When I listen to the PM and Chancellor I want to remind them they are trying to steer or improve a £2600 bn economy. All we hear from them as they seek to find an alleged £22 bn is items involving £1 bn or £2 bn. These are scarcely rounding errors in the national accounts. If they want to make a difference they need to be moving and finding tens of billions as £26 bn is just 1% of the total.
The big idea to get faster growth bears a resemblance to the previous governments policy, with the injection of a faster pace and less realism. It is to generate green jobs through decarbonising energy in a hurry. This entails writing off much of our fossil fuel driven economy before it is worn out, making net growth difficult to achieve. The £3 bn a year of state investment through the National Wealth Fund and Great British Energy is tiny in relation to the total investment of well over £200 bn it would take to decarbonise electricity generation and to replace the nuclear power stations about to close through old age. It is not a lot more than the previous government was spending through U.K. Infrastructure Bank and the British Business Bank. It is an expensive new pair of letterheads and brass plates and more management overheads.
They invented a £22 bn black hole as a political slogan to seek to bury a Conservative Party that had been badly wounded by a disastrous election defeat. They do not deny that £11 bn of it is their very own inflation busting no productivity gains awards to public sector employees. They do not set out how many underspends or over provisions they also inherited. Without the detail why should we believe them?
There is a rule emerging. Every spending cut or tax rise they want to make can disappear as it hits reality. Taking fuel payments away from most pensioners is meant to save a modest £1.3 bn. Now they are energetically trying to get more pensioners signed up for Pensioner Credit. If 400,000 do so there is not net saving from the change.
They told us they could get £1 bn more from taxing Non Dom’s more. As the rich head for the exit it is quite likely there will be no net Non Dom gains. Meanwhile a lot of money that would otherwise fund businesses, employ people and lead to shop and VAT revenues will have gone elsewhere. There could be an overall loss.
They look to VAT on school fees to bring in another £1.4 bn. They now face a court case claiming VAT on school fees violates the very Hunan Rights laws Labour normally reveres. They could lose the case. Meanwhile they need to offset against the extra tax the costs of more pupils taking state school places when their parents can’t afford the fees. Those parents who do dig deeper to pay may then not be paying so much VAT on other things they would have bought if the school fees cost them less. The schools will of course be able to reclaim the VAT they pay on inputs which also reduces the gains by a Treasury estimated one quarter.
The extra oil and gas windfall tax helps kill off extra investment and production from the North Sea. Aiming to raise maybe an extra £500 million it is along with the end of new licences likely to mean a fall in revenue. At a combined tax rate of 78% who is going to want to take the risks of anything new?
September 28, 2024
Everything is going to plan. Net zero is intended to bankrupt us and 2TK is gleefully continuing the devastation started by the tories.
On Monday our last perfectly good coal fired power station will close with nothing to replace it. That is 1.5gw of dependable, despatchable energy never to be seen again.
We are heading full speed towards power cuts and rationing whilst the government is trying to force EVs and heat pumps on us.
New cars are being rationed which reduces the tax take for the treasury. In fact everything Thieves does will potentially reduce the tax take.
It’s almost as if it’s deliberate.
September 28, 2024
IW,
It is a script meeting for 1984.
September 28, 2024
You should also consider an alternative explanation: another lot of even bigger chumps than the last lot are now in charge of the UK. Either explanation will still result in the descent of the UK to third world status. I suspect the Labour government contains a mix of both the doctrinaire and the dumb.
September 28, 2024
Do you recall a speech by Reeves PRIOR to the election which was all probity and economic and financial responsibility? It sounded like the Tories from the 1980’s. Since coming into power all those ‘rules and economic checks’ have been completely forgotten. The ‘savings’ from removing the winter fuel allowance have taken the media bandwidth attention so that we don’t look at the spending profligacy. We are spending and wasting like its 1999. The cost of borrowing will rise.
September 28, 2024
I assume third world status is Stasi Starmer’s plan to deter immigration he has not other deterrents. When will the UK become un-attractive to them? At 100 million, 200 million, 300million when Sharia law takes over perhaps and free speach is completely dead not just half dead.
