Report · Dubai Online
John Healey cheered the Labour faithful with his first conference speech as chancellor, offering an upbeat vision of a reindustrialised Britain with fresh opportunities for young people – but gave little sense of how he intends to pay for Andy Burnham’s radical plans. Healey’s budget next month is widely seen both inside and outside Labour as the moment when the prime minister’s radical rhetoric about ditching 40 years of neoliberal orthodoxy risks colliding with fiscal reality. With the global bond sell-off driving up government borrowing costs, and eye-watering energy prices likely to push up household bills in the new year, he did deliver some home truths to Labour members – and cabinet colleagues.
He deliberately and repeatedly highlighted his role in the last Labour government, as an aide to Gordon Brown – at one point recalling lending him a tie to deliver his conference speech, which Healey was wearing as he spoke, as a neat nod to that era. But, he warned: “the money New Labour had in the 90s is simply not there now”. “The worldwide economic shocks – conflicts, trade tensions – are felt hard at home,” he conceded.
“Britain has it harder now.” Like Rachel Reeves before him, Healey sought to argue that fixing the public finances was a precondition for rebuilding the economy. “The rock of fiscal discipline. It underwrites every promise this government makes ... we can’t succeed without it.” Attacking the Conservatives for driving the UK further into the red during their 14 years in power, he claimed that current levels of UK debt “are an assault on our common sense; they’re an affront to our values” – although Reeves deliberately redefined the government’s fiscal rules to allow more borrowing to fund long-term investment, which Healey presumably doesn’t resile from.
Much of the speech hailed the benefits of new industries, creating good jobs for young people – including via new local apprenticeship teams, to be overseen by local mayors and matching firms to young people. “These times demand of us a greater resolve, a greater determination and a greater hope,” he said, promising to pursue what he called the “moral duty” of finding work for the almost 1 million young people not in education, employment or training (Neet) – echoing language also used by work and pensions secretary, Pat McFadden. Many of the Neets, he claimed, could form, “the future workforce of a reindustrialised Britain”, adding that he hoped they could move “from generation jeopardy to generation hope”.
Healey also sought to fill in some of his own personal story to those outside the hall less familiar with a man who, he said, had given his first Labour conference speech a full 40 years ago, in 1986. He spoke of his wife, Jackie, who he became engaged with a fortnight after their first meeting at a Labour function, and his first job as a pot-washer in a pub that taught him the joys of a hand-pulled pint. Yet he threw little light on how he is approaching a budget now exactly a month away, other than to recommit to Reeves’s determination to balance the books, which will take more than optimism and a good story.
Source: The Guardian
