Labour’s economic vandalism is turning all my friends into unemployed socialists - "The tragic irony of all this is that, despite their purgatory, Britain’s young have an appetite for their own destruction. I have personal experience of this too. One Left-leaning young lawyer I know told me that, despite the ruinous tax bill coming her way, she “wouldn’t know what to do with the money anyway”. And when the young do rebel, it’s in an even more ruinous direction. A YouGov poll of 18-24 year-olds from the start of the month had the Greens on 43 per cent. The declining prospects of Britain’s youth are real, and, despite its absurdity, the message from the radical Left that it is all the fault of “the rich” is cutting through. Today’s young revolutionaries might talk about overturning the system, but they are effectively calling for more of the same. Higher taxes, more diversity and more immigration. They don’t just want things to get worse; they want them to get worse faster."
A perverse new plan to ration water - "Britain should never have a scarcity of water. This is a temperate island, which over the course of a year gets a surfeit of rain. The fact that swathes of the country have been condemned to hosepipe bans is indicative of a failure to invest in the infrastructure that would allow enough water to be supplied to the places that need it. The last major reservoir opened in the 1990s, with attempts to build new ones held up by the planning system. Millions of litres of water are lost every day through leaky pipes. Instead of powering ahead with desalination plants in areas that could benefit from them, Britain has managed to open just one, in East London. Even that has effectively been mothballed... Rather than imposing rationing by the backdoor, the Government should be liberalising planning laws, rolling out new reservoirs and desalination plants, and scrapping net zero targets so they can be powered by cheap and plentiful energy. The country’s water crisis is entirely of its own making. The aim of policy should be abundance, not a state-manufactured drought."
Labour accused of making workers poorer by banning last-minute shifts - "Labour has been accused of making workers poorer by banning last-minute changes to work shifts. The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), which speaks on behalf of 5.5 million firms, said forcing companies to give at least seven days’ notice of work rota changes would lead to chronic staff shortages across the economy. Ministers are preparing to introduce new rules governing zero-hours and low-hours contracts under the Employment Rights Act championed by Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister. Under the plan, employers would have to provide reasonable notice of shifts, changes or cancellations and to offer compensation when shifts are cancelled at short notice. A government consultation has proposed at least a week’s notice for shift changes – with unions pushing for even longer notice... Labour has already admitted its plan could cost companies up to £3bn a year to implement because of increased bureaucracy and fines for last-minute cancellations."
Labour’s growth fantasy is dying under the weight of its own promises - "Private sector pay is rising by its lowest rate for six years, yet those working for the state are still seeing healthy growth in their wage packets. Office for National Statistics data show that for the three months to June, annualised wage inflation in the private sector stood at 2.8pc, while it was 6.1pc for those in the public sector. Such a differential is unsustainable. Public wages must be paid for either through taxation or government borrowing – and both are at unprecedented levels. Our national debt will soon breach £3tn and taxes are at their highest since the aftermath of the Second World War... Labour wants to be nice, or at least be seen to be the nice party... for many in Labour, it is a matter of equality... The public sector is much more heavily unionised than the private... abour continues to rely on unions for their funding and its members as its foot soldiers. A strike on Labour support from the unions would make winning an election all but impossible for the party. They would not have the money nor the local intelligence to campaign. With mergers and the decline of traditional industry, Labour is relying on a shrinking band of unions to keep it in business – only 11 affiliates remain. Although the teaching unions are not affiliated, the overall tinge of these remaining unions is increasingly public sector, overwhelmingly so for Unison, the largest with 1.3 million members. Is Labour really in a position to say no to their demands? The combination of these three factors make it all but impossible for Labour to get public sector pay under control. All they have left is the hope that somehow the private sphere can be squeezed just a little harder. But this won’t remain the case indefinitely; a breaking point will come. It may even be soon."
