Starmer himself has been quoted in the Financial Times saying
I don't think it's going to take five or ten years to double productivity, not for a moment", adding that he was "absolutely confident that the timeframes we're talking about are much, much shorter.
And while he pours money into this mirage, Rachel Reeves is basically going to be telling people who need public help 'Let them eat AI!' as she looks for cuts to benefits and public services, and the magic economic growth fairy promised by Starmer fails to appear.
There have been lots of posts previously tallking about how and where Labour use scapegoating to attack minorities. This is another more toxic form of snake oil and magical thinking: attacking migrants and immigration doesn't improve public services. It's immoral and acts as a distraction and a false solution to real problems when people are encouraged to blame real hardship on imaginary causes.
It also has the well-known harm seen in many other countries that if you accept the far-right framing and analysis behind scapegoating and offer a 'lite' version of that which fails to improve people's lives (because the whole framing was false in the first place), then it positions the far right with their full-fat version to win. You admitted they were right in their analysis of the problem but you just didn't go far enough. And your opponents have the advantage of not just having failed for all to see to improve anything.
The latest You Gov poll is now
LAB: 26% (-9)
RFM: 25% (+10)
CON: 22% (-2)
LDM: 14% (+1)
GRN: 8% (+1)
SNP: 3% (=)
Labour are only 1% ahead of Reform.
I honestly think this economic snake oil and social scapegoating approach is going to be catastrophic. It's the definition of a Right Wing party to me. And I simply don't know how it can be turned round by the next election because the flaws in this way of thinking go so deep.
(In depth discussion of the scapegoating side would belong in Epiphanies unless this thread is placed under dual rules)
Comments
Starmer's claim is delusional. Doubling productivity in five years or less equates to a 14% annualized growth rate. Hyper-accelerated countries emerging from war don't do that.
I suspect he actually means 'productivity growth' (so much for being 'forensic'), and even then it's unclear what this maps to as productivity growth has flatlined for a couple of years (double 0% and you still get 0%).
The sums being talked about are paltry (they are fractions of the amounts that the large cloud providers are spending), AI is very energy and water hungry, and the UK has very high energy prices and issues with water supply [Plus a third of energy comes from Gas with associated supply issues]
Well, so much for the McSweeney strategy of relying on 'hero voters' (Tory -> Labour swing voters which 'count double').
As I've said before, I don't think they had any real ideas other than believing that they were magically competent and there'd be a reversion to mean growth once they were in charge.
He gives the impression of not knowing what he is talking about and at the very least his government is being misleading about data privacy.
https://x.com/silkiecarlo/status/1878857740220842102
The Labour Government have the moral high ground and nothing else.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-sets-out-blueprint-to-turbocharge-ai
And that's before anything starts going wrong or overbudget. By comparison the government's cuts to winter fuel allowance were meant to save £1.4 billion a tenth of that.
And Reeves has been eyeing truly nasty hits on disability benefits - especially likely to affect people with mental ill health - because she is £10 billion short on her figures.
https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cost-of-living/dwp-plan-cut-benefits-including-30769616?
But Starmer can splurge more than that on AI - pretending it will solve things- when he refuses to do things that would actually have a very solid likelihood of helping to grow the economy because he's chasing Tory and Reform voters and actually going the worst possible way about it - making a Reform victory more likely through his poor framing and mismanagement.
"£14 billion and 13,250 jobs committed by private leading tech firms following AI Action Plan"
That's not taxpayers' money. ChatGPT says £1bn.
May I ask, what's the reference here?
It still looks hugely dubious and The Register has questions about it - sorry about the long link I keep bodging my code on this phone -
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/13/uk_government_ai_plans/ [ ETA revised link ]
How much it'll cost in public spending when 'unleashed' AI projects in public services start causing chaos like previous big government IT projects remains to be seen.
Sorry.
Morgan McSweeney who lead the Labour electoral campaign was fixated on 'Hero Voters' in marginal seats - i.e Labour / Tory swing voters which he termed 'Hero Voters'. In reality when they did the analysis, even their own report had to admit that these people comprised only 10% of Labour's 2024 vote (at very best), but then consoled themselves by saying they counted as 20%.
He had previously led a losing leadership campaign in 2015 that had got 4% of the vote (in the US context, imagine putting the campaign leader for the stapler lady in charge of the general).
But both him and the his deputy weren't big on policy, and neither was Starmer, so this is the result. The AI policy is the kind of thing you launch in the dying days of an administration when you no longer have any other ideas.
Birmingham City Labour Council's bankrupting of themselves by customizing an Oracle enterprise system notwithstanding.
While the buggered up Oracle implementation cost them a hundred million quid to fix, the real culprit in their bankruptcy is the nearly 800 million quid they’re still struggling to pay in compensation after losing a massive equal pay lawsuit some years ago.
Four years of Zombie government then. But they mean well.
But fundamentally they aren't being serious about it, or rather they aren't thinking seriously about it.
They are positioning it as a means of solving the productivity gap in the UK economy, but there are a number of reasons why this doesn't follow.
The productivity gap is a result of the composition of the businesses UK economy (low productivity, low margin service industries) and the inability of businesses to take up new techniques, technologies and processes. If you want to be serious about AI take up then you need to address those issues.
