Labour claimed loss-making nationalised rail firm was in profit - "Labour has been accused of misleading taxpayers over claims that a publicly owned train company was turning a profit. Ministers proudly announced that LNER was contributing cash to the Treasury, when its public subsidy more than doubled. Labour used the claim to hail the operator, which was taken over by the government in June 2018, as the poster child for rail renationalisation... Ministers have insisted that over the longer term the plans to renationalise Britain’s railways could save taxpayers as much as £2.2bn a year. That projection is heavily disputed by many opponents who argue that a publicly run service is likely to prove more costly and inefficient. The most recent figures from the ORR show that only two train operators returned money to the Treasury last year, both of which were privately run."
Left wingers hate profit and the private sector, so this doesn't matter
Out of the red and into the black: How Reeves misled world about her Budget - "she was misleading the public in order to provide an excuse for increasing taxes to provide money for yet more spending on benefits to calm unhappy MPs, rather than filling a black hole."
Reeves faces ethics inquiry over Budget lies
Gen Z is being immiserated – and that’s why Labour will be eviscerated - "To summarise briefly (and definitely non-exhaustively), the Government has implemented or plans: increasing the minimum wage (now nearly two thirds of median wages), increases in the youth minimum wage and young apprentice pay, increases in taxes on employment, shortened probation (possibly not to day one, but still down to six months), increased redundancy rights and union access for employees, additional sick pay and parental rights, and much lower flexibility on contracts. There are additional requirements on large parts of the economy– farmers cannot get agricultural subsidies without paying the “real” living wage (higher than minimum wage), it is moving towards sectoral pay in social care and for all school support staff, and it has negotiated large pay increases for doctors, nurses, and train drivers. It will simultaneously oversee increases in health and disability benefits from £77bn to £109bn by 2030, and as Dan Neidle’s Tax Policy Associates have pointed out: “teachers, doctors and others on fairly ordinary salaries continue to face marginal tax rates of more than 60 per cent and sometimes nearly 80 per cent.” What does this add up to? It will be expensive to employ people, unattractive for many to earn more whether through overtime or promotion, and relatively easy to live on benefits... what does that add up to? A generation who will feel – even more than today – that working hard, playing by the rules, and trying to get ahead is not only unrewarded but actively penalised. For companies, this is eroding one of the UK’s historical superpowers – a flexible labour market of highly talented people has been one of our core comparative advantages against other European countries, and it is dying. Why do this? An easy answer would be that Labour cares about the poorest and their wages. But it also talks ceaselessly about growth, and many of these trends began before this Government. The Conservatives are somewhat culpable... Taxes on employers and minimum wage hikes are ideal. They are answers to the cost of living which require no spending, and don’t create any obvious big electoral losers. But they do create electoral losers, especially those on the margins of the labour market. In the UK, new graduates are already facing the worst employment environment for years, and before many of these changes bite. Just over half of graduates are working full time fifteen months after graduation. The only people doing even worse? Young non graduates. And just because people can’t point to the specific policy that destroyed their lives, doesn’t mean they won’t hate the governments that oversaw their struggles."
Working families £18k worse off than benefit claimants after Budget - "Families on modest incomes will be £18,000 worse off than jobless parents claiming benefits following Rachel Reeves’s abolition of the two-child cap in the Budget, an analysis has found. A family with three children that has at least one parent claiming the average rates of Universal Credit (UC), combined with other benefits, will receive up to £46,000 by next year, according to the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ). That compares with the £28,000 take-home earnings of a family where one adult is working full-time, and another part-time, on the national living wage. The disparity will fuel criticism of the Chancellor’s Budget for raising taxes on working people by £26bn to pay for an extra £16bn on welfare spending... The think tank calculated that to take home the same amount as a three-child family with combined benefits, a worker would now require a salary of around £71,000 before tax. This would have to rise to £90,000 to match the benefits of a family with five children. A single out-of-work parent on the same combined benefits with three children would be paid £43,000. That is over £22,000 more than someone would net after tax from working full-time on £20,600, according to the CSJ. By contrast, a single parent of three with a child receiving an allowance for a condition (such as ADHD or autism) will now receive £38,000 – £17,000 more than the take-home pay of a living-wage job. The CSJ report entitled “The Benefits Budget” highlighted what the think tank described as a “worsening of deeply perverse incentives” in the welfare system. It estimated the out-of-work benefit population with no requirement to work now exceeded five million, almost double the pre-pandemic level when taking “legacy benefit” claimants into account. Working-age health benefit spending is on course to reach 1.9 per cent of GDP by 2030, the highest level in 20 years and almost double that of a decade ago. It estimated that the total number of children growing up in workless households has seen the fastest increase on record, at a total of 1.5 million... Joe Shalam, policy director at the CSJ, said: “Work is the best route out of poverty, but our welfare system grows ever more riddled with perverse incentives that trap people on benefits and fail to help them towards financial independence. “This failure ripples through the generations, with children twice as likely to be in absolute poverty when growing up without seeing a parent go out to work each morning.”... The DWP disputed the analysis, saying that a family on the national living wage would net more income at £56,370 including in-work benefits."