Spend more on foreign aid, Labour MPs tell Burnham
Andy Burnham doesn’t know where growth comes from - "Andy Burnham has an idea. By shifting a team of civil servants dedicated to the issue of economic growth from the Treasury to Manchester he will spark what he calls “growth in every postcode”. How very Burnham, and how very Labour. It reveals a bizarre mentality which seems to hold that businesses only get formed, and only grow, because there are public officials helping them along. The sad reality is that the Government is standing in the way of the private sector, not aiding it. It has treated business people as if they exist simply to have their pockets picked... He has promoted the concept of “Manchesterism”, which, inasmuch as it means anything, seems to mean co-operation between the private sector and local authorities... The term Manchesterism is, after all, not original. It was coined in the 1880s to refer to the mixture of free trade and laissez-faire capitalism which had made the city so successful. It was embodied in the values of industrialists like Richard Cobden, one of Manchester’s first aldermen, who combined an interest in social reform with a belief that it was ultimately free enterprise which drove the improvement in living standards. Burnham, by contrast, has scorned “neoliberalism” as an experiment which has failed. Cobden would have been horrified. Manchester may be a very different place now than it was 200 years ago, but the rules of capitalism have not changed. If you want economic growth you have to let entrepreneurs get on with it, taking risks and investing capital. They do not need Burnham, the Greater Manchester Authority or even the Government’s new growth unit trying to tell them how to do it."
The chart that proves it’s Labour killing employment - "In total, the number of payrolled jobs fell by 13,000 in July, following another 13,000 fall in June. A net total of 94,000 jobs have been lost over the last year, and 188,000 over the last two years. The number of vacancies fell yet again, down by another six thousand. The chart below is striking, and a damning indictment of Labour... Add it all up, and the conclusion is clear. Britain’s labour market has started to slow dramatically. It has not yet collapsed, but it is getting close to the point where it will. It is not hard to figure out why. The slow-motion car crash of the former chancellor Rachel Reeves’s decision to hike the rate of National Insurance paid by employers is still playing itself out. No one fires people on the day the tax on jobs goes up. Instead, they wait for them to leave and don’t replace them (it’s a lot easier than risking an expensive tribunal). The living wage has been pushed way ahead of the rate of inflation, and certainly way ahead of output, so it is now above the point where it is worth hiring people. Angela Rayner’s extra employment rights for workers may be well-meant, but as they start to bite they have also made employing someone far riskier, especially for the small businesses that account for the bulk of job creation. Soaring rates, green levies, and the highest energy prices in the developed world have also forced many businesses to close, with the staff laid off at the same time. All of this combined means the labour market is starting to break. It is only going to get worse over the next few months. The ban on zero-hours contracts will trigger another round of job losses, as some employers can’t afford to offer full-time positions instead, while rising inflation, and yet more tax rises in the Budget, will crush demand and confidence. As vacancies fall, and fewer people have jobs, they have less money to spend, and that makes it even tougher for the businesses that remain open. Britain has had plenty of economic problems for at least two decades. But at least it used to generate lots of jobs, even if they were not always well paid enough, or in high-growth industries. Under Labour, that is no longer true. Andy Burnham’s new government doesn’t appear to have a clue what to do about it."
