Darren Jones has warned against increasing public spending as a path to making the country "great again".
The former Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister under Sir Keir Starmer said Britain is "poorer than we often think" as he said higher public spending alone would not lead to economic growth.
Mr Jones was sacked from Labour's frontbench when Andy Burnham entered No 10.
He had been talked up as a contender to lead the party, but declined to stand, saying a contest would not give the eventual winner enough time to prepare an autumn budget.
Writing for the Times, the MP for Bristol North West said: "Britain is poorer than we often think. We won’t get richer based on higher public spending alone, and we can’t tax billionaires who don’t live here.
"We shouldn't rely on public spending as a route to some romantic version of making Britain great again as we look in the rearview mirror for a great history that is no longer available to us.
And up pops the doublethink - just when it was going so well -
"We must face the future, and I know my colleagues are up to the challenge."
6 comments:
Powder distinctly soggy right now.
Do we continually borrow money to feed our spending? Yes, so Britain really is "poorer than we often think".
We do have deep coal, oil and gas fields, good agriculture (still), a world class financial centre, but these aspects of 'wealth' are not allowed to 'count'.
The "deep coal" must surely be worthless unless there's some astonishing advance in the technology to get to it. Have you ever seen a huge Aussie open cast mine? There's no way that deep mining can compete with that in an era of cheap shipping.
James - and some of it will turn out to be face powder.
DJ - yes, what we don't do well is play to our strengths. There seems to be an attitude that they will manage by themselves even if we relentlessly milk them to sustain the things we don't do well.
dearieme - years ago I read an article about the cost of UK coal compared to Aussie coal which the article said is virtually bulldozed out of the ground onto the ship. An exaggeration, but it makes the point.
When we lived in Queensland I knew a mining engineer. His account of a "mine" he knew was that they bulldozed off a few feet of soil and stones. Then there was a layer of steam coal which they gave tho the state government as a royalties payment, then hundreds of feet of coking coal which is what they really wanted. It was shipped to Japan largely. Other fields would largely be steam coal and, again, it was a case of basically a huge quarry.
dearieme - I wonder how many kids today know what coke is, apart from the fizzy drink and the powder sniffed by celebrities?
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