Mario Nawfal on X - "🚨🇬🇧UK ANTI-CORRUPTION MINISTER RESIGNS AFTER BEING ACCUSED OF…CORRUPTION Financial Services Minister Tulip Siddiq has resigned following scrutiny over her financial ties to her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, the ousted Bangladeshi prime minister under investigation for corruption. Siddiq denies wrongdoing but stepped down, citing her role as a "distraction" to the government. Critics have raised concerns over properties linked to Siddiq and her family, as well as alleged financial irregularities in Bangladeshi infrastructure projects. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose approval ratings are plunging, appointed Emma Reynolds to replace Siddiq immediately. Source: Reuters"
Labour's wretched incompetence may be the key to Britain's salvation - "Watching this new Labour Government, one finds oneself rearing back and shaking one’s head: surely it can’t be true that none of the current Cabinet has private sector business experience, beyond working in the complaints department of HSBC? Having chanted that this Government will be all about growth, Starmer and Reeves seem to be now set on plunging us into recession. But, of course, the Tories must shoulder much of the blame. A near-universal set of assumptions among Conservative politicians was that if there was a problem, however small, it was for the Government to fix. Money should be spent, a law passed, a new regulator created. So much for any bonfire of the quangos... So when Labour came along, it already had a foundation to build on. The present government didn’t declare war on landlords, North Sea oil companies, car manufacturers, employers, farmers, small businesses, and on. It simply ramped them up... To ensure continued economic stagnation, the Government busily creates a new quango every week. The rest of the world has come to understand that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is a farce, but in the United Kingdom we double down on this radical progressive ideology with new regulators – Sir Keir’s chosen instrument of enforcement. In the US, large and small businesses, and Federal and State government, have abandoned this toxic, anti-growth ideology. The big banks are withdrawing from Mark Carney’s Net-Zero Banking Alliance. But in the UK, Ed Miliband has been handed £37 billion of taxpayers’ money to make Britain “carbon neutral” by 2029, with more futile net zero spending announced every day. How exactly is the country going to pay for all this? A hit to profits here, a bit more tax there. It all adds up and it all prevents economic growth. But here’s the problem: we have now got to the stage where there is no more money left. The juice has been squeezed and the pips are squeaking. All we can now do is borrow more yet the readiness of the markets to lend is reaching a tipping point. The Labour Party wearisomely chants the discredited mantra that Liz Truss crashed the economy when 10-year bond yields climbed to 4.5 per cent in 2022. They now stand at 4.63 per cent. Truss may have been defeated, but her approach could have created growth; what has come since creates only decline. In consequence, many current and future wealth creators are scurrying away from the country."
Peter B on X - "Unaffordable £1.4 billion of UK winter fuel allowance. Affordable £12 billion of overseas "climate aid""
Starmer's right to jump queues. I jump them and Britain should too - "I was cheering on Sir Keir Starmer as he took his children to the Monte Toboggan Run while on holiday this week in Madeira (still firmly in charge of the country, though, don’t get any ideas Angela…). You ride on wicker sledges from the church in the village of Monte, 1.9 miles down to Livramento, a suburb of the town of Funchal, whizzing along at a maximum speed of 24 mph. The only problem being that before you get your sledge you need to queue. In Starmer’s case, that ought to have been for three hours. So, on our next holiday to Madeira that’s something we won’t be doing. Unless, by that point, I happen to be prime minister. Because when Sir Keir turned up he went straight to the front of the queue. As he should have done. As is perfectly right and fitting for our, or indeed anybody’s, prime minister. Yet the crowd who were patiently waiting in line, a legion of British holidaymakers, apparently, were spitting. And spluttering, and harumphing and fuming. One such queuer was Russell Schacter from Ilford. “It was a difficult pill to swallow to see him pushing to the front after we queued for three hours”... “Brits are famous for being good at queuing,” said Schacter. And what a tragic crown that is. “Best at queuing” is our nation’s most wretched epitaph. Because, actually, if we want to get ahead in the world we need to start hating queues, be bad at queuing, and subvert the queues. Sadly Downing Street’s response to questions about the incident was: “We don’t comment on the Prime Minister’s security”. They had to waft it away as an issue of safety. Indeed, government sources have also suggested that the decision to escort Starmer to the front of the queue was taken by Madeira police. It would not have been sensible for a prime minister to have stood outside for hours in a public queue. And that I can understand, he’s trying to enjoy his holiday and all these middle-class Brits start whingeing to him about the increase in private school fees. Downing Street should have manned up and said: “Of course Sir Keir didn’t queue, he’s a prime minister.” That, alone, would set fire to the bellies of the nation. Work hard, get to the top, become rich and you won’t need to queue. Well-connected VIPs don’t queue. Taylor Swift got a police escort to Wembley, no ghastly traffic lights and commuter congestion for her concert last August and quite right too. Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby jumped the queue for the late Queen’s lying-in-state, an apt reward for the penance of presenting daytime TV. MPs and peers also famously jumped that queue. If you had a lying-in-state at your office, you shouldn’t have to queue either."
