Even the charity shops can’t survive in Labour’s high-tax Britain - "We should be clear about who is to blame for that: Rachel Reeves and the rest of the Cabinet appear to have no idea how tough they are making it for any form of commercial operation to survive. The charity shops may not face the substantial increase in business rates imposed on pubs, cafés and other shops. But they still have to pay higher National Insurance (NI) charges on the wages of paid staff, a soaring living wage, electricity bills inflated by green levies and VAT on new goods. Even more seriously, they are victims of the steady closure of other businesses. As the local café closes because it can’t pay the rates bills, the bookshop because it can’t pay the NI, the bookies because it can’t pay the new betting levy or the bakery because it can’t pay the electricity surcharges, the high street gets deader and deader. With the charity shops gone, there will soon be nothing left. The vape shop that actually does a decent trade in smuggled cigarettes might survive, and so might the Turkish barber. But apart from that, there will be a row of boarded-up shop fronts. Even the estate agents won’t bother with the “To Let” signs for much longer: it won’t be worth the money. What was once the thriving heart of a local community will have become a commercial graveyard with nothing but tombstones for dead businesses. It is surely time for the Government to get serious about rescuing the high street from oblivion. It doesn’t have to be that hard. It should reverse the NI increase, freeze the living wage and cut business rates, and if backbenchers won’t contemplate controlling welfare spending to pay for that, it should increase income tax instead. It is a fairer way to raise money than by hammering retailers. Next, it should immediately suspend all the planning rules that make it so hard to turn old shops into apartments or workspaces. Buildings that are not occupied get run down very quickly. It is better if they are used for something than left idle."
Profits are not immoral - "The Labour Party manifesto for the 2024 general election promised “a new partnership with business to boost growth everywhere”. After two years, business doesn’t seem to think much of its new relationship. Rain Newton-Smith, the director-general of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), has accused Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, of treating business like “a cash tap” and warned that “the cost of doing business is reaching a tipping point”. Too often, Mrs Newton-Smith declared, Government treats profit as if it were a “dirty word”. Instead of blaming private companies for the rising cost of living, the Chancellor “should focus on fixing the economic problems she has created”. Some might wonder whether the CBI is a little late to recognise the dangers presented by Labour’s socialism. The business lobby group has offered full-throated support to net zero and long appeared to be more concerned with Brexit than with domestic economic policy. So for it to condemn the policies of Ms Reeves in such stark terms speaks volumes for how bad the situation for British businesses really is."
What on earth does it mean to be Left-wing now? - "generally speaking, the more a group or its spokesperson refers to “the rich” with obvious distaste, the further to the Left it is. Confusingly, however, they all say that the interests of “working people” are the sacred measure of political value, without ever defining precisely what that means. This is obviously intended to replace the old Labour shibboleth that the party represented the interests of working class people as opposed to the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. So “working people” is imprecise for a reason: it performs an important function by relinquishing the old militant associations and avoiding the rather patronising note of snobbery implicit in the word “class”. Now, anybody whose heart is in the right place (and who works for a living) can be a part of the Labour movement. Unless and until they earn too much money whereupon they become part of the hated “rich” – even if they have earned their wealth through honest endeavour and in the process created opportunities for other people to become more affluent and therefore not reliant on the state for assistance. So the term “working people” perpetuates the problem rather than solving it. It preserves the distinction between those who work (probably very hard and at genuine risk) perhaps by creating their own businesses, and those who are employed by them. It is the latter group whom Labour notably seeks to protect from the possible predations of the former, through extended employment rights and increases in the minimum wage. Labour, in virtually all its guises, remains on the side of those who work for somebody else rather than embracing those who initiate new enterprises – and that is a sure fire recipe for undermining economic growth. If you want growth – which has been the endlessly reiterated goal of Sir Keir Starmer and his Chancellor – you must embrace the idea of creating new wealth wholeheartedly which means, as Blairite New Labour used to say, letting some people get “filthy rich”. If you want a free enterprise economy to succeed, and to bring the self-determination and social mobility which it can provide, you must not cast yourself as the enemy of entrepreneurialism, especially as the budding entrepreneur is as likely as not to be from what we