Labour’s equality crusade is bad news for Britain - "The truth is, governments of all stripes often express a desire for “more equal” outcomes. But there are two main challenges. The first is that plans to engineer equal societies almost always focus on finances, hardly ever on a higher equality of happiness. The second is that such demands are underpinned by two certainties: that it is unfair that entrepreneurial billionaires are as rich as they are, and that Britain has become more unequal in recent years. Neither is correct. Take “fairness”. According to Forbes, the UK has 56 dollar-billionaires, while the US has nearly a thousand. On a per capita basis, the US has almost 3.5 times more billionaires than Britain – indeed, any country would give its eye teeth to have the array of global success stories seen in the US. Scanning down the list of these people – in either country – it is immediately apparent that these are not long-established fortunes. Rather, they are lists of people who have founded some of the planet’s most successful companies, such as Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, Sergey Brin’s Google and the multifarious firms founded by Elon Musk. Meanwhile, in the UK, one finds the likes of chemical magnate Sir Jim Ratcliffe and engineering whiz Sir James Dyson. In all these cases, there is a critical point to remember. The values of their fortunes are based on stock holdings in their companies which are only successful because they provide goods and services we want. In effect, their worth has been determined by us all. What about the idea that Britain has become more fiscally unequal?... the problems of a low Gini are rarely examined. The Gini coefficient for the UK touched 0.2 in the 1970s, while ratios were even lower for many Eastern European communist states. But what these apparently highly equal societies showed was that when money is not the differentiator between risk and reward, other factors fill the void. For communist societies, these factors were obvious – simply having money did not give you access to the party-controlled shops where desirable Western goods were available. Instead of money, what mattered was special privileges and, critically, those privileges are not caught by any Gini coefficient measurements. Meanwhile, in the UK – during the supposedly egalitarian 1970s – another form of privilege was on display. Britain did not have shops only open to those with party approval, but it did have high tax rates, which killed entrepreneurialism and ambition and led directly to a moribund economy – and with it a stultified social structure. What mattered was social entitlement. Ironically, those railing against class privilege should have been the keenest proponents of dynamic free markets – for there is no better way of undermining sclerotic societies than offering opportunity to those who may lack social connections but have considerable ambition. Often, in economics, how a desirable outcome is attained matters just as much as achieving the goal itself. Where a moderate Gini score is a result of a natural economic progression, with a broad base of productivity-driven wealth creation, it is both good and can be maintained. But where a similar Gini has been achieved through manipulation, or instilled through state action, the results are likely to be unjust and will certainly be unsustainable. The UK’s Gini held steady at 0.33 from 2012 to 2022, and more recently is likely to have fallen as significant numbers of high earners leave the country. There is an old joke that the people keenest on diversity in every other way always make an exception for earnings. But this does not necessarily lead to positive outcomes – particularly not if most people are equally poor. There is plenty of research that shows the greatest number of people are happier when they see their own material position improve over time, and that demands economic growth. If we really want equality, perhaps we should start there."
Time for more degrowth!
