Richard Murphy: Why I'm worried about the prospect of a Labour government

If it did, I would not be writing for The National. But there is much more than Keir Starmer’s attitude towards independence that makes me feel this way.

His denial of our right to proper proportional representation in all elections also offends me, not least when even the members of his own party support that idea and have passed a resolution at their conference saying so.

This makes Starmer (above) the ultimate anti-democrat. In addition, as the election campaign closed, Starmer suggested that he could not imagine a return to the EU during his lifetime.

This, alongside his approaches to independence and PR, makes it clear that he will as Prime Minister act in denial of the political wishes of vast numbers of people in the countries that he wishes to govern.

His refusal to commit to anything like the necessary levels of government spending to achieve appropriate levels of support for essential public services, including those funded through the Barnett formula in Scotland, is also depressing.

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Let me ignore the issue of climate change further now, largely because it seems that he intends to do so.

Instead, the thing that I am at least as worried about is the intention that he and Rachel Reeves share of bringing back the truly dreadful Private Finance Initiative (PFI), so great is their paranoia about supposedly increasing the national debt.

The Tories created PFI in the 1990s, but Labour massively expanded this programme during their period in office from 1997 to 2010.

They used it to pay for all sorts of infrastructure spending, from schools, to hospitals, to maintenance contracts, and even roads.

Scotland disproportionately suffered from its consequences, with many projects in Scotland being laid low by the exceptional and inappropriate costs imposed on them as a consequence of the massive transfer of value from the state to the private sector that PFI delivered, with no overall gain for society being achieved, at all.

Now, as many observers note, it looks likely that Labour will be inviting private equity companies, and particularly those from the USA, into Downing Street as soon as possible so that they might discuss the future funding of government investment expenditure.

This is despite the fact that the government can always provide, whether via taxation or borrowing, the lowest possible cost for funding such investment.

In particular, government can always secure the lowest possible interest rates available within an economy like that of the UK.

This is precisely because ultimately governments create all of our money and, therefore, a government is always able to guarantee repayment of its debts.

No one else can do that. What this means is that anyone lending money to the government is guaranteed to get it back, which is not the case for anyone else.

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That reduces the borrowing cost because it is risk free. Therefore, if we need infrastructure investment – and we definitely do – the obvious way for that to be funded is via government borrowing, with ongoing costs being matched by taxation.

Despite this, Rachael Reeves (below) wishes to borrow funds at higher overall interest cost from the private sector. She also wishes to burden future generations with the absurd level of ongoing costs that are always included in PFI deals.

(Image: PA)

She will do all of this simply to avoid the suggestion that she has borrowed, when in reality that will be exactly what she is doing, and no one will be fooled by her chicanery.Gordon Brown did, of course, do the same thing, at a considerable cost of Scotland.

He, too, wanted to pretend that he was not borrowing.

But what is really absurd is that Reeves has apparently learned nothing from the mess that Brown created. What he left behind were massive excess cost to be borne long after he left office.

Far from saving money, his PFI schemes cost the country considerably more than a simple policy of borrowing and taxation could ever have done.

People in Scotland have paid a considerable price for this, and it now looks as if Rachael Reeves wants to do the same thing all over again.It is inevitable that if she goes down the PFI route that this is what will happen.

These contracts are always heavily stacked in favour of the private sector operators.

The result is arrangements that are exceptionally expensive because they maximise the cost of future service payments under these arrangements just so that it appears that no borrowing takes place at the time that they are signed.

I come to two possible conclusions. The first is that Rachael Reeves and Keir Starmer are so stupid that they do not know how badly PFI failed us all when it was last used by Labour.

Alternatively, they believe that people are so stupid that they will be conned again. Neither is an attractive choice.

I would love to think that for once in my life I could welcome a new government into office without fearing a forthcoming financial disaster that it will inevitably create, but that’s not going to happen this time. One day, I hope, Scotland will have a better choice. But it’s not available, as yet.