used to call the “working class”. Running through all this verbiage, there is a deep rooted contradiction which nobody from any of the factions seems prepared to address. Much of Labour’s policy – or lack of policy – is related to its attitudes to welfare spending. Supporting people who are not working, or helping to support those whose working income is too low to sustain them, seems to be the encumbrance which none of the party’s incarnations can confront. Even when the cost of this support is making it impossible for the state to spend money on improving the services which are important to its favoured “working people” – health, education, defence – the Left, even in its diluted modern form, cannot wind it down. Paradoxically, this inability to reform welfare dependency is a major obstacle to reconciling Labour with what used to be its natural supporters. Working class people, whom Labour now call “working people”, are notoriously infuriated by those in their communities who live on welfare benefits. Unlike middle class sympathisers who manage to blame themselves for “social unfairness”, they are inclined to believe that the word “fair” means “you get out of life pretty much what you put in.” The Left’s position is obviously contradictory: if you revere working people and regard their interests as the sacred core of your political mission, then you should share in the resentment that they feel for those who choose not to work, or who calculatedly limit their earnings so as not to lose their in-work benefits. What the welfare programme does, as most “working people” can see, is reward poverty and penalise those who begin to emerge from it by removing guaranteed state support from them. As Arthur Laffer put it: “If you pay people to be poor, you will get more and more poor people.” There are other perversities too in the Left’s message. In all its forms, but most stridently as it approaches the hard end of the spectrum, the Left urges the most extreme environmental measures. Ed Miliband, the hard-Left’s most plausible voice, is evangelical on this point. It seems not to occur to him that the voters whose cost of living would be most severely affected are precisely those “working people” whom he idealises. Telling them to sacrifice their precarious standard of living for the sake of future generations makes him sound more like an indulged aristocrat than a defender of the proletariat. Add to this that many of his comrades on the “progressive” Left support Arab regimes which suppress women and murder homosexuals. What on earth does being Left-wing mean now, in any of its forms?"
Britain’s biggest company has consigned the UK to the history books - "“We can’t wait for the UK to keep pace with us.” This damning indictment from the country’s largest company, delivered to a room filled with investors and innovators, is a serious concern. Although, if we’re honest, it hardly comes as a shock. The words came from Paul Williamson, who leads corporate ventures and investments at Arm, the $435bn (£324bn) juggernaut that built the chip architecture found in every smartphone, and which remains at the vanguard of semiconductor design today. It is the future, and yet has already consigned the UK to the past. Famously, the firm opted to list in New York rather than relist in London in 2023 – and its market cap has grown eightfold since that decision. Despite being born in a barn in Cambridge, the city in which it remains headquartered, the company is withering about its home. While Williamson was extremely positive about the scientific ambition of Cambridge, he decried the city and the nation’s “too modest, too cautious, too local” approach when it comes to business. And he was not alone in this assessment of the country’s prospects. Speaking earlier at the same Oxford-Cambridge supercluster conference, boldly entitled “Creating a scientific superpower”, Irene Tracey, the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, defined the core issue: “There’s a really deep culture of anti-growth in the UK.”... Peter Freeman, of the Cambridge Growth Company, complained that Anglian Water and Thames Water were the biggest blockers of new developments. These are providers of public utilities fighting planning applications for new homes that would allow these regions to thrive; a disgraceful and embarrassing state of affairs. We have seen multiple times what happens if cities are allowed to fight the blockers and force regeneration. Just look at the financial hub of Canary Wharf, built from the ruins of the docklands, or the squalor of King’s Cross transformed into the “Silicon Roundabout” of AI... One of the most depressing issues is that money is desperate to flow into the UK, but we refuse it time and again – and even when we do manage to accept it, our country is little more than a staging post for its onward destination to foreign lands... Our dreams of becoming a data centre powerhouse are over before they’ve begun, Williamson says, thanks to a key economic disadvantage of the UK – incredibly expensive energy... If the best the Treasury can bring is failing to fiddle with the margins, the UK is set to remain little more than an incubator for the US’s next big thing."
Looking for Growth on X - "Do you know just how bad the current state of British planning is? £800,000,000 is being spent on Heathrow’s planning for the runway. Not the runway. The PLANNING. We have become a country ran by the lawyers, for the lawyers. Is this really “efficient spending?”"
