Today's newsletter, which I primarily wrote because Harvey, who filled in for Georgina while she was on holiday, made a really cool chart, is on Labour's child poverty pledge and what it tells us more broadly about the government's approach:
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One reason why much of Labour's first year in power has been a write-off is a tendency to will ends (child poverty down, growth up) but not means (I am once again asking what it will take for Labour to develop any interest in tax reform):
spoke to a friend working in the Department for Housing & Local Government and I was reminded of your "can I have Sunak back?" post a few weeks back. I got the sense this person missed the fact that the Tories, for all their flaws, knew how to pull the levers of government.
It was obvious from their campaign that this would be a vibes based government. “Growth will just magically happen through competency and stability vibes alone”.
Yeah - I think the thing which was not wholly obvious what the exact reaction to 'getting whacked in the face by the actual reality of governing', though some aspects of it are (obvious they were going to end up scrapping two child, for instance).
I honestly think they were so hopped up on the incompetence of the Tories that they believed their own line that the system would generate growth purely once the competents were back at the wheel!
But it’s also true that the state is a huge ecosystem with its only climate of possibility and once you enter it you can rapidly weathered by that climate back to the same limited parameters of your predecessors.
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While politicians seem to focus more than ever on the former without much desire to do the job of politics on the latter
We deserve each other I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