Why Britain Is Shedding Millionaires - WSJ - "Compared to 2024, Britain has 35,000 fewer residents with an individual net worth of £1 million or more—the fewest since 2008 and a 7% decline in two years, according to a tally by the Adam Smith Institute, a free-market think tank in London. Blame a hostile tax climate and sluggish British economic growth... Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has declined to rule out a wealth tax, and a newspaper poll this month found 66% of respondents supported one. Leftist economists Gabriel Zucman and Ben Tippet have been promoting a wealth tax of at least 2% on Britain’s most affluent and claim it would raise more than £10 billion a year. One problem: Britain’s rich can afford to move abroad, and many already have. Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus and Malta have been “falling over themselves to attract the wealthy,” says Douglas McWilliams, founder of the London-based Centre for Economics and Business Research, which does economic forecasting.Some 27,300 people with a net worth of $1 million or more have moved away from the United Kingdom in 2024 and 2025, according to New World Wealth, a wealth intelligence firm based in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Adam Smith Institute also finds that Britain is creating fewer home-grown millionaires. The report cites lower household savings, the inflation-based erosion of pension values, a lack of economic confidence that’s reducing property values and “a culture which is hostile to wealth-creators,” among other factors. High taxes and burdensome British regulations discourage entrepreneurship. Class-based envy and resentment are in the political saddle these days in the U.K., as they are in much of Europe and the U.S. The Adam Smith Institute says the top 1% of earners already pay 29.1% of British income taxes. A British government report released last month predicts “major sources of pressure on public finances over the next 50 years” as social spending consumes an ever-growing share of GDP. Squeeze the rich hard enough, and they’ll flee, leaving those far less affluent to pick up the tab."
Weird. Left wingers keep insisting that rich people will never leave>/i>
Labour is destroying one of its greatest achievements - "It was under Blair that new rigour in academic subjects was pursued and when the first tentative attempts to reduce the control local councils had over schools was attempted via the creation of new foundation schools. This latter initiative was the brainchild of Andrew Adonis and was strongly opposed by the teaching establishment, including the trade unions and the Left of the Labour Party, which felt that if education was anything it had to be corporate... In one of her few public statements since taking up her post, Powell suggested that the system she inherited was guilty of “hoarding excellence”, and that her mission was “to spread it into the lives of every young person in the country”. An admirable ambition, of course, with which no parent, teacher or politician of any party would disagree. But “hoarding”? Where are these “hoards” of academic excellence and why have they not been distributed to the masses before now? Powell seems to believe that there is a finite amount of academic excellence and, like wealth, it must be fairly shared with others. And naturally, it’s those middle-class children and their parents who have been most guilty of piling it in heaps in the spare bedroom or conservatory... Her commitment to “spreading [excellence] into the lives of every young person in the country” sounded an awful lot like the lowest common denominator education policies that the Left has often fallen for in the past, a crude and vain attempt to engineer “equitable” rather than fair examination outcomes across the spectrum of academic ability. A fair and reasonable education and examination system does not create equality of outcomes for every pupil taking an exam; a fair and reasonable system recognises each child according to their ability and willingness to put in the work, as well as the competence of their teachers and own social background. Many of these factors are beyond the legislative or funding powers of the Department for Education, a fact that must infuriate politicians who believe that every aspect of a pupil’s life must be regulated and monitored by the state, that “fairness” as well as “excellence” are commodities to be distributed at a minister’s behest. Some pupils are just more academically gifted than others and will get better exam results than some of their peers and, therefore, will have better career prospects. This is not an injustice, it is a simple fact of life. The government’s job is to make sure that pupils’ own social backgrounds and material wealth are removed, as far as possible, from the factors that influence exam grades. This is what Blair and then Gove recognised in their own attempts to roll back some of the more damaging but fashionable “child-centred” learning imposed on the curriculum in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s"
With education as it is with money, left wingers believe in the fixed pie fallacy. But it makes even less sense when applied to education
Eco-rules behind years-long delay to delivery of 10,000 prison places - "The delivery of more than 10,000 new prison places has been delayed because of hold-ups over badgers, water weeds and legal challenges... The opening of three new mega-prisons, which were meant to be in service by now, has been put back until 2031 after environmental and planning disputes. The prisons will provide a combined 5,000 extra spaces, official figures show. Meanwhile, the Government plans to release the same number of criminals early over a period of 10 months from October to free up places in overcrowded prisons. Government data also show that a further 5,500 places in jails would have been created if not for delays in constructing additional housing blocks, refurbishing existing prisons and the use of temporary accommodation. The overall capacity of the prison system has increased by just 26 places since Labour came to power two years ago, government figures show... Ministers previously blamed the presence of badgers, which are a protected species, for halting building work on the jails. Under nature laws, badgers can only be evicted from their setts between July and November, which restricts when construction work can take place... the Tories pledged to solve the prisons crisis by leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to deport all foreign inmates in British jails... The Government’s legal battles to push through new capacity and construct the three delayed jails were triggered after councillors refused to grant planning permission, meaning ministers had to launch a lengthy process to overturn the decisions. At the Lancashire site, which sits alongside HMP Garth and HMP Wymott, residents waged a four-year legal battle that was finally dismissed last June. By then, the 1,700-place jail was meant to be near completion. At a second site near Grendon, in Buckinghamshire, planning delays meant officials had only progressed as far as launching a public consultation by last June. Buckinghamshire council then made changes to the planning permission for the 1,500-space jail in October over concerns about its effect on great crested newts."