Thread by @NJ_Timothy on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Labour are going to tell the biggest lie in British politics. They're pretending everything is worse than they realised, so they can break their promise made less than a month ago, and rinse you with taxes rises. This is why it's untrue. First off, we know this is what they have always planned, because Labour sources told the Guardian they were secretly planning to do this before the election. Starmer and Reeves are pretending that the public finances are somehow much worse than they expected them to be. But Reeves admitted in June that, "we’ve got the OBR now... You don’t need to win an election to find out [about the public finances]." She knew what the fiscal choices were, and she pretended she would not put up taxes. She explicitly promised "no additional tax rises" beyond those she set out, and claimed Labour policy "will be fully funded and fully costed - no ifs, no ands, no buts". Here's another one: "We have fully costed, fully funded plans ... Nothing in our plans requires any additional tax to be increased." Now the "if and buts" are coming. Labour claim they have "inherited the worst economic circumstances since the war." This is obviously untrue:
In 2010 Labour left unemployment at 7.8% compared to 4.4% now, and public sector net borrowing 10.3% of GDP compared to 3.1% now... Then, the economy was in deep recession, and now it is forecast to grow faster than any in the G7. Inflation is down to two per cent – compared to 8.3 per cent when Mrs Thatcher came to power, and 15.5 per cent when Harold Wilson returned to Downing Street in October 1974... Reeves has claimed: "If you look at debt as a share of our economy that's the highest since 1951." This is factually incorrect. And while high, UK debt is lower than Japan, the United States, Italy, France and Canada. And whether we're talking borrowing, debt, inflation or growth, with Covid lockdowns and the energy bailout - which affected each of them - Labour demanded the interventions should last longer and cost more. Labour's trick is to commission an "audit" of public spending, showing a supposed "black hole". But as Paul Johnson, director of the IFS, says, this claim is not “very credible at all”. The choices available to Labour were known before the election. They chose to go along with Conservative spending plans, and now claim they didn't know what those plans involved. Now this is another choice. And they are choosing to break their promise and put up taxes.
Some commentators are ignoring the obvious dishonesty and calling it smart politics, comparing the operation to what George Osborne did as Chancellor in 2010. But then Osborne had promised cuts in an election campaign and predicted an "age of austerity". This year Labour made no equivalent commitment. They claimed they had changed on tax. They promised, "no ifs, no ands, no buts", that there would be "no additional tax rises". They are quite openly breaking that promise, and to justify doing so, they are telling a massive lie."
Wetherspoon boss issues price rise warning after Labour's budget - "The boss of Wetherspoon has warned of price rises across the hospitality sector following Labour's tax raid on businesses in the autumn Budget. Sir Tim Martin, the chairman of Wetherspoon, said his pub chain's tax and business costs are expected to increase by about £60 million over the next tax year... Business leaders have told the Government they are now in 'survival mode' following Labour's first budget in 14 years that saw Chancellor Rachel Reeves raise taxes in the UK to their highest level in history... Tax rises will cost business more than £1 billion in increased costs, while the 6.7 per cent increase in minimum wage would set them back a further £1.9 billion."