Burnham is dangerously devoted to failed ideas - "Andy Burnham believes that the 1970s were a time of plenty, to which Britain should return. In some senses, our new prime minister is correct: in the 1970s there were plenty of strikes, plenty of power cuts and plenty of bad ideas pushed by the Labour Party. Unencumbered by a strong grasp of history or economics, Mr Burnham looks set to adopt the very worst of them: the wealth tax. The fact that in Britain property is taxed more heavily as a share of GDP than in any country in the OECD seems to have escaped his notice... Labour promised in their February 1974 manifesto to impose an “annual wealth tax on the rich”, which would include houses, land, businesses, pensions and art. On top of this, they proposed new taxes on transfers of assets and property transactions. With energy rationed and unemployment surging, the well-off were to be soaked to avoid addressing fundamental problems in the British economy. Like so many of Labour’s ideas, it came up short when confronted with reality. After Labour won the election, Denis Healey, the then chancellor, tried to implement the policy but eventually gave up. As with David Lloyd George before him, who had tried to introduce his own wealth tax in 1910 in the form of a land value tax (another failed idea supported by Mr Burnham) Healey determined it was “impossible” to make the proposed levy “yield enough revenue to be worth the administrative cost”. Taxing wealth meant employing thousands of new, expensive civil servants to value assets with no ready market price. Moreover, the Treasury warned that a wealth tax could lead to an “exodus of UK capital” and “risk serious damage to the economy”, as people sought to protect their assets and the incentive to invest collapsed. What was true then is true now... Indeed the dramatic flaws of the 1974 plan are, if anything, even greater today, given capital is more mobile than ever before and many assets arguably harder to value. Time and time again, countries that have imposed a wealth tax see capital flight, depressed investment and falling tax receipts. Rather than conduct this self-harming experiment on the British people, Mr Burnham need only look at Ireland, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Iceland, Sweden or Spain. All have abolished wealth taxes in recent years. Nonetheless, Labour remains perversely addicted to this idea. When Ed Miliband was Labour leader he proposed an iniquitous “mansion” tax on properties worth more than £2m. Despite the British public telling Labour exactly what they thought of that plan at the 2015 general election, Ms Reeves resurrected the proposal last year... He also seems to support Ms Reeves’s vindictive plan to charge interest on those who cannot pay the bill straight away, rolled up until death or the estate is sold – as well as the decision to make unspent pensions subject to inheritance tax too, instituting a form of double taxation for grieving families. The incoming prime minister’s love of pernicious failed ideas from the 1970s does not stop there. In 1975, Healey reformed the precursor to inheritance tax. It was disastrous, in effect making it harder to pass businesses down through the generations, forcing the break-up of family firms, farms and estates. Yet Mr Burnham seems to want to repeat the trick by replacing inheritance tax with a series of even greater death taxes, to be paid by even greater numbers of people, supposedly to fund social care."
The true cost of Britain’s tax on aspiration - "Punishing tax rates mean ambitious workers may decide that there’s no point getting ahead, undermining the earning power of the cohort on which the nation’s finances increasingly depend. Kristian Niemietz, of the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank, said: “While it has become fashionable to claim that ‘the rich don’t pay taxes’, the truth is that we have a highly progressive tax system, which, if anything, has become overly reliant on a relatively narrow base of high earners.” According to data from HMRC, men pay more tax on average than women, and those aged between 40 and 59 pay the most. Campaigners said that the numbers highlighted how much of the tax burden falls on high earners – and that despite the claims of economic activists, such as Gary Stevenson, an ex-trader and YouTuber, the wealthy were paying their fair share of tax. John O’Connell, the chief executive at the Taxpayers’ Alliance campaign group, said: “High earners pay vastly more into the system, even before National Insurance and countless other taxes are included. “Someone on £150,000 can pay as much income tax in four years as a median full-time worker pays in around four decades, yet many politicians still talk as if they are not paying their way.”"
