Labour Must Learn to Respect Work as Much as Wealth

There is no institutional alarm bell when families ration heat in December because the cost of warmth has outpaced dignity.

Before anyone reaches for easy outrage, let’s say something clearly, and honestly.

The City matters.

The Treasury matters.

The markets matter.

A country without stable finances is a country walking on broken glass. Pension funds matter. Investment matters. Borrowing costs matter. Stability matters. No serious government can ignore those things, and no serious Chancellor should.

But it is workers who build wealth.

Factories, hospitals, building sites, care homes, warehouses, depots, classrooms. It is not spreadsheets that generate national prosperity. It is people. Hands. Hours. Skill. Effort.

And neither can a serious Labour government ignore the lives of the people who built the party in the first place.

That is where the moral imbalance now sits.

Rachel Reeves prepares to deliver a Budget that bends its language, posture and priorities towards the approval of institutions that were never designed to care about cold homes, low pay, or housing insecurity. That does not make those institutions evil. It makes them incomplete.

The Office for Budget Responsibility examines the maths. It interrogates the spreadsheets. It asks whether the debt line moves in the right direction and whether the markets are likely to remain calm.

That is not wrong. It is necessary.

But it is not enough.

There is no official body asking whether a full week’s work now pays less, in real terms, than subsistence on the state. There is no independent monitor of whether renting a modest home now consumes a morally obscene proportion of a worker’s wage. There is no institutional alarm bell when families ration heat in December because the cost of warmth has outpaced dignity.

Those are not fringe issues. They are central to the legitimacy of the state.

That is why the OBR should be reborn.

Not scrapped. Not attacked. Not politicised. But expanded.

The Office for Budget Responsibility should become the Office for Budget and Living Responsibility.

The markets should still be measured.

The debt should still be tested.

The numbers should still be credible.

But alongside that should sit hard, binding tests of:

Can a minimum wage worker live with dignity?

Can an average household heat a home without going into debt?

Can a working family realistically aspire to stable housing and ownership?

These should not be side notes. They should be core metrics of success.

Work must mean something again.

It is not an attack on those who receive benefits to say this. Benefits should protect people. They should be humane. They should prevent despair. But when the state accidentally creates a world where working full time leaves you poorer than subsisting, that is not progress. That is a structural failure.

And it should be treated as one.

The explosion in housing costs is not a mystery. It is not an “unintended consequence”. It is the predictable outcome of treating homes as commodities first, and shelters second. Labour used to understand that. Housing was a moral issue. It was about stability, community, and dignity.

Now it is discussed as “supply constraints” and “planning frameworks”.

Language matters. Because it reveals what sits in the heart.

Energy, too, has been moved from the realm of necessity to the realm of market abstraction. Fuel is now wrapped in green finance, infrastructure models, and investor confidence. All important. All real.

But the outcome is brutally simple.

Too many homes are cold.

And a cold home is not a macroeconomic variable. It is a human failing.

Labour does not have to choose between the City and the country. That is a lie that suited its opponents for years.

A mature Labour government should be able to say: markets matter, but so do people. Confidence matters, but so does comfort. Stability matters, but so does warmth.

The party was built by workers who wanted dignity, not special treatment. They did not ask to be shielded from effort. They asked that their effort mean something. That it bought security. That it bought stability. That it bought a life.

A Labour Chancellor should speak fluently in the language of spreadsheets and the language of human consequence.

Right now, only one of those is being heard.

The City will never love Labour. It will only ever tolerate it when Labour behaves conservatively enough to be trusted. Workers, on the other hand, built it. Funded it. Defended it. Believed in it.

It is not radical to say they deserve equal respect.

So let us not tear down the OBR. Let us not pretend the markets do not matter. Let us not cheapen fiscal discipline.

Let us expand it.

Let us demand an Office for Budget and Living Responsibility. An institution that respects the bond market and the boiler. The gilt yield and the gas meter. The investor and the individual.

That would be a modern Labour settlement.

Not City first.

Not workers as an afterthought.

But a country where stability and dignity finally sit on the same side of the table.