Time to blame "capitalism"
Badgers are classified as of "Least Concern", but that doesn't stop greenies
The Left is cheering a purge of London’s ordinary homeowners - "many on the Left, including sitting MPs, are happy to mock ordinary families squeezed out of London who they claim should simply live somewhere else if they can’t afford it. Heaven forbid anyone makes the same claim about social housing tenants... If you have the temerity to build a new shopping centre or apartment block in London, you’re accused of gentrification, social cleansing and pricing out residents. But for some reason, it’s acceptable to talk with appalling casualness, and even glee, about squeezing the put-upon middle classes out of their neighbourhoods... Many things in life are unfair. Residents of London and the South East may pay a smaller share of their property value in council tax, but they are also the only net fiscal contributors to British public finances. In other words, if you’re a taxpayer in the South East, you’re already subsidising other regions to the tune of hundreds of billions. If fewer people are able to live and work in the most productive part of the country, if fewer people pay tax, and if even those who can afford the cash simply sell up to avoid paying up, where will all the money upon which other regions rely come from? And what kind of place will London and the South East be if only footballers, bankers and benefits claimants get to live there? Too often we treat dependency as a form of heroic virtue, and modest financial success and contribution as a form of unearned privilege. It should scarcely need to be said, but the lives, communities and homes of those who own property in London and the South East are not worth any less than social housing tenants, or those living in poorer regions."
UK Prime Minister on X - "Jonathan Reynolds has been appointed Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade."
Andrew Griffith MP on X - "When he was Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds presided over:
- 330 pages of new employment red tape
- Record insolvencies
- Higher taxes on business
- A crisis of youth unemployment
- 100,000 jobs lost
Do we really need a sequel?"
Retailers hit back at Healey over supermarket ‘price-gouging’ claims - "Business groups have hit back at Andy Burnham’s Chancellor after Labour renewed its attack on supermarkets ahead of the Budget. Retailers said John Healey was wrong to point the finger at businesses after he vowed to combat “price-gouging” and monitor signs of shoppers being ripped off. Grocers said they were already delivering the most affordable food in Western Europe, while also claiming that tax rises under Labour were to blame for a recent uptick in prices... Andrew Griffith, the shadow business and trade secretary, said: “Time and again, we see this Government lashing out at others for their own mistakes. “Retailing is brutally competitive and prices are going up because of Labour’s tax hikes, employment red tape and energy costs. As John Healey explores his new residence, he needs to look a bit closer to home to lower the cost of living... British supermarkets are famously low-margin on both groceries and petrol. The CMA found in 2023 that the average operating margin was just 1.8pc and had fallen in recent years. It has climbed since then, although most supermarkets reported a fall in profit margins in the last year. It said earlier this year that supermarkets were the cheapest place to buy petrol."