Burnham plans £38bn tax raid, say Reform - "Andy Burnham is to launch a £38bn tax raid on the wealthy to fund a spending spree in office, analysis by Reform UK has found. A report into the prime minister-in-waiting’s pledges found Mr Burnham would bring Labour’s total increase in taxation from around £66bn to more than £100bn a year. This includes promises of a “care levy” of up to 10 per cent of the value of estates after death, reforming the rates of capital gains tax (CGT), and imposing National Insurance on landlords’ rental income. Implementing a torrent of new taxes not mentioned in Labour’s 2024 manifesto will increase pressure on Mr Burnham to call an early election... Robert Jenrick, Reform’s economy spokesman, said: “Andy Burnham has spent 20 years reaching for other people’s money – a death tax on family homes, a graduate tax on young people getting their first pay cheque, a £14bn raid on savings and investment, and new levies on everything from your parking space at work to your weekend away. “Taken together with Rachel Reeves’s record, Labour could well raise more than £100bn a year of tax rises. If Mr Burnham disputes this, the remedy is simple: rule these 10 taxes out, by name, today.” The UK already has its highest tax burden on record, following raids by Rachel Reeves on employer National Insurance contributions, new VAT on private schools and a freeze to income tax thresholds. Mr Burnham has declined to set out detailed tax plans ahead of his first Budget but has pledged to remain within Labour’s fiscal rules, which require debt to be falling as a percentage of GDP... Mr Burnham has hinted at a range of expensive spending plans that will require funding from taxation. He has suggested he would support increasing the top rate of tax to 50 per cent for the highest earners, which would amount to a breach of Labour’s 2024 manifesto not to raise income tax. He has also refused to rule out a range of tax changes, including aligning CGT with income tax, which he said earlier this month he would “want to look at”. Mr Burnham is also considering lowering the threshold of Ms Reeves’s “mansion tax” on properties worth more than £2m to just £1.5m, which would drag many homeowners in London and the South East into higher rates of council tax. A levy on landlords’ rental income would raise around £3bn a year, according to the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), although economists have warned the policy would lead to a restriction in the housing supply and higher rents for tenants. Other suggestions Mr Burnham has previously supported include a graduate tax to replace student loans, higher gambling duties, a workplace parking levy and greater powers for mayors to charge tourists for overnight stays. In total, Reform said the policies would bring the tax increases from Sir Keir Starmer and Mr Burnham’s governments to £104bn, with £38bn of increases from the new administration alone. A report by his allies at Mainstream, a Burnham-aligned think tank, has previously estimated that the policy would raise up to £14bn, although it would likely lead to wealthy taxpayers leaving the country. City bosses and ultra-high-net-worth individuals have warned that a Left-wing Chancellor would reduce market confidence in his government, and could raise the cost of borrowing. The Treasury already spends around 10 per cent of its total expenditure on debt interest, despite Ms Reeves’s attempt to reduce borrowing and win over the bond markets."
LBC on X - "Gary Lineker is among 120 UK-based millionaires calling on Andy Burnham to impose higher taxes on their wealth in an open letter."
Tyler on X - "The trouble is that everyone knows he doesn’t actually want to pay more tax, he wants the adoration in his social circle of luvvies for pretending he wants to pay more tax. If he actually wanted to pay more tax, he wouldn’t have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds fighting a tax bill three years ago. They do these performative stunts because they want to be more loved and wind up being more hated instead... You have an option to voluntarily pay more tax if you wish. The idea that if you wanted to pay more tax the government would turn you down it pretty ridiculous. This is all just moral posturing."
The Composite Guy on X - "In gold-standard Nordic economies like Denmark & Norway, Brits are the most fiscally productive migrants. In the UK, no ethnic group has a lower unemployment rate than White Brits. Yet the prevailing attitude on both the left and the right is that native White Brits are lazy."
The UK's Bonds Are Giving Latest PM Burnham a Reality Check | Financial Post - "Gilts struggled again on Tuesday after sliding on Monday when Burnham took office, taking yields to a two-month high before easing... Article content Article content Article content Burnham has repeatedly stressed the need for fiscal discipline, but also unnerved the gilt market by saying Monday he’d look for “flexibility” in the rules that govern borrowing and spending. That’s left UK assets pricing in an uncertainty premium as the full scope of the government’s priorities won’t be revealed until an autumn budget... “The biggest risk is the fiscal arithmetic not adding up,” said Laura Cooper, global investment strategist at Nuveen Asset Management. “The Treasury’s traditional role as an internal brake on spending has gradually softened, which argues for higher gilt term premia.” Article content Gilts have been under pressure ever since Burnham put himself forward for leader last month after winning a parliamentary seat... Longer term borrowing costs have risen more this week, with 30-year yields hitting the highest since mid-May. These have been in focus ever since former prime minister Liz Truss’ 2022 budget of unfunded tax cuts tanked the market, leaving investors sensitive to any loosening of fiscal policies by the sixth new leader in the past decade. Article content Article content Britain’s borrowing costs are already the highest in Group-of-10 countries, and public debt is roughly equivalent to its gross domestic product."
