Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer should learn from Brazil President Lula da Silva's 'barbecue and beer' pledge – Stewart McDonald

Tax cuts provide an illusory boost when the money is quickly swallowed up by rising living costs

Early last year, as he was being sworn in as president of Brazil, Lula da Silva made some promises to the people who had elected him to office. Where others would wax lyrical about the billions they would soon shower upon the nation or the grand forces of history that would drive their movement forward, Lula’s pledges at first seemed almost ludicrously unambitious.

“I will fight for your rights”, he told an audience of supporters. “The right to barbecue with family on the weekend, the right to buy a little cut of beef, the right to eat that piece of beef with the fat dipped in flour, and the right to a cold glass of beer.” That was it. Since then, despite the tremendous resonance his speech had with working people around the world, I have not heard another head of state with the courage to make any kind of similar promises.

Instead, here in Blighty, we have a Chancellor who froths at the mouth whenever he talks about cutting taxes – as if having more pounds in one’s pocket were the end goal rather than the means. No matter that the high streets where people are meant to spend all this newfound dosh often resemble a scene from 28 Days Later, only with more American candy stores and more vaping or betting shops. No matter that people can barely drive to the high street itself because roads up and down the UK now more closely resemble the cratered surface of the moon than public highways. No matter that the UK’s completely broken economic model means that most of the new money will be swallowed up on rent and higher mortgage costs before it can even be spent.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva made deceptively unambitious promises in a speech that has since resonated around the world (Picture: Nelson Almeida/AFP via Getty Images)

Churchillian wisdom

Indeed, I wrote recently about Winston Churchill’s famous speech at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh on rentier capitalists and landlords. In that same speech, Churchill spoke about a toll bridge in Westminster which cost the working people who used it daily about 6d a week. The tolls were abolished by the local council, which aimed to put more money in the pockets of hard-working citizens. And yet, Churchill said, “within a very short period from that time the rents on the south side of the river were found to have advanced by about 6d a week, or the amount of the toll which had been remitted.” If there is anyone reading this who thinks a similar phenomenon won’t happen in the UK today, they should write to me. I have a toll bridge to sell you.

Talk about putting more pounds in people’s pockets is useless in a country with such a broken economic model, where any wage increase is quickly swallowed up by exorbitantly high living costs. Politicians need to be more specific: what matters is increasing people’s disposable income in order to improve their standard of living. This should not be anything close to contentious political ground for any party. It is central to improving the living standards of people in every community.

A basic tenet of capitalism is that money is for spending: for investing in productive assets and for buying goods and services. Instead, the UK Government, trapped in the 1970s, puts forward promises to slash inheritance tax for the wealthiest people in the country and allow bankers to pay themselves any bonus they think they deserve – a policy now backed by Labour in their latest series of never-ending U-turns. They are monomaniacally obsessed with rewarding unproductive, speculative capital, and we are all paying the price. It is an act of generational vandalism.

IMF pours cold water on Tory plans

It is not only in the UK that the Conservative party’s follies are criticised. As Jeremy Hunt rattles the sabre with which he will cut taxes at next month’s budget with decreasing subtlety, his noises have been heard in Washington, DC – home of the International Monetary Fund. The fund (which is actually a bank), together with the World Bank (which is actually a fund), represent as close to a physical manifestation of the liberal economic order as exists on this Earth – and it came out swinging against the UK Government earlier this week.

The IMF poured cold water on ideologically driven, economically damaging Conservative cuts, with a spokesperson saying that “preserving high-quality public services and undertaking critical public investments to boost growth and achieve the net-zero targets” will need far higher levels of public spending than are currently planned.

It should not have taken the IMF to say this from on high. Where was the Opposition? Where was Keir Starmer on the need for public investment to boost growth and achieve the net-zero targets? He was, of course, diluting down Labour’s once ambitious £28 billion green pledge and sending out advisers to brief that it might be cancelled altogether. Supine.

Scotland needs better than Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. We need a better conversation about the economy. Earlier this week, I called a debate in Parliament on living standards and the need to talk about quality as well as quantity when we talk about the economy. Who turned up? Apart from SNP MPs, only two other parliamentarians spoke: one each from the Labour and Conservative Party, no doubt strong-armed by their respective Whips into attending. It is an untenable situation.

As this UK Government gives its swan song – one last heave for a set of policies that will enrich the already wealthy at the expense of working people – it is time for the rest of us to reflect upon the current economic state of affairs. Why did it feel so radical for President Lula to promise working people the right to relax and enjoy their lives? Why did a promise made by the leader of an emerging Latin American economy resonate so heavily in one of the richest countries in the world? How did we get here? How do we get out?

Stewart McDonald is SNP MP for Glasgow South