Time to blame greedy companies for raising prices
Labour is running the country purely for the benefit of the public sector - "The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has reportedly backtracked on plans to cut pension tax relief for higher earnings to 30 per cent, a new flat rate that would apply to all earners. While this would go some way to plugging the alleged £22 billion annual funding gap Labour claim they inherited from the previous government, the Treasury has warned that the law of unintended consequences would mean that significant numbers of public sector workers would be impacted along with the intended targets, the undeserving “fat cats” that inhabit the fantasies of Labour Party members. The backtrack – if that is what it is – is informative of two separate but related aspects to Labour’s approach to government. The first is that ministers seem to have actually learned from their recent mistakes and injected a touch of political realism into their decision-making. The announcement of the scrapping of the winter heating allowance for all but the poorest pensioners has already had a devastating effect on the party’s – and Keir Starmer’s – popularity. No doubt the chancellor was not looking forward to the avalanche of criticism she would receive – not least from her own back benchers – if another tax-saving measure were to make “the wrong people” poorer. Which leads neatly to the second strand of this U-turn: Reeves changed her mind, not because the proposed measure would be unfair to all those who save up for their retirements, but because a large number of public sector workers would be affected as well. And in the minds of the modern Labour Party, that would be unconscionable. Less than a fifth of workers earn their living in the public sector, yet it remains, for the Left in general, the target of all its praise, respect and love. No one is more “deserving” of state largesse than those who toil away in local government, the health service and the civil service, despite the fact that their wages – and the services they provide – are funded exclusively by the productivity and efforts of those working in the private sector. As shadow chancellor of the exchequer, Left-wing MP John McDonnell was fond, in the run-up to Christmas, of wishing all “public sector” employees a Merry Christmas. Few challenged him on why private sector workers were so less deserving of enjoying the festive season. It does seem strange that those who enjoy harsher working conditions, are less securely employed and who have far less generous pension arrangements should be – but are decidedly not – the priority of the so-called workers’ party. But Labour knows which side its bread is buttered on: the private sector might pay the bills but it’s the public sector that comes out to vote Labour... on whose shoulders will the responsibility of digging the country out of the financial hole it’s in rest? Solely the private sector? If that is the philosophy of the government, then it is wholly at odds with its stated (admittedly pre-election) determination to encourage economic growth in order to pay the bills of the coming years. You cannot level extra taxes on only one sector and expect that sector to respond by increasing its size and efficiency. The so-called financial black hole that ministers are trying to deal with was not created by the private sector, nor does it rely on the government’s largesse to fund pay awards. Yet when the going gets tough, it is private employers and their employees, those not reliant on public funds for their secure employment and pensions, who are expected to make further sacrifices."
Left wingers just hate the private sector
Britain: How to Destroy an Economy in Six Months - "The largesse distributed by Prime Minister Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves to doctors, train drivers and the nationalised sickness service (NHS – £25 billion extra) led to a budget in which the State raised taxes by a staggering £40 billion, increased the minimum wage, increased already crippling business rates and increased employers’ national insurance payments for each worker. All this was apparently (no joke!) in order to “go for economic growth” but even the Office for Budget Responsibility understandably predicted the budget would make business investment weaker and the Bank of England has reduced its growth forecast – to NIL in the fourth quarter of 2024. The State-dominated British economy impoverishes everyone. An analysis by the Tax Payers Alliance showed that the average household will pay over £1.2 million in tax in their lifetime, meaning they would have to work for 19.5 years just to pay off the taxman. Even the bottom 20 per cent of households, or families with a household gross income of £19,599, will work for almost 23.4 years to pay off their lifetime tax bill, the longest of any group since taxes long ago stopped taxing income and instead taxed existence, property and jobs. Since 2020 the State sector has taken on an extra 250,000 employees to add to its appalling low productivity record. Rachel Reeves’ solution is to reduce by a mere 10,000 and ask Departments for 5% savings on their budgets. The international competitiveness of the UK is quite horrific. The three critical elements in economic growth are CAPITAL, INCOME RETURNS and INVESTMENT OPTIMISM. The budget seemed designed to destroy all three. For decades, as the insatiable appetite of the State grows to meet the ambitions and electoral promises of politicians, taxes have come increasingly from indirect and “upfront’ taxes unrelated to actual earnings or profits and therefore unresponsive to slower or negative economic growth. The State demands its right to spend, unconstrained by the ability of the economy to finance their spending. Just how unconstrained the parasite State has become was revealed in the purchase by a Government Department of two leather bound files for £1,200!... The degree to which this disastrous government fails to understand the very concept of capital was revealed in their application of Inheritance Tax to family businesses and farms where they actually believe that such businesses can lose 20% of their capital and still function. To tax those families who sell out their capital for a one-off gain, or those who do not farm but buy land as a tax avoidance scheme has a logic but to cripple ongoing businesses as one generation dies is madness... No wonder Bill Gates and British banks are buying up farmland! The Taxpayers Alliance found that, as the UK is sending farmers abroad over £516m in foreign aid, the inheritance tax changes announced at the Budget will raise £520m for the Treasury... January 2025 will see a devastating series of announcement of business closures and redundancies as businesses of all sizes react to the enormous extra costs piled on them by the economically illiterate spendthrift Rachel Reeves... The UK has the highest government debt (97% of GDP) since the 1960s... One would think it could get no worse – but the Government seems determined to wipe out major industries like oil and gas, cars, petrochemicals, steel and plastics on the altar of “net zero”. The implications for unemployment, the resulting welfare needs and the fall in taxes are dire. No wonder company start ups are the lowest for 13 years and the London Stock Market is losing company quotations to Wall Street."
