askchapo

Apologies this ended up being quite long and it's just my own view.

Because the current ruling clique got into the position in order to enact an anti-left purge by restricting internal party democracy, purging candidates that are insufficiently loyal to Blairism and israel. They rode into government as the only existing opposition to a historically-unpopular Tory regime and managed to pull off a large parliamentary majority despite getting only 33% of the vote, which immediately went to their head and convinced a large number of them that their removed neoliberal authoritarian politics were historically popular. This was only possible with the support of the hard right media establishment and behind it, the City of London, which were profoundly spooked by the 4 year Corbyn premiership and had to be brought back on-side by manifold promises to avoid any kind of social democratic reform, resulting in the "fiscal rules" of Rachel Reeves and the broader restrictions placed by the treasury and the office for budget responsibility.

Of course, this same media establishment and the broader petit-bourg/labour aristocratic masses who make up the largest voting population also find tax rises to be anathema, so the government has gone to great lengths to avoid increasing tax whatsoever (save for some minor increases and equalisations in areas such as inheritance, hence the "farmer protests", and national insurance rises for employers, which are minor but being treated as though they're Stalinist expropriations).

Overall this prevents any increase in public expenditure (save for a few pet projects, the military budget, and wage increases for some public sector workers) and in fact has led to a new wave of austerity. It is important also to mention the Truss experience which weighs heavy on the minds of any regime's budgetary managers; in 2022 Truss tried to implement tax cuts that would have made the British state insolvent much more rapidly than it otherwise will be, and this spooked the bond markets, almost leading to a serious financial crisis and insolvency in the short term. The financial deep state fear this happening again as Britain's finances are dire and worsening, and the Labour government are terrified of the possibility that they might have to go to the IMF for a bailout, which last happened in 1976 under Callaghan's Labour government and would be a deep national embarrassment, as well as an echo of "old Labour" that they're desperate to avoid. To understand why, you have to know that elderly reactionaries constantly harp on about the 1970s and how terribly Labour managed the state in that decade.

Unlike the US which has infinitely deep pockets due to the dollar's global hegemony, the British state is at more immediate risk of a financial crisis and the budgetary shortfall worsens every year, leading to an increasingly radical drive to cut state expenditure at any cost which is shared by every party with a chance at getting into government via parliamentary means, and yes, this would likely also apply to a social democratic government if such a party had a genuine shot at electoral victory. This manifests as a contradiction between the government itself and the parliamentary party who find some of these cost-cutting measures too evil even for them, such as the recent rebellion on cuts to disability benefits that would have amounted to wholesale social murder.

The only option left to them that doesn't involve fighting their own parliamentary party, then, is to seek private investment at any cost as a driver of growth. This means courting Blackrock, it means lowering the cap on ISAs to try and force the upper middle class into seeking riskier investments, it means reforming pension structures to allow more to be invested. Of course, this isn't anything like what Starmer and his faction promised they'd be doing when they were in the leadership election in 2020 with a much more left-leaning base, and it's not what the unions want either (some strikes were quickly settled via pay rises but there are many further issues unresolved). Nobody is getting what they wanted except for the City of London and a layer of professional middle class freaks.

As basically everyone is disappointed and their popularity dwindles, Starmer and his leading clique, having done nothing but repress the left and pander to the right in the lead up to winning power, can only reflexively continue to do so, and have been more authoritarian and radical in attempting to crack down on the social movements than even the Tories were. They attempt to appear "serious" about the immigration "crisis" (migration numbers are high but it's a direct result of the need for cheap, exploitable labour, which neoliberalism demands), leading to their dangerous aping of far-right rhetoric and policy. This fails to convince the fascist scum who will never trust Labour anyway and are voting Reform or Tory, but it also disgusts the minority of decent people in the country.

There's a lot I'm not addressing here, especially around the sheer radicalisation of neoliberal rightists within the party due to Ukraine/Russia and the genocide of Palestinians that they're complicit in, but these are the broad strokes IMHO. These budgetary issues will ruin any government that gets into power no matter how far-left or far-right they are, as following decades of neoliberalism the state is totally governed by the markets and the markets are getting easier and easier to removedwith every passing year. In a few years this will manifest either as a gigantic financial crisis or a round of austerity so severe that the state recedes totally from many aspects of life, both of which will open up room for some kind of extra-parliamentary seizure of power that will end the United Kingdom.