The Oxford student who mocked Charlie Kirk still hasn’t learnt his lesson - "Sir Keir Starmer says he’s “proud” that his Government has scrapped the two-child benefits cap. Presumably, then, he’s unfazed by the analysis from the Centre for Social Justice, which found that working parents who earn the “national living wage” will now be as much as £18,000 a year worse off than jobless parents who claim benefits. Perhaps I’m just hopelessly old-fashioned, but I must confess that it’s not entirely clear to me why parents who work should be poorer – indeed, significantly poorer – than parents who don’t. Yet this is the situation that Sir Keir and co have brought about. All while insisting that they’re doing it in the name of fairness. Bewildered voters will be asking what on earth Labour thinks it’s playing at. Paying the least productive members of society to have as many children as possible – while productive members of society increasingly find themselves priced out of having children at all. Of course, I’m not suggesting that the Government is doing this on purpose, as part of some nefarious Left-wing plot to destroy Britain. All I’m saying is that, if the Government did wish to destroy Britain, it would be hard-pressed to come up with a more effective means of achieving it."
Surprise, surprise: The public sector is totally spared from the Budget pension raid - "There is total insulation to the public sector, which continues to enjoy gold-plated pension arrangements. It gets worse. A woke agenda is permeating many public sector pension schemes with certain industrial sectors deemed bad and actively dumped. The incoherence is that these sectors – oil, mining, defence, tobacco and so on – are reliably the most steady dividend payers and have recently experienced stellar capital growth. While the “right on” investments have tanked miserably. Never mind if they perform badly: Johnny taxpayer will make up the difference when the defined benefit guarantee comes into play. There is no moral hazard. This Budget rewarded those who have little propensity to work and the pension sector follows a similar pathway. Some might call it two-tier: those that have won the jobs jackpot and work in the public sector, and then the rest of UK Plc – those that work in the private sector or work on their own account in self-employment."
Rachel Reeves has betrayed the nation - "The extension of the income tax threshold freeze – Rishi Sunak’s invidious invention – is a direct increase in the taxes that working people pay, to the tune of more than £8bn. Every penny of this will be swallowed up, not by improved public services for us all but by increased benefits payments to a select few. In fact, it will barely cover half of that cost. For a Chancellor so dedicated to targeting those with the “broadest shoulders”, she has picked one of the most regressive taxes possible. This stealth tax will not target the wealthiest but disproportionately affect those working desperately hard on lower salaries. A party founded on the principle of supporting the working man has just betrayed him. Continuing in the spirit of prioritising state reliance over rewarding work, Reeves has slashed the amount employees can put into their pensions via salary sacrifice schemes. Don’t worry about funding your own retirement through prudent saving, this government is keen to create a generation of pensioners reliant on the state. Certainly, a mansion tax raised solely on homes in excess of £2m seems like it would target those broad shoulders – but you can bet your bottom dollar it won’t be long before this nice little earner is extended to the rest of us. This is no baseless speculation. The history of the taxman is littered with new ways to tax us and very few examples of ever turning off the taps. Income tax and stamp duty are well-trod historic cases but even the so-called “expensive car supplement” now applies to the majority of electric vehicles. This Budget itself is full of tweaks designed to eke more tax out of existing policies: road taxes extended to electric cars, the rate of tax paid on your savings hiked and pension contributions capped. Even one of George Osborne’s most infantilising policies has now been extended, with milkshakes and canned coffees dragged under the purview of the government overreach that is the sugar tax. More sticking plaster than smorgasbord, this Budget almost makes you long for the once-posited income tax rise – at least there was a simplicity and an honesty to that. Worse still, these rises barely paper over the fiscal cracks. Backdated as so many of them are to the end of the Parliament, there is little faith that any of this revenue will ever be recorded – and we all know spending will be significantly higher than is claimed. All of this means that the cost of servicing government debt will only rise, taking an ever greater share of the tax revenue thanks to the poor decisions we’ve all been lumped with."