Burnham to promise to undo Thatcher’s economic legacy in first speech as Labour leader
Left wingers have never forgiven Thatcher for postponing the UK's economic decline
After 25 years in politics, Burnham still doesn’t understand tax - "Burnham has already committed himself to two expensive policies that yield little benefit: buses, of course, and energy bills. On the former, he has committed £500m to cap single bus tickets at £2 until the end of next year. While he has framed this as a revolutionary policy, it is only a return to the Conservative-era £2 cap, which was raised to a £3 cap by Starmer. This makes no difference to the constituents of his former mayoralty, where fares are already capped at £2, nor to the more than nine million people in London, where single fares are £1.75. How will he pay for such a policy? Ask Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, and the answer is “beats me”. Speaking on the morning news rounds, Alexander conceded: “The detail will need to be worked out. We wanted to make the announcement today.” Considering the parlous state of the nation’s finances and Burnham’s insistence that he is “ready” for government, we deserve a little better than a childlike “we just couldn’t wait!”. What of his VAT cut on energy bills? For the bargain price of £850m, Burnham is scrapping VAT on the electricity portion of your energy bill, to return a princely £45 to your pockets over the course of a year. However, as Helen Miller, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, points out, the policy will only apply between October 2026 and April 2027, for a total average saving of just £25, or £4.17 a month. But much like Liz Truss’s energy subsidy – which, it must be noted, was phenomenally more expensive than anything Burnham has suggested – it is a poorly targeted tax break. Burnham’s VAT cut will benefit the largest households – typically with the highest income – the most, since they use more energy. Miller also notes that if Burnham had wanted to genuinely ease the burden of energy costs, targeting gas prices would have been more sensible, given these have risen 24pc since the war in Iran, compared with the electricity price cap’s 5pc – not to mention the net zero levies applied to electricity. As with the buses and the short-lived income tax break, this, too, begs funding questions. Darren Jones, for whom no room was found in Burnham’s cabinet, quickly pointed out a contradiction with No 10’s line. They claim the cut is funded by the scrapping of Starmer’s Digital ID scheme; Jones notes this was never funded... If the new Prime Minister doesn’t quickly mature from his policy of “spend now, probably don’t find the money later”, he’ll soon find himself in hock to the bond markets – like it or not."
Brace yourself for Andy Burnham disappointment – he'll make you pay - "Official statistics reveal that since Labour came to power, benefit claims for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have increased by 40% with the government approving an average of 40 personal independence payments (Pip) a day over the last two years where ADHD is given as the main condition. Pip is a benefit for those with long-term health conditions or disabilities who need extra support with daily living or mobility. On top of this, of all those claiming Pip for ADHD, it is estimated that around 40% are in receipt of the top rate of this benefit worth £194 a week which is additionally paid along with most other benefits with no requirement to look for work. Currently more than four million people claim Pip at a cost of £26billion a year according to the latest figures for 2024-25, government forecasts predict this will rise to £45billion by 2031. This is unsustainable and contributes to the financial ticking time-bomb that Andy Burnham will inherit when he becomes Prime Minister."
Labour treat taxpayers like mugs – creating dependency is not compassionate - "Labour is so wasteful with other people’s money that it now wants to throw cash at solving problems that do not even exist. Taxes are at an all time high and the economy is anaemic, but Bridget Phillipson has called for unemployed parents to be given free childcare... Under this government, the state now steps in to provide breakfast for schoolchildren and also teaches them how to brush their teeth. It wants to keep chipping away until personal responsibility becomes obsolete because the state takes care of every aspect of life. There’s not even any need now to worry about how to keep the family entertained in the school holidays. Unemployed parents are given special rates for major visitor attractions. So, a family of four can visit the Tower of London for £4 instead of the usual £111 bill. None of this helps the children escape the benefits trap. If they grow up to learn that parenting is carried out by the state and the tab for everything is also picked up, then there is little incentive for them to make their own way in the world. But that suits Labour fine. It is the party of welfare and wants to recruit the next generation of voters. Research by the Centre for Social Justice found that a three-child family in work needs £71,000 a year before tax to match an equivalent jobless family. The think tank warned that scrapping the two child benefit cap and failing to tackle welfare reform had led to a “worsening of deeply perverse incentives” in the benefits system under Labour. It found there has been the fastest increase on record of the number of children growing up in workless households, standing now at a total of 1.5 million. CSJ chairman Iain Duncan Smith warned in the report that “taking money from those who work hard to give to those who work not, is bad economics and bad politics”. The former Tory leader pointed out pouring money into benefits is not the same as tackling the root causes of poverty. But it is a concept that Labour seems unable to grasp. Social security minister Stephen Timms published an interim report this week that found that the main disability benefit, the personal independence payment, is “not fit for purpose”. The bill for Pips is set to hit £41billion at the end of the decade, but Timms did not find that a problem. He told the BBC: “My view is the current level of spending is not a great concern.”... Labour must learn that creating dependency is not compassion because at the moment it is failing the people it wants to help and treating taxpayers like mugs."