Meme - David @david_stillwell: "The world's largest building cost less than a planning application in the UK."
"The building is so big it has its own microclimate (Boeing). World's largest building cost £740m to build and is so big it has its own weather. The colossal facility cost more than to build and has produced over 5,000 wide-body aircraft since it opened in 1967"
Meme - Total NIMBY Death @BarneyFlames: "1980-2000 was the only time England outperformed Europe in economic growth and the voters have never forgiven Thatcher for that."
prge @shguke: "there you go"
"Rarely had it so bad. Average annual GDP per capita growth over lifetime, %"
Left wingers hate economic growth, so
War is forcing Britain to rethink the triple lock on pensions - "“We cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget,” warned Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, the former Nato secretary general, in a speech this month. He is right that the resources dedicated to welfare are slowly ratcheting up. At the start of this parliament, it accounted for 10.7pc of GDP. By the start of the next decade, this figure will have expanded to 11.2pc – equivalent to £406.9bn, the biggest ticket item for government expenditure... Despite the hefty price tag, the British electorate wants to keep it. Since the triple lock’s introduction, it has become one of the most universally popular policies. Whether young or old, Labour or Tory, rich or poor – a large majority of Britons back it. YouGov polling shows that two thirds of voters support maintaining it while only 11pc say it should go. The remainder say they’re unsure. Such polling is flawed, however, says Sir Charles: “Whenever you ask people about any spending policy, the surveys never associate the cost. People always like having money spent on them if there’s no price tag attached to it... Even without the need to increase military spending rapidly, Britain’s ageing demographics were already making it a costly choice... While the most common trope from pensioners is that they have “paid into the system”, the truth is that Britain’s pension system is pay-as-you-go. There is no ring-fenced account for the state pension. Rather, workers pay for their parents and grandparents, hoping that they will be entitled to the same benefit one day. But as deaths are poised to outnumber births this year and net migration could fall to zero for the first time in more than three decades, the burden on a shrinking base of taxpayers grows... Among Britain’s pensioners, many feel strongly that scrapping the triple lock is unaffordable and unacceptable. But economists say the problem it set out to address has largely been solved. A typical British pensioner’s income in 2023 was equivalent to 84pc of the average across the population before factoring in housing costs, according to the OECD. This marks a jump of 11 percentage points since 2000. As the vast majority of retirees own their own home outright, this often leaves them with a similar or higher living standard than working-age families... Children grow up in homes with almost double the rate of relative poverty as in families that are retired, Hale says. She highlights that today’s pensioners also went to university for free and benefited from the right-to-buy policy, which significantly boosted homeownership... Supporters of higher state pensions often point to international statistics showing the state pension as far lower than in other countries. But experts caution that such comparisons are highly misleading, as Britain’s pension system differs from those of many neighbouring countries. Comparing the generosity of the UK state pension with that of another rich country is therefore apples and oranges."
Time to double down on net zero to destroy the economy
The welfare juggernaut is out of control - "How has the country managed to get itself into a position where more than 600,000 households receive welfare payments greater than the average worker’s post-tax salary of £32,200? In some cases the benefits are far greater, with 16,000 households paid £60,000, the equivalent of earnings well over £80,000. There is supposed to be a cap on the total amount a household can receive, but so many exemptions have been applied as to render it pointless"
Labour is not 'the party of the workers'. It is the party of those who leech off them - "The last Labour MP who constantly sounded the drum for radical reform that would make an actual difference to the disastrous dependency on benefits of too many citizens was the late Frank Field, and he was dismissed from his role as minister for welfare reform after just a year in office in Tony Blair’s government. Since then, despite the occasional glimmer of sense from the Labour benches in the House of Commons, there have been few attempts at benefits reform that the party has not opposed. The benefits cap announced by chancellor George Osborne in 2010, the so-called “bedroom tax”, which reduced the benefits of claimants living in social housing with a spare or unused bedroom, the two-child benefit cap and the introduction of Universal Credit to replace various predecessor benefits. Labour promised to reverse them all, even if the two-child benefit cap is the only one they’ve got around