Nationalisation of the railways is already off track - "“I accept that over the last year, performance at South Western Railway has not been up to scratch… we will leave no stone unturned in making sure that constituents have a better travel experience in future,” Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, pledged in Parliament last month. She was responding to a question by Will Forster, the Liberal Democrat MP for Woking, about why services on the recently nationalised South Western Railway were enduring “horrendous delays and cancellations”. Nationalisation, Mr Forster asserted, “has not gone to plan”. Though these are early days for state-run trains, the signs are not good. Labour’s much-vaunted Great British Railways is still to be legally constituted as the Railways Bill makes its way through Parliament – 80 years since Clement Attlee created British Railways, later known as British Rail. Labour is again ending private-sector involvement in running most passenger trains and creating the third biggest public-sector employer in Britain, after the NHS and the Armed Forces. Rail will now have to compete again in public-sector spending rounds against nurses, police and soldiers for money. Last year, taxpayers had to put £21.6bn into rail whilst ticket sales raised £11.5bn. John Major’s privatisation of the railways in the early 1990s endured early challenges, but the benefits to passengers and social mobility were undeniable. While splitting track and train was a clear mistake, extracting civil servants from running loss-making and subsidy-drunk train services brought significant benefits. It delivered a significant increase in capital investment, a new focus on innovation, better trains, better safety and gave passengers what they wanted – rather than what British Rail thought they deserved. It also delivered early passenger train choice. Until Covid, privatisation brought a clear focus on rail ridership that had been missing under nationalisation. British Rail oversaw the long-term decline in passenger numbers from around one billion in 1950 down to 750 million in 1992, whereas privatisation reversed this 40-year decline, growing ridership to an impressive 1.7 billion in 2019. The new plan to nationalise train services contains no passenger growth target or cost control safeguards. Instead, Great British Railways risks enduring Whitehall micromanagement, high subsidy, ageing trains and political interference. A tale all too familiar when looking back at the old British Rail board begging ministers for more taxpayer support to run more loss-making trains. So how independent will the Fat Controller at Great British Railways really be once a panicking Transport Secretary starts pulling levers to stem losses? If passenger numbers and their growth are no longer to be the key driver of success, then the omens are not good. If a primary ambition is to increase reliability, then this risks being code for a reduction in services. It is, in effect, disguising failure by state-run Network Rail and Great British Railways."
Clearly, this is the fault of counter-revolutionary saboteurs, who must be hunted out and hanged!
Will Solfiac on X - "Nesta's plan to cut energy bills, being considered by Andy Burnham's team, involves the genius move of using taxpayer money to pay off £2.7 billion of debt for people who haven't paid their electricity bills."
max tempers on X - "“Since the costs of bad debt are already socialised across all bill payers, we should pay it off with HMT money [socialised across all taxpayers].” Such a craven, cynical strategy to trick people into thinking their bills are lower because they aren't willing to bring costs down"
Count Binface is no laughing matter. He embodies why Britain is in such a mess - "There is a line in Count Binface’s manifesto that encapsulates why Britain is in such a mess. “I’ll cut your taxes,” pledges the Clacton by-election candidate, “and raise everyone else’s.” So says every party, if not quite so baldly. Politicians baulk at hiking the taxes that people feel directly. Instead, they raise the taxes at one remove – the taxes that voters imagine fall on others. A business no more pays corporation tax than your TV set pays the licence fee, but politicians pander to the section of the electorate which mulishly refuses to understand that all taxes are paid by human beings. I wish I could write that Binface was cleverly satirising the populism of the mainstream parties. In fact, like so many BBC comedians, he recycles received pieties as if they were hilarious insights. He promises to cap the price of “Wigan kebabs”, and to “restore the price of a 99 Flake to 99p”. That is pretty much what Zack Polanski says about food prices. Indeed, when it comes to energy bills, it is what all the parties say, which helps explain why Britain is getting poorer... Binface, formerly