pete75 wrote: ↑10 Jun 2023, 2:42pm
The point is Labour are having to rethink their spending plans for the environment because of the inflation, higher interests rates and generally poorer economic propsects cause by Truss's disastrous 49 days.
Truss, though an immense failure at everything, is far from the sole cause of those, indeed the medium and long term economic effects of actions like hers are pretty negligible, they do not change a countries fundamentals.
Much of inflation is due to external shocks, a large one of which we can lay at the feet of Putin. Whether interest rates are really a good way to deal with that kind of inflation is debatable but without government intervention to soften the feed through of energy prices to businesses and ultimately consumers the BoE only has one tool in it's box.
None of that really should make any difference to labour's plans. Poorer economic prospects are usually a prompt for more public investment, not less so that is a poor excuse.
Whilst there may be the valid point that the uks supply chains may not be in the required position immediately (at which point over investment can spike inflation) it would have been far better to simply word it somewhat more subtly in the first place (eg make available £xxbn of investment per annum from day one) business thrives on certainty, not indecisiveness.
That said, I'm not seeing much in the way of any u turn imminent from them on this topic, recent history has shown that even ignoring the climate risks, dependency on fossil fuels is not good for an economy, the quicker we can extract ourselves from them the better. That Germany has become the diminishing supporters of brexit EU economic point of comparison shows this as well.
Plus we should be trying to lead in emerging sectors, not clinging on to yesterday's.