to so far. Yet with the benefits bill costing taxpayers £155bn a year – and rising fast – we face either radical reform or bankruptcy. The former is at least politically manageable, if difficult. But is Labour, the so-called party of the workers, in a position to effect the kind of change that is needed? The recent record suggests not. When the former work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, brought forward modest reforms that would have shaved just £5bin off the benefits bill, it only took a modest rebellion by Labour backbenchers to force Keir Starmer into one of his many high-profile, humiliating U-turns, undermining his own minister in the process. As John Major said this week, governments with very large, three-figure majorities tend to be unmanageable because the back benches are packed with MPs who know they’re only there for a single term, and therefore have little to lose by rebelling and forcing the government to compromise on unpopular policies, even the necessary ones. Real reform of the sort that is needed in our welfare system would cause national uproar. It would provoke anger in housing estates and in the House itself. It would make the government of the day tremendously unpopular. While an administration committed to putting country before party might seriously consider the reforms needed, this Labour one certainly won’t. For good governance we need a government – and a prime minister – prepared to say “No” to his back benchers, and prepared to suffer the unpopularity that comes with real leadership. Because government is not just about doing what’s popular – in fact, it’s almost never that. It is about, or should be about, deciding what’s best for the country and getting on with it. At a time when the consensus across the political centre is for massively reduced levels of net immigration, the need for more workers earning their living rather than feeding off the state has never been greater... if “the party of the workers” won’t do what is necessary to avoid the imminent cliff edge, then another party will have to step up and remove that mantle from Labour once and for all."
The party of the workers has brought back mass unemployment - "The statistics speak for themselves, as do the repeated testimonies of business leaders up and down the country. An organisation that claims to represent working-class people has instead brought unemployment back to levels not seen in the UK for many years... it is indisputable that Reeves has sent the cost of running a business – whether small, medium, or large – rocketing through the roof with all sorts of dire knock-on effects. The next shoe to drop is huge increases in the minimum wage, something Sir Keir Starmer described this week as an example of how the “Government is choosing to provide security in an increasingly dangerous world”. Yet as usual, the hype simply isn’t even close to being a reflection of reality. Labour’s changes are undoubtedly full of “good intentions”, as Cressida Hogg, the chairman of the Confederation of British Industry, put it on Thursday. The problem, in her view, is that the minimum wage reforms are having the opposite of their intended effect, instead freezing young people out of work by making it too expensive to hire those at the start of their careers. Labour has vowed to axe age bands for minimum wage rates, meaning those aged 18 to 20 will be paid the same as those 21 and over. Hourly pay for younger workers has leapt 26pc from £8.60 when Labour came to power to £10.85 today. The move will “create worse outcomes and fewer jobs for young people”, Hogg told an audience of business leaders in the North West. As a City grandee in charge of one of Britain’s most influential business lobby groups, Hogg’s intervention is something of a bombshell. This was a flagship policy at the heart of Labour’s election manifesto, with the party promising to “remove the discriminatory age bands so all adults are entitled to the same minimum wage”. Yet Hogg said “the cost of doing business has become a bar on the door of opportunity” for the young. What a spectacular own goal on the part of ministers. Labour will baulk at the suggestion it has sent a wrecking ball through the jobs market but the evidence is irrefutable. Youth unemployment is up to 16pc – a level not seen in more than a decade and threatening to leave behind a lost generation. Nearly one million youngsters are classified as Neets – not in employment, education or training – at the same time as nine in 10 employers complain of a shortage of skilled workers. Unemployment at a five-year high of 1.8 million but on course to surpass the two million mark for the first time in 10 years. Meanwhile, under Labour, taxes on work are rising at a faster rate than any other major economy on the planet, with the UK experiencing the biggest jump among 40 mostly rich countries last year, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. At the same time, many of those on welfare now earn £2,500 a month, which is more than the minimum wage. Under this ham-fisted, economically illiterate Government, the incentive to employ people is disappearing fast and so too the motive to work. It is a twin shock that will exact grave and lasting damage on the economy."