Watch as UK Minister is told £200m-a-year 'benefit fraud is decriminalised in the SNP's Scotland' - "Devolved benefits agency Social Security Scotland receives thousands of allegations of fraud every year but only a handful are ever passed on to the Crown Office for prosecution. The latest report suggests that around £188million was paid out in fraud or error last year from a total bill of almost £6billion... Speaking in a debate on work and pensions in the Commons on Monday, John Cooper, the MP for Dumfries and Galloway, said: "In Scotland, benefit fraud has effectively been decriminalised; the number of prosecutions is vanishingly small."
Meme - Kevin Ovenden: "Let's be clear about this: cutting spending and jobs elsewhere means not just slashing socially useful spending and services. It also means cutting the effective demand those sacked workers effect through their spending power. This does not bring growth. It shifts resources to the arms companies and to the military. It does not produce engineered products that can go into making useful commodities or transporting them. It goes into producing weapons whose use means destruction. This is a logic that the working class and the labour movement should oppose."
Al Jazeera English: "BREAKING: UK boosts defence funding by an extra £15bn, says Finance Minister Rachel Reeves as PM Keir Starmer says higher spending will require cuts to non- military areas such as civil service staffing"
This given how pathetic the UK military is. Left wingers think unlimited social spending grows the economy and want to cut defence spending to 0 so the West's enemies can easily take over. But they hate the West, after all
Burnham ‘caved in to unions’ in final act as mayor - "The pay settlement for Manchester bus drivers, worth up to 56 per cent over three years, is one of the highest in modern times... One transport industry source said the move was a “capitulation to union demands” and raised concerns about the knock-on effect of such a large pay rise. “Given that wages are 50-70 per cent of underlying bus costs, this will increase network costs by 5-10 per cent at a stroke. If you give increases of this order of magnitude, there is the problem of the domino effect,” he said. He explained this is where a pay rise leads to demands from other public sector workers for similar increases. Mr Burnham has described the franchised Bee bus network as a “blueprint” for Britain... But figures show that the network, which Mr Burnham decided to bring under his control in 2021 with a franchising arrangement, is heavily reliant on taxpayer subsidies. Last year, Manchester’s bus network was the most heavily taxpayer-subsidised in the country, aside from London. The amount of subsidy Manchester’s buses have received – both from central and local government – has increased sharply since the Bee network was launched. According to official figures, its net subsidy rose to a record high of £83.7m in 2025, more than double the amount it received just two years previously."
A simple £50bn tax break could boost London – but Labour will blow it - "Many other jurisdictions seem to enjoy much higher levels of pension investment in domestic equities than the UK, but for most of them such home country bias is largely a cultural phenomenon. If the UK went the mandatory route, we would join China, Hong Kong and India as the only countries in the world that imposed such a heavy-handed approach. The primary duty of pension providers is to maximise returns to investors, not to subjugate this responsibility to the Government’s wider growth objectives."
The £1bn ‘Manc-hattan’ scandal looming over Andy Burnham’s leadership - "Andy Burnham made his intentions on housing abundantly clear in the run-up to becoming mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017. No longer would a local taxpayer housing fund support “large companies which should have used their own finance”, nor would it prioritise “city centre and luxury schemes”. Instead, Burnham vowed to use the fund for the “long-term goal of an affordable home for all”. Almost a decade later, Burnham’s promises lie broken. While he has transformed Manchester’s skyline with dozens of towering new developments, his new era of affordability has failed to materialise. Instead, the so-called “King of the North” stands accused of bankrolling thousands of high-end luxury flats that many of his working-class supporters can’t afford."
Andy Burnham speech latest: MP unveils plan for No 10 North in Manchester - "Andy Burnham plans to take Britain back to the 1970s with state intervention in the markets and a mass social housing programme. The former mayor of Greater Manchester said that the economy “from the mid-1980s onwards” had not been built for ordinary people and vowed to put a renewed focus on building council housing and technical education. His comments nod to a decade in which 1.1 million council homes were built and many children still went to a “Secondary Modern” to learn technical skills if they didn’t pass the 11+. Mr Burnham also said his economic vision would mean “not leaving everything to the markets” and “public intervention where necessary” – rolling back the mass privatisation and city deregulation brought in by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s."
