Jesus, this is dreadful stuff. Sharon Graham is not very bright at all. But who needs to be bright when you get the platform she has on the basis of 46,000 votes out of 1.2m members.
https://labourlist.org/2026/02/unite-af ... rence-2027
Unite is the biggest union funder of the Labour Party and Graham warned: “If the government does not understand that it is real change and real Labour that ordinary people want, then the rot will continue.”
Putting up taxes and borrowing a lot to pay for more public services. "The rot'.
Yeah, Labour, sort public services out, and don't raise taxes except from a tiny group of wealthy people. That might indeed be what "ordinary people" want. But that's absolute bollocks economics. No country in Europe has got close to doing that, or is even stupid enough to try.
She also slammed Rachel Reeves’ economic plan for the country for lacking vision, claiming her Budget “delivered for the bond markets and once again for the bankers, while increasing stealth taxes for millions of workers”.
What does "delivered for the bond markets" even mean? You pay them to borrow. If (as I presume she means) she's worried about borrowing being too low, the borrowing rate would go up. Wouldn't that be delivering more money to bond markets?
Great Tory talking point on "stealth taxes" too.
“The Treasury tells us that we can’t afford investment to save our critical infrastructure – that would jeopardise our fiscal rules. And so, reducing the debt we hold as a percentage of GDP goes before building British industry and our public services.
The fiscal rules exempt infrastructure spending! How can she not know this? We're not "reducing the debt as a percentage of GDP". We're aiming to have it falling in 2029-30.
“Would we ever have had an NHS if the 1945 Labour government had adopted this worship of fiscal rules. Labour appears to now be Labour in name only.”
"Worship of fiscal rules"? She doesn't even know what the rules are. But perhaps we should scrap them and run Attlee's budgets. Attlee ran a surplus as soon as he could!
To get there, the Attlee Government did austerity like she's never even contemplated to reduce domestic consumption. The idea it was some carefree spending government is so wrong it's not true. When you get your history from slogans and vibes, that's where you end up.
The NHS's first budget was £437m. It's now over £204bn. That's way more, even allowing for inflation. And this is her killer example that this Government isn't Labour and the first one was? The NHS budget went up massively in the two Reeves budgets. Does she even know this?
I don't think I could be less impressed by the political aspects of trade unions. Perhaps we'd be better banning them and everyone else from donating to political parties and do it through state funding?
- By Youngian
- By Abernathy