Additionally, the productivity gap already exists, so for AI to solve it, the UK would need to take it up solely or to a greater extent than elsewhere, which again is unlikely both for the reasons above and the fact that AI is being driven by global companies who are going to push it into as many markets as they can (and those markets are already better at adopting new technologies)
So de-risking a few private enterprises by offering grants and guarantees isn't actually likely to achieve much. There's no inherent good in building more data centres here as opposed to anywhere else, they don't create many jobs (which is how Starmer tried to sell them).
Finally, and on a lighter note, the Labour Party is very far from being 'seen as using AI well':
https://news.sky.com/story/labour-apologise-after-posting-tiktok-video-featuring-explicit-song-13284944
You've asserted this before. Is your evidence any better than the last time?
https://forums.shipoffools.com/discussion/5619/the-uk-budget-hell-edition#Comment_646618
How would you describe productivity in the UK public sector ?
I can think of a few reasons, not many of them cheerful. I’m not sure it matters but Telford is far from the only UK shipmate who posts occasionally (some post regularly) in the early hours of the UK morning.
I’ll leave it there.
https://online.york.ac.uk/what-is-the-public-sector/
So where are the objective productivity figures for these services over the past 5 years of Tory government. Since Covid? And the previous 5. Of Tory government.
It is irrelevant to the comparison, the measures are completely different. From my previous post:
What comparison? The gov link is for 2021. I fully understand that we get what we vote for.
The statistics don't show public sector productivity 'falling off the cliff'
I'm an erratic sleeper, so I'll post anywhere from about 9 AM to 2 AM EST.
You can find some figures and commentary here, but in case youdon't want to wade through it all, here are some highlights:
That doesn't really support your contention that "Over the past 5 years productivity in the UK public sector has fallen off a cliff.".
If you look at most of the graphs there are spikes where input and output are mismatched. that track the start and end of Covid. These are consistent with departments drawing down emergency capability during the pandemic and then rebuilding it afterwards. Indeed as the report says:
"The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic had a large impact on public services. In 2020, inputs rose, reflecting the extra resources provided to public services to deal with the pandemic. Conversely, output fell in 2020, as many services were delivered in a different way than in 2019, with additional costs and mandatory restrictions present for certain services."
A small change like this from quarter to quarter is to be expected and is essentially noise, both as there's likely to be an annual cycle affecting demand on government services, and because spend in one quarter is not likely to show up as improved output until later on.
As military defence, central government, and local government services are going to be excluded from this kind of calculation because they adopt the output-equals-input approach, this figure will be dominated by health and education both of which have seasonal and cyclical demand patterns.
Both these points are addressed in the report:
"Productivity was 8.5% lower in Quarter 2 2024 than in Quarter 4 2019. This reflects changes in the severity of the cases being addressed by public services, as well as the delivery of these services."
"These are official statistics in development, and we advise caution when comparing the latest estimates with those published before the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, as the structure of inputs and outputs changed in response to the pandemic. The method is also under development which means the estimates are subject to revision as more up-to-date data become available. Read more in Section 10: Data sources and quality. "
i.e they changed what they measure over the period being considered and so it's hard to draw the comparisons you want to draw.
It's perfectly possible to construct a set of explanations around the changes in report, for instance, just think of the impact of recruitment when unfilled vacancies in the NHS goes from a low point of 80K to over 110K (an increase of nearly 40%):
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-charts/nhs-workforce-nutshell#vacancy-rates
Teaching vacancies went up by a similar percentage over the same period (though in smaller absolute numbers).
Suddenly you are paying more to recruit and then more on stop gaps like temporary agency staff, indeed from the report:
"This is the largest increase in inputs since Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2023. It is primarily a result of increased healthcare inputs, but inputs increased for all service areas. Similarly, output increased for all service areas, except for justice and fire. "
Of course they don't do.
https://x.com/Peston/status/1883251462559437158
Perhaps Peston should have pressed Streeting on exactly what he meant by 'anti-whiteness' rather than doing a court stenographer act.
Too stunned to hear a Labour minister sounding like an editorial in The Sun, I expect.
I despair ......
I have heard that planes can cause a lot of polution circling the airports waiting to land
But I am still absolutely horrified, and deeply disappointed, by the proposal. Is it worth having economic growth - especially in the overheated south-east - if we're going to be burning up the world with our emissions? Why do we need more capacity? Why do so many more people need to fly (and yes, I do realise that Heathrow handles freight as well as passengers)? Why will thousands of local people have to live under planning blight for the next decade? This is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Our Labour Welsh Government got a lot of stick for declaring a Climate Emergency and declining to build the M4 relief road at Newport - what must they be thinking of their Westminster overlords?
Words fail me.
It's pure Treasury brain, these places already generate economic activity, therefore they must be the most profitable areas to invest in.
What Alan said. Some things have diminishing returns and finite scale.
Top of my list for alternative investment to replace air travel would be high speed rail. A collection of routes that connect multiple UK cities, through the Channel to the rest of Europe.
Also note that modern long-range narrow-body planes can safely fly across oceans (A321 XLR, Boeing 737 MAX etc.), and do so in an economical fuel-efficient (on the scale of aircraft) way: you don't necessarily need to be flying massive widebody jets to international hub airports any more.
I haven't been on Eurostar in a while, but the last time I took it, there was as much horsing around for checkin as there is on a plane. If it behaved more like a train and less like a plane, it might look more attractive.