Bosses to slash jobs and investment after shock property tax raid - "Hotel, pub and restaurant chiefs are preparing to cut investment and jobs after Rachel Reeves launched a stealth tax raid on the hospitality industry. Some of Britain’s biggest chains said they would be forced to rein in spending plans and raise prices as a result of reforms to business rates – a form of property tax – that have left many nursing tens of millions of pounds in additional costs."
Damn greedy companies! They need to be forced to employ people instead of hoarding money!
This bodge-it budget does not give Britain what it needs - "BRITAIN IS in alarming decline. Its paltry productivity growth, high borrowing costs and incoherent economic policy are bad enough. But the country also risks the collapse of the political centre ground. The combined polling share of the populist-right Reform UK and populist-left Green parties now exceeds that of the Labour and Conservative Parties, the duopoly that has dominated British politics for over a century. The brutal truth is that eventually, one way or another, radical change is coming to Britain. Either today’s centre-left government will choose the dramatic change that fixes the economy, or change will be forced upon the country by the financial markets or by voters stampeding towards the extremes. This was the backdrop to the budget, presented on November 26th by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the exchequer. It is why this should have been a moment of radicalism by choice. Instead Ms Reeves offered a bodge job. The government seemed immobilised by its peril. Compounding her administration’s earlier mistakes, the chancellor failed utterly to lessen Britain’s economic and political vulnerability... With the deficit still gaping at 4.5% of GDP, Ms Reeves succumbed to her own worst instincts and those of her backbenchers by increasing borrowing, relative to her previous plans, for four years (even by the old growth forecast). Only in April 2029 does her extra fiscal consolidation bite. Even if she sticks to those policies in later budgets, her government will by then be at the end of its term. It may already be out of office. Meanwhile, the chance that Ms Reeves will have more holes to fill is alarmingly high: officials gauge the probability of meeting one of her debt targets as just 52%... If and when taxes do catch up with spending, they will reach 38% of GDP, the highest in the post-war era. That is roughly the same as Germany, higher than Spain and not far off Norway and Sweden. This is not all the chancellor’s fault: Britain is ageing and it needs to spend more on defence. Yet she was careless about incentives to work and invest. The tax system’s many high marginal rates and cliff-edges remain, and Ms Reeves added to the complexity. A new levy on expensive homes might have been welcome but for its poor design. The tax treatment of savings will become even more fiddly, with an exemption for over-65s that is a handout to the old. Gambling taxes will go up, but bingo taxes will be scrapped. The budget thus followed a pattern of obfuscation and superficiality that is well-established, but increasingly costly. Chancellors tinker while the country stagnates. That a Labour leadership with a working majority of 169 has to behave in the same unserious way reveals its staggering political mismanagement... The tragedy is that Britain’s economy has plenty going for it, if only it were better run. The country is younger, and ageing more slowly, than other large economies in Europe. It is a relative front-runner in adopting AI. Its labour market is more flexible (albeit getting less so under Labour). The belt-tightening needed to stabilise its debt-to-GDP ratio is about a third smaller than in neighbouring France. There is no immediate economic crisis, by contrast with deindustrialising Germany. Its problems—chiefly high housing and energy costs—are long-running and there is no mystery about how to alleviate them. In 1945, 1979 and 1997 British governments remade the social contract with ambitious reforms that were often emulated overseas, including William Beveridge’s welfare state and Margaret Thatcher’s privatisations. In contrast, Labour’s talk on reform runs far ahead of its actions. Its housing policy has been timid and it has no solution to the economic drag from Brexit. On energy prices, which are among the highest in Europe, the budget’s big idea was to shift costs around, not bring them down."
One of Britain’s richest men quits the UK - "One of Britain’s richest men has quit the UK after three decades as Rachel Reeves prepares a fresh tax raid at her Budget this week. Lakshmi Mittal, the billionaire steel magnate who is worth more than £15bn according to the Sunday Times Rich List, is said to have moved his tax residence from the UK to Switzerland and will spend most of his time in Dubai. The Indian-born tycoon is the latest high-profile entrepreneur to abandon Britain in response to Labour’s tax treatment of the super-rich... ArcelorMittal, which is headquartered in Luxembourg, employs more than 125,000 workers in more than 60 countries, including Britain where it produces specialist products including chain-link fencing and metal wires... Mr Mittal’s exit is the latest in a string of high-profile departures that have included Nik Storonsky, the founder of Revolut, and Herman Narula, the £2.5bn tech chief executive. Labour has been criticised over its erratic policy-making in the run-up to the Budget. Ms Reeves had been rumoured to be weighing up an exit tax which would charge 20pc on the gains of wealthy individuals if they chose to leave the country, but dropped the plans over fears it would cause an exodus of millionaires."