Will Tanner on X - "It's annoying to see people frame this as a good thing. The decline in drinking just indicates people are being less social, not that they're getting healthier; whites actually have better health outcomes if they have a few glasses of wine a few days of the week. More importantly, alcohol is a social lubricant and has long been a part of our Western culture for that reason. It helps bring people together, particularly in mixed male and female spaces or when it's just the guys, and so to see it decline is to see the other neuroses of the present--particularly childlessness and atomization--increase"
The Old World Show on X - "The death of the famous pubs of Britain is another example of this. Men once got together and built bonds while drinking and smoking in Britain's pubs, which dotted every village and town across the country. Then smoking was banned, and extortionate taxes and fees piled on top of drinking in pubs, to make it unaffordable. That has gradually killed pub life, and destroyed the social bonds between British men that were once strengthened by it. An atomized and lonely populace is exactly what the bureaucratic regime wants, so this has succeeded wildly for it"
A million young Britons are falling through the cracks - "one in seven of the UK’s 16 to 24-year-olds — almost a million people — are stranded outside employment, education or training (Neet), with the steep rise of the past three years taking the share of dislocated youth back to levels not seen for over a decade. This upward march is a stark outlier internationally, making the UK worse than its peers on either side of the Atlantic and decisively displacing Italy as the country where youth means being left high and dry. Most concerning, Britain’s lost million are increasingly locked into their isolation: 60 per cent of current Neets have never had a job — the highest figure since records began — and almost a third report a disability or chronic health problem that prevents them working. Governments can at times rely on a fair wind in the wider labour market to bring some economically marginalised youths back in from the cold, but hundreds of thousands in this group are now so far removed from the world of work that they risk becoming permanently stuck outside. Any serious attempt to reverse the trend should begin by understanding what is behind it. That must include acknowledging that government policy is at least partly to blame. As forecast in an analysis for the Institute for Fiscal Studies by Sam Ray-Chaudhuri and Xiaowei Xu, increases to the minimum wage and employers’ social security contributions have made hiring much more expensive in hospitality and retail — two of the main employers of the young. Sure enough, the number of 16-24s in those industries has fallen markedly in the past year or two, tipping tens of thousands into unemployment.
But it’s worth remembering that the much larger and worst-hit group is those who have never worked at all; here we must turn to the education system. While common knowledge among most teachers and parents, the steep rise in chronic absence from school during and immediately after the Covid pandemic has derailed the crucial transition from compulsory education to the adult world for huge numbers of young people... despite local authorities having a legal duty to track and support these marginally attached young people, huge numbers are slipping through the cracks. About 10 per cent or more of 16 and 17-year-olds are either registered Neet or unknown to the authorities in some local areas. Intersecting with all of this is the rise of reported youth mental health problems and disability claims — itself owing to a combination of underlying health trends and changes to the way benefits are awarded to claimants. Nowhere else has seen as steep an increase in young adult ill health as the UK, where the share of 16 to 24-year-olds reporting a problem that reduces their ability to carry out day-to-day activities has almost tripled from 7 per cent in 2008 to 21 per cent today."
Time for more "awareness" about mental health, to increase benefits and pay for it by "taxing the 'rich'" because only a monster bootlicker would advocate otherwise, because almost everyone is one paycheque away from being homeless.