Falling job vacancies may signal recession, recruiter warns - "Job vacancies are falling and the economy is "cooling", suggesting recession may be "around the corner", according to the boss of Reed, one of the UK's largest recruitment firms. Speaking to the BBC, James Reed said his firm had noticed a sharp fall in the number of jobs being advertised and urged the government to rethink the recent increase in the tax employers pay on staff wages."
Monthly Decision Maker Panel data - November 2024 | Bank of England - "A new question in the November survey asked firms about how they expect to respond to the increase in employer National Insurance contributions that was announced in the Budget. Firms were allowed to select more than one option. 59% of firms expect to lower profit margins, 54% expect to raise prices, 54% expect lower employment and 38% expect to pay lower wages than they otherwise would have done."
Britain is closer to bankruptcy than anyone feared - "If it was a company the shares would have crashed, and the liquidators would be getting ready to take control. The National Audit Office has today refused to sign off on the UK’s accounts, citing a lack of information from local authorities on their potential liabilities. They can hardly be blamed for that. The grim truth is that the country’s balance sheet is a mess – and we may be a lot closer to bankruptcy than we realise... the real problem is not just bad investments. They can always be ring-fenced or unwound. It is the soaring cost of a dysfunctional government machine. Local authorities face bills that are running away from them. The idiotic “war on landlords” has driven up rents, vastly increasing the cost of housing people who have nowhere to live. The price of social care for the elderly is rising all the time, and the increase in National Insurance will drive up the costs of homes that will be passed onto councils. There are an increasing number of illegal asylum seekers – sorry, “irregular migrants” – that have to be looked after. And the courts are imposing backdated equal pay legislation that may land authorities with bills running into tens or hundreds of millions. Add all that up, and it is a surprise that more are not bankrupt already. The central government is hardly in any better shape. The cost of gold-plated public sector pensions is going up all the time, with estimated liabilities of £1.3 trillion, although the true cost may turn out to be far higher. The outstanding stock of student loans is estimated to come to another £225 billion, and may be virtually worthless as no one has any real idea what percentage of them will ever be repaid. Six or seven universities may soon go bust, again hit hard by the rise in NI, and will have to be bailed out at huge cost, or else wound down in an orderly manner, which unfortunately won’t be much cheaper. Net zero is turning into a huge drain on resources, with the endless virtual-signalling pledges on climate change racking up liabilities that no one had bothered to property tally up. The list goes on and on."
Clearly, the solution is to "tax the "rich""
Anger against Rachel Reeves' £40 billion 'tax-bomb' Budget grows - "In a bid to head off a growing business revolt over her £40 billion ‘tax-bomb’ Budget, the Chancellor told the CBI conference she was ‘not going to have to come back for more’. Ms Reeves was heard in stony silence by business chiefs, who say her National Insurance raid will hit jobs, growth and investment. CBI chairman Rupert Soames said business had been treated as a ‘cash cow’ to be ‘milked’. The employers’ organisation said two-thirds of its members were slashing their recruitment plans after the Budget, with firms switching to ‘crisis containment’ or ‘damage limitation’ mode. Salman Amin, chief executive of the firm behind McVitie’s biscuits, told the conference that the case for investment in the UK was ‘becoming harder to understand’. Ms Reeves appeared taken aback by the scale of the business backlash to the Budget. She insisted she had heard ‘no credible alternative’ and claimed the Budget would provide the ‘stability’ needed for growth. But the Chancellor appeared to acknowledge that the economy could not withstand another huge tax raid. And she warned Cabinet ministers that they would have to ‘live within their means’ as she signalled there would be no further increases in public spending during the next four years...