Reeves to spend £6bn more on benefits - "Rachel Reeves will increase spending on benefits by £6bn in the Budget, despite calls to control the ballooning bill. The Telegraph understands the Chancellor will confirm the amount paid in working-age benefits will increase by 3.8 per cent from next April. Ministers will argue the rise, equal to the rate of inflation in September, is important so that the value of benefits is not eroded. However, working-age benefits have been frozen in the past, including under the Conservatives between 2015 and 2019. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, claimed on Tuesday that the trajectory for increased welfare spending would “bankrupt” Britain. Labour dropped plans for a £5bn cut to welfare spending earlier in 2025 and Ms Reeves is expected to lift the two-child benefit cap in the Budget, landing extra costs on the Treasury."
Hard-working families are being destroyed to pay for the benefits class - "The productive and the hard-working should be shackled to the state, and forced to provide for the rest of society. We can call this redistribution, or fairness, or justice, or whichever form of veil over violence we choose to comfortably distance the language of tax and spend from the implicit threat of force which backs it. The ultimate consequence is still the same: the creation of the welfare state has resulted in the creation of a welfare class, which will vote itself a large share of your income. From a certain perspective, the result is that the most successful people in Britain are not CEOs or doctors or bankers: they’re the fathers who have 11, 14, 26 children while living on benefits, and get someone else to pick up the bill. In some cases, they may live straightforwardly better lives than their working peers: I’ve set out before how families on incomes of £100,000 per year can be worse off than those on welfare in social housing... if you line the population up by “deprivation”, those in the most deprived areas have more children than those in the wealthiest parts of the country... It would be easy to write this down as the cost of being a decent society: a little money taken from those with, to give to the children of those without. Easy, but wrong. For whatever reason, people find it hard to think about counterfactuals. And the counterfactual in a world where hard-working, middle-class households weren’t paying for £141bn in child and working age welfare isn’t a world in which they keep the money. It’s a world where they spend it on families of their own. And for those who’ve spent time and effort trying to create the stability that their future children deserve, there is a real prospect that paying for the fourth child of a family on welfare, somewhere, has come at the cost of having a further child of their own. The result is a sort of compassion trap. Our determination to do the right thing leads us to absurd consequences. The same humanitarian urges that lead to surges in immigration that our culture cannot absorb lead us to create systems where hard-working families are effectively pushed to have fewer children of their own in order to provide for others, to create welfare structures based on rights that have no cap and no natural limit: whatever it takes to keep the system going, whatever resources have to be expropriated, will be, until the burden eventually becomes intolerable. The costs of this approach can be considerable. In A Farewell to Alms, the economic historian Gregory Clark sets out how economic success in English history correlated with the number of children families had, and in turn how this spread the values and culture that created that success through the population. Britain, at the moment, appears to be in the midst of an experiment in reversing this process, encouraging habits which are hard to break. The link between a parent claiming welfare and their child going on to do the same is well-established. The result of a welfare state with few guardrails to its generosity and few incentives to escape the benefits trap could be to mould a population more reliant on government handouts, and less able to fund them... From a certain perspective, there is no such thing as a neutral policy. Whatever framework the state sets up – whatever combination of benefits, taxes, or their absence it chooses – will favour one type of family and one type of parent over another. Rather than being guided by heedless compassion into creating a system that penalises success, shouldn’t we give at least some thought to the sort of country we want to build?"