Politics UK on X - "🚨 NEW: Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden told Peter Mandelson that Labour MPs always ask "who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others""
Britain is at a tipping point, and our future is in Ed Miliband’s hands - "sometimes history actually is at the fulcrum, when just a little pressure either way can send a system towards wildly diverging outcomes. It seems clear to me at least that Britain is entering such a period across several fields at once. The long, slow run down of our military capacity has progressed to the degree that the consequences can no longer be denied. The automation of cognitive labour is threatening an economy built on the bet that manufacturing could be offshored and automated, but that labour-intensive services would remain big British employers forever. The Boriswave of migrants is about to crystallise into a catastrophic fiscal burden unless their pathway to permanent settlement is blocked, or unless the next government takes action to reverse it. Across multiple areas, the same pattern keeps emerging. Britain has run down its stock of physical and social capital, embraced short-term solutions at the expense of long-term costs, and now faces a choice between continuing down the current disastrous path or attempting to rebuild, finding that the damage is either exponentially harder or impossible to undo. Energy might be the best example, as it ties so many fields together. In the United States and elsewhere, investment is pouring into the construction of data centres and power plants as firms race to build the clusters necessary to train and run AI models. In Britain, OpenAI is suspending its flagship investment. Its stated reasons – “regulation and the cost of energy” – have made the UK a marginal investment case, rather than a core one. British industrial electricity prices (before taxes) have gone from 32 per cent higher than those in France in 1997 to 94pc higher today. They are, by some margin, the highest in the developed world. Over the same period, energy use per capita has fallen by 38pc in Britain, compared to 25pc and 17pc in France and the United States. Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes is an Assistant Comment Editor and leader writer for The Telegraph, a role he took up in early 2023. See more Published 16 April 2026 11:30am BST Related Topics Rebooting Britain, First World War Centenary, Ed Miliband, Labour Party, Artificial Intelligence, Energy 334 Miliband is making decisions which will shape the country for the next decade Miliband is making decisions which will shape the country for the next decade Credit: Stefan Rousseau/PA A philosophically inclined friend is fond of bringing up a particular line from Hegel: “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” It is a poetic reflection on how a true understanding of why events unfold and how they are connected is available only with the clarity of hindsight. To pick an extreme example, when Edmund Gerde failed to tell Leopold Lojka that the route of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade had changed, he had no reason to think that he was setting the events of the First World War in motion. Even so, there are still times when we find ourselves obviously at one of those tipping points, or at least are told that we are. Sometimes they are confected for political reasons: Tony Blair’s 1997 claim that Britain had “24 hours to save the NHS” comes strongly to mind, as do its various imitators (48 hours to save the NHS, 72 hours to save the NHS, three months, six months and so on – time and standards in British healthcare apparently both move backwards). Catastrophic predictions followed by anodyne outcomes are part of Westminster’s standard operating procedure. But sometimes history actually is at the fulcrum, when just a little pressure either way can send a system towards wildly diverging outcomes. It seems clear to me at least that Britain is entering such a period across several fields at once. The long, slow run down of our military capacity has progressed to the degree that the consequences can no longer be denied. The automation of cognitive labour is threatening an economy built on the bet that manufacturing could be offshored and automated, but that labour-intensive services would remain big British employers forever. The Boriswave of migrants is about to crystallise into a catastrophic fiscal burden unless their pathway to permanent settlement is blocked, or unless the next government takes action to reverse it. Across multiple areas, the same pattern keeps emerging. Britain has run down its stock of physical and social capital, embraced short-term solutions at the expense of long-term costs, and now faces a choice between continuing down the current disastrous path or attempting to rebuild, finding that the damage is either exponentially harder or impossible to undo. Energy might be the best example, as it ties so many fields together. In the United States and elsewhere, investment is pouring into the construction of data centres and power plants as firms race to build the clusters necessary to train and run AI models. In Britain, OpenAI is suspending its flagship investment. Its stated reasons – “regulation and the cost of energy” – have made the UK a marginal investment case, rather than a core one. British industrial electricity prices (before taxes) have gone from 32 per cent higher than those in France in 1997 to 94pc higher today. They are, by some margin, the highest in the developed world. Over the same period, energy use per capita has fallen by 38pc in Britain, compared to 25pc and 17pc in France and the United States. These facts are not unconnected. The result of choices made by successive governments is an energy structure in which system costs are compounding while reliability decays: the prospect of surpluses in summer and scarcity in winter means that the National Energy System Operator is increasingly focused on managing demand, rather than meeting it, and the costs of this system are making energy-intensive industries uneconomic. We have storage capacity for fewer than 20 days of average gas use, and our actual reserves are far below this level. In the North Sea, meanwhile, the number of exploration wells drilled fell from 106 in 2019 to six in 2024. The decline is political, as well as geological and, as a result, the drilling rigs and skilled workers needed to revitalise it are leaving for jurisdictions with more activity. The energy tipping point has not yet passed, but it is approaching. The investment decisions which will shape the next decade and counting of British economic prosperity are being taken now. Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, and his colleagues are doing their level best to bind the country to their preferred approach through long-running contracts with renewables companies and potentially new treaties with the EU. They may not succeed, and the measures could be undone, but there is only a limited window to change course. Another term of Labour – or indeed the Greens – and it will pass. In this, the energy sector serves as a microcosm for Britain as a whole. Unless we confront our problems head-on soon, we will find ourselves locked into a pathway of national decline."
