Great analysis! And perhaps also worth remembering another prime minister whose words carry much responsibility for this. Thatcher's characterisation of the government's finances as being analogous with those of a household planted the seed from which this reverence for the fiscal rules has grown.

Compromise and negotiation are important, of course, but it helps when both parties have sound positions of principle. The principle of supporting the neediest in society is fairly easy to grasp. The principle of the inviolability of self imposed and arbitrary fiscal rules may be less so!

And rents will rise..

"Reeves will also announce a decade’s worth of social rent increases, alongside a consultation on how to ensure that the cheapest rents rise to meet the most expensive ones."

And yet... Look where the money goes...

"The extra money will help housing associations buy up thousands of new units that have already been built by private developers as part of their affordable housing commitments, but which are sitting empty because associations cannot afford them."

Exactly that. Rentier capitalism or the financialisation of the economy - much the same thing.
I've tried to capture how that has come to dominate the economy in recent decades in an image here:
bonkerseconomics.net/a-slippery-s...

Whether this terminology can be made to stick, only time will tell. But it feels as if more and more productive work is shifting into the unpaid sector (people obliged to shift for themselves) so hopefully there is a rising awareness of how limited the current GDP framework is.

The next step in the process is to look at all "work" and make a distinction between "productive" (adds new wealth) and "transactional" or "extractive" (reallocates existing wealth - generally non-progressively). Unsurprisingly, unpaid work tends to be more productive - we do it because we want it!

Ultimately this leads to a redefining of GDP, which could become a popular political objective if people understand how much of the value they add goes unrecognised.

Thank you for those references. My preference is to stick with "work" as the term for "adding value" while seeking to erode the political distinction between paid and unpaid.

So to make the case politically for valuing work in terms of useful production rather than transactional ££ it is going to be necessary to arrive at words that convey the difference in a way that is easily grasped by the general public.

Thank you, that's very interesting. Those usages don't seem that intuitive, however. "Labour" has all sorts of connotations and for many people (including government) work is all about money!

So maybe "labour" is the word to describe productive activities, both paid and unpaid. In which case what is the word to describe paid work that produces nothing new - David Graeber's "bullshit jobs"?

Interesting to distinguish between work and labour. Language is important here, with "work" almost a political term ("working families", for example) which says nothing about how productive it is so long as someone is being paid.