A leading watchdog warned that Labour’s controversial employment rights charter would cost business more than the £5 billion a year claimed by ministers
Vital reforms to tackle Britain’s growing ‘sicknote culture’ were kicked into the long grass, despite a pledge by Sir Keir Starmer to ‘grip this problem once and for all’
The Bank of England warned of the need to be ‘vigilant’ about a possible slowdown, with its deputy governor saying there was a ‘further risk that the UK economy proves less resilient than expected’
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch told the conference that ‘capitalism is not a dirty word’ as she vowed to rebuild her party’s relations with business...
CBI chief Rain Newton-Smith said the NI raid would ‘hit profits, hit competitiveness, hit investment, hit growth’. Mr Soames, grandson of Sir Winston Churchill, said that in the election Labour had done an ‘outstanding job of winning the confidence of business and convincing us that, very genuinely, they understand that the solution to our economic ills is investment and growth’. But over the coming months, business people would be ‘forming a judgment about what the Government really thinks about business’... Mr Soames quoted Churchill’s comments that some ‘regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger, to be shot’, and ‘some regard it as a cow, to be milked’. "
‘It’s madness’: The crisis forcing cash-strapped councils to cut back on services - "On Election Day, 67 residents voted to remove the government, beating the 60 who voted to keep it. The decision came amid the area’s slow decline, which some residents said was too drastic to recover from with city taxes. It was also emblematic of Americans’ waning trust in government at all levels, an issue that research found is especially prominent in rural areas... Such concerns have been fuelled by the spiralling cost of social care, as England’s councils scramble to plug gaps in their finances. According to estimates from the County Councils Network (CNN), the collective black hole could amount to around £54bn over the next five years... One in five councils in England will be at risk of financial failure by the end of this financial year, while four in 10 are at risk of going under over the next five years, according to Grant Thornton UK... Should Chancellor Rachel Reeves fail to amend her current spending plans, Davies believes pressures on councils will only escalate, prompting more asset sales and an increasing number of bankruptcies."
Weird. I thought austerity was a choice made by evil Conservatives because the cruelty was the point and social spending could and should be increased. Maybe the new cope will be that Labour is really conservative
Meme - max tempers @maxtempers: "🚨 NEW: The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, worked as a ‘complaints support manager’ and not as an economist in a bank according to a former colleague. She resigned after being exposed ‘doing Labour council business’ under the guise of frequent doctor’s and dental appointments."
Kev Gillett. Professional OAP: "Can my network pis share this factual story. Back in 2009 Rt Hon Rachel Reeves worked 3 levels below me. Just facts. She was a Complaints Support Manager at LBG/HBOS. Not an Economist. #factcheck. Nearly got sacked due to an expenses scandal where the 3 senior managers were all signing off each others expenses. Narrow escape. Then had lots of visits. So she was followed. Turns out she was doing labour council business. When shown the facts. She resigned. #facts."
It's -1°C and I'm too scared to turn on my heating - "My 76-year-old husband, Rajinder, and I voted Labour – but we regret it. That’s because we believe the way they’ve handled cutting pensioners’ winter fuel payments has been atrocious. We rely on that money to get by and now we’re too scared to turn on our heating this winter... We have lost all trust in the Government and now believe they don’t support people like us. Doctors and the World Health Organisation are recommending older people to keep the house to at least 18 degrees to protect themselves, but we can’t afford to do that. If we did that – meaning we’d be constantly using our under-floor heating – it could cost us up to £300 a month. We even had to change suppliers to try to cut back our monthly bill, which is now £100. Instead of turning our heating on regularly, I constantly use my hot water bottle and an electric blanket to keep warm. But we shouldn’t have to scrimp and save when it comes to our heating. Now, according to the Government’s own estimates, an additional 50,000 pensioners will be living in relative poverty next year as a result of cuts to the winter fuel payment. Currently, that total number is at 1.9million pensioners, which is around 15%. That’s utterly shameful. The Government should be doing more to tackle this growing problem. It’s safe to say that we would never vote Labour again."
Left wingers aren't going to gloat about leopards eating people's faces, of course. If they die from the cold they'll never get the chance to vote Labour anyway - maybe that's the plan
