Open letter to Alison McGovern

I recently wrote an email to my MP, Alison McGovern, asking that she vote against the government's proposed plans to remove the winter fuel payments from pensioners. She sent me back a copy of Rachel Reeves' press release. This is my reply:

Dear Alison,

First, let me thank you for sending me Rachel Reeves' press release. It's an example of economic illiteracy, performative cruelty, and massive cognitive dissonance ignoring the evidence.

For sure, the alleged £20 billion hole in the finances sounds like a lot of money, but it's less than 2% of the whole budget. It's peanuts, not even statistical noise. It's also based on the long debunked fallacy that there is a fixed amount of money and the government doesn't have the means to make more money when it needs to. Central government finances in a country that has a fiat currency are nothing like a household, and using that metaphor is incredibly dishonest. Theresa May suddenly finding her magic money tree and creating £1 billion to bribe the DUP, and Boris Johnson pulling £32 billion of of nowhere to create the useless track and trace systems are examples of this, as well as your own party finding £300 million to send to Ukraine not days after the fuel allowance was removed only adds insult to injury. This is also approximately half of the "saving" from removing the heating allowance. The Ukrainian cash being used to rebuild infrastructure and probably help keep their pensioners from freezing to death is a cruel irony. I don't begrudge the money to Ukraine, but I do begrudge intellectual dishonesty.

We also see the dangerous idea of austerity being rehabilitated, even after George Osbourne was forced to abandon it because it was doing so much damage to the economy. Has Reeves learned nothing over the past 15 years? Is she in some kind of time warp? Was she asleep all this time? The evidence demonstrates clearly that all austerity does is increase the value of the assets held by the wealthy and impoverish the rest of us. Doing failed policies over and over again isn't the first sign of madness, but it's certainly not a sign of competence, rather a slavish inability to question long defunct and discredited economic dogma. For someone who claims to be an economist, Reeves seems to have very little idea of how government finances actually work.

She claims to have "discovered" this hole. I have read it was reasonably well known in government circles well before the election. The only conclusion I can draw is that this was planned all along as a demonstration of how far she is willing to go.

The performative cruelty is wanting to demonstrate to the City that she's willing to do things that may be an anathema to the majority of the population. The Tories did this many times, and Reeves wants to demonstrate that she is just as capable, if not more so, of putting the boot in to poor people who can't fight back to protect the interests of the wealthy.

The Tories were defined by their economic illiteracy, performative cruelty, and oblivious disregard for humanity. An acquaintance of mine recently tweeted that some folks worked extremely hard to get them out, but in fact didn't manage to do so. I think he was right. I would appeal to your heart, and perhaps your sense of shame, but what would be the point? The Tories didn't have them and it would appear you don't either.

Regards