Clearly, people are only not having children because it's too expensive
‘I’ve claimed Universal Credit for the last six years – work simply isn’t worth it’ - "The current benefits system means that work isn’t worth it, and that will only continue thanks to changes made by Labour. More than half of the Budget tax rises will be eaten up by the benefits bill, which will only keep ballooning: by 2030-31, the UK’s total welfare costs will hit £406.2bn. All this is being paid for by sneaky stealth tax rises on people who are working. And while most benefits rise by inflation, these frozen thresholds eat up more of your salary every time you get a pay rise... m pays better than a life of low wages and high taxes Erica Crompton 03 December 2025 1:36pm GMT Related Topics Benefit, Universal Credit, Jobs and employment 1826 Erica Crompton Erica Crompton takes home £1,027 a month in Universal Credit Credit: Andrew Fox It’s 8pm on a February winter’s evening. I’m knackered, and relieved to be home after an eight-hour shift and four-hour commute. I’m hoping to relax in a bubble bath with my G&T, but there’s a problem: my out-of-work neighbours are having one of their all-day, all-night parties. That was in 2009. I was busting my gut for minimum wage – and out of pocket every month. I was paid £12,500 a year for that job as a radio scriptwriter, but when I crunched the numbers, I was down £200 each month as my travel cost so much. Plus, my mental health was at breaking point. So, reluctantly, I handed in my notice and signed on to Jobseeker’s Allowance, like my noisy neighbours, getting £300 a month plus £300 housing benefit. My last proper job was in 2019 and I’ve been on Universal Credit ever since. Today, I take home (on average) £1,027 a month, which includes my £381 rent on a shared ownership property and £200 for caring over 35 hours a week for my partner who uses a wheelchair. I also get a little extra as my mental illness is stress-triggered and prevents me from working regular jobs. Doctor’s orders. Tax-free income I’m far from alone. According to the Office for National Statistics, there were 8.3 million people on Universal Credit in October 2025, out of around 43 million working-age people living in the UK. Some people who are on Universal Credit are disabled, and others work while claiming. Because I have a severe mental illness, there’s no obligation to work. But I do what I can. I work occasionally as a journalist; writing articles, like this one, which reduces my monthly Universal Credit payment by 50p for every pound earned over £411. Universal Credit isn’t taxed, and because I earn less than the tax threshold for my part-time work, none of my income is taxed. Last year I took home around £10,100 in earnings, and £12,324 per year in Universal Credit – that’s a total of £22,424, untaxed, before any expenses, and without deductions for my student loans on my two degrees. Most of the work-from-home jobs that I could get don’t pay much more than this – and they are taxed. I’d end up with less money every month if I wasn’t also on Universal Credit. The current benefits system means that work isn’t worth it, and that will only continue thanks to changes made by Labour. More than half of the Budget tax rises will be eaten up by the benefits bill, which will only keep ballooning: by 2030-31, the UK’s total welfare costs will hit £406.2bn. All this is being paid for by sneaky stealth tax rises on people who are working. And while most benefits rise by inflation, these frozen thresholds eat up more of your salary every time you get a pay rise. Recommended The proof that benefits pay more than a full-time job Read more I get why people like my old neighbours, and now myself, are deemed “losers”: work is good for one’s self-respect and self-esteem. Part-time wages that pay less than Universal Credit I need part-time hours that I can work from home (WFH) so I can fit it around caring for Paul, my partner. This is extremely competitive in today’s job market. There’s a crisis in the jobs market, particularly affecting graduate-level roles. Unemployment stands at 4.7pc – the highest since 2021, according to the ONS. Vacancies have plunged. Employers are holding back hiring amid uncertainty. There are now 2.5 unemployed people per job vacancy, according to the ONS, up from 1.7 before the pandemic. For every suitable role I see, there are already 100 applicants. Job site Adzuna only has just 3,242 part-time, WFH jobs listed right now – that’s some stiff competition. All this leaves me scratching my head as I sit there staring at my calculator, wondering if trying to get a job is worth it. After all, these work-from-home part-time wages are minimal and actually pay less than what my Universal Credit payment brings home. I’ve even considered putting my mental health in jeopardy again and working full-time, against what my psychiatrist advises. But for a job that pays £26,000-£30,000 a year, I may as well carry on claiming my benefits which aren’t taxed. I do have some hope of finding the right role soon. To get off Universal Credit, I calculated that I’d need two days WFH a week at a rate of £200 a day to be better off. Working hasn’t worked for me in the slightest In 2010, I was struggling and I made a serious attempt on my life with my mental illness worsening. That near-death experience gives me a different perspective. I put my health, and my time living, above any career or a job these days. It’s just not worth going back to that near-ending. All things considered, I’d probably still remain unemployed even if my benefits were halved because being able to take an entire two months off when I’m getting stressed with life is priceless. Also, I put caring for my partner full-time above any pay cheque, anytime. I know from working for a pittance in the early 2000s how to scrimp and save. And I’ve always got time for friends and family; I understand the time I have is a luxury that many don’t have. I find it ironic that it was while I was in full-time work in London, I could only ever afford pokey flat-shares and run-down bedsits. Yet after a year working part-time from home, and savvy scrimping of benefits, I’m able to part-own a bungalow here in Staffordshire with a garden for just £381 a month – half what I paid for flat-shares in London where most work is. I just don’t see how working has worked for me in the slightest."
Clearly, welfare payments need to go up because people can't afford to live on them