Lord Buckethead, is more like a licensed jester for the broadcasting establishment. He came to prominence as one of the menagerie of figures who arose in opposition to the Brexit referendum in 2016, alongside EU Supergirl, the top-hatted Steve Bray and the otherwise sensible Victoria Bateman, who insisted on wandering around naked in protest. Binface is a comedian only in the sense that, say, Nish Kumar is a comedian. His career has largely been as a BBC comedy writer... Only unscrupulous politicians pretend that price rises are caused by “corporate greed” rather than by excessive regulation, taxation and money-printing. In the same way, raising taxes that people imagine are paid by someone else is wildly popular. Voters oppose raising basic-rate income tax (by 65 per cent to 22), National Insurance (also 65 to 22) and VAT (73 to 14). But they support an “exit tax” for people leaving the UK (by 60 per cent to 21), a “mansion tax” for £2m homes (69 to 20) and a wealth tax on assets of more than £10m (75 to 12). In practice, all these taxes would cause a precipitate drop in state revenue, and for the most obvious of reasons. Wealthy people wouldn’t meekly hold their wallets open. They would move – they are moving – to friendlier jurisdictions, leaving the rest of us to pick up their share of the bill. That is why, in reality, we all end up paying for wealth taxes... A recent set of polls commissioned by the Prosperity Institute found that people wanted to spend even more on the budgets that are already the biggest and fastest-growing, notably healthcare and social security. Shown a pie-chart of where government spending actually goes, focus-group participants protested that they couldn’t find the foreign-aid budget, and were incredulous when informed that it amounted to less than 1 per cent of total spending. Why have we, as a country, drifted so far from reality? Partly because we prefer sweet falsehoods to bitter truths, and partly because the lockdown convinced us that there really was a magic money tree. But partly, too, because our politicians are like weak parents bullied by demanding teenagers. They shy away from telling us what needs to happen. Sir Keir Starmer was elected two years ago promising sensible, technocratic government and no new taxes beyond the three identified in the Labour manifesto: school fees, energy levies and changes in the non-dom rules. He could have delivered on that promise, but it would have meant cutting welfare and denying some of the more extreme public-sector pay demands. Instead, he caved in... What, though, of more difficult reforms, such as ending the state monopoly in healthcare, abolishing the various EU-derived and ecological rules that inhibit building and – if scrapping the triple lock really is impossible (Burnham has indicated that he will not touch it) – raising the state pension age? I’m afraid the early signs are discouraging. The hints of what a Burnham government might do focus on small changes that will make things slightly worse. He wants more state control of utilities, which will mean greater expense and less efficiency. Ditto his plans for protectionism in key sectors which, behind the manly-sounding headline of “national resilience”, will make the protected industries less productive. He seems to be eyeing even higher taxes, possibly on capital gains... the anger will not abate, and our politics will get wilder until someone is prepared to tell us that we must live within our means."
Council have sent me an enforcement notice to take down my air conditioning within 28 days. In the middle of a heatwave. 🙃 : r/LegalAdviceUK - "Background is I bought an ex council house in 2022. In 2025 I fitted an AC unit after a hot summer. Neighbours are both still council houses. After they found out I had AC this year they went to the council and asked for it. Housing assoiciation refused their request and they came over to me asking how I got mine. I explained I owned my own home and paid to get it installed myself. This caused a bit of bitterness and jealousy from one of them who reported me to the council, "Why can he do it when we can't?" What I didnt realise is that you need planning permission to install an AC unit in England. The council have served me an enforcement notice telling me to get rid of my AC within 28 days. Is there a way I can challenge this? I spent thousands getting my AC installed. Or can I be granted planning permission reteoactively? I dont want to lose it in the middle of a heatwave!!!"
Peter Hague on X - "When you lived in the USSR the government tormented you, ostensibly, in service of a grand plan to produce communist utopia. In Britain you’re tormented by the state basically because they enjoy doing it. There is no grand plan, no civilisational purpose. It’s just pettiness for its own sake"
The communist utopia in the UK now is Net Zero