September 28, 2024
When younger people see their national government is incapable of running the country, what do they do and who do they look to? Perhaps put their faith in a global body that looks to be more citizen-friendly, such as the World Citizen Club or the Global Citizen Community, or if they’re in business join the WEF and become a Young Global Leader. It isn’t hard to see the direction of travel intended by those who are wrecking this country. As many others have pointed out, to ‘build back better’, you first need to pull down what was there to start with. That’s the nation-state. Its enemies are working within it to destroy it.
September 28, 2024
Alternatively look at the polling which shows large support in the 18-20 age group for Reform (a clear second to Labour) and similar for AfD support in Germany. It would be odd if every new generation simply followed the politics of the previous generation (in this case WEF Globalism).
September 28, 2024
@ R Grange I agree with your sentiments.
And look at what is quietly taking place in New York, whilst we’re all destracted by freebie clothes and flat borrowing! The UN meeting is discussing the fifty odd points of how they plan to introduce basically, global communism!
Here is just one link describing what’s going on.
https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/09/the-un-admits-it-global-government-is-what-it-wants-to-meet-all-challenges/
September 28, 2024
Young people have already looked at the EU – a globalist entity – which is failing faster than Starmer. The UN which is the source of much injustice. Young people need to think about recovering the Constitution that protected generations and which is now list, thanks to ‘Constitutional Monarchs’ who refused to do their one and only job.
September 28, 2024
+1
September 28, 2024
IW :
It is deliberate.
September 28, 2024
@Ian Wraggg – 2TK has openly stated he will listen to WEF before Parliament, therefore the unelected vested interest before representatives of the electorate
September 28, 2024
Indeed. We have already had leaflets through the door from some outfit I have never heard of called SP Energy (who appear to run, or distribute, part of the national grid’s output) saying prepare for power cuts.
September 28, 2024
Indeed net zero is lunacy, we have electricity and gas bill that are up to four times those in the USA yet we are expected to compete?
Taking fuel payments away from most pensioners is meant to save a modest £1.3 bn. Well a bit more as Labour suggests it will kill 4000 of the. early (each year I assume) so more then saved on state pensions I suppose.
VAT on school fees is the complete reverse of what is needed for better education and to save money you want more to pay for their education and more private schools not fewer. Save for education. We need tax breaks for those who elect to go privately.
Every policy pushed by Labour, with the sole exception of relaxing planning, is anti-growth. Net zero, more employment and other red tape, VAT on school fees, Non Dom abolition, the mad energy policy, car market rigging, boiler market, transport market rigging, education rigging, healthcare rigging, every more state, the war on Landlords and the self employed, every higher taxes, the war on free speech…
September 28, 2024
LL,
What you highlight is the detail, the result of totally negatve government thinking, indicating that they have never worked at the coalface and do not understand human nature. Under such stewardship the UK has no future.
September 28, 2024
Little future with this direction of travel. We need more people using private health care to save the state system too. Tax breaks are needed so as to get fairer competition and relieve the state system.
September 28, 2024
Yes. I recall there being tax incentives for people paying insurance premiums to BUPA and other private medical insurance; PPP ‘Private Patients Plan’ was one I think.
A sensible Govt should welcome the prospect of people who avoid clogging up the state system, and who pay the state large sum for services, without receiving what they have been forced to pay for, by law!
The same applies to those who choose independent schools. An idiotic Govt chooses to discourage independence and force more demand and expense on the creaking services they are failing to deliver, by extra tax on those who prefer to pay for freedom of choice.
This idiotic Govt does the reverse of what it is supposed to do.
September 29, 2024
You got income tax relief and there was no Insurance Premium Tax now 12%. Also NI relief if paid by your company.
September 28, 2024
Good to see some sense from Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB on Coffee House Shots. He argues that “there is a fundamental dishonesty about the route to net zero, with communities being hollowed out and the working class left behind. All of this has resulted in fertile ground for the far right.”
He is exactly right on the grid expansion problems if we all switch of EVs and heatpumps three times as much energy goes down gas pipes as down electricity cables. He also fails to mention the winter heating heat pumps electric demand perhaps 10x the summer demand so not a doubling of the grid but 10 times. This then wasted for most of the year.
Alas he still seems to, quite wrongly, accept that we need a war on CO2 plant, tree and crop food and that there is a climate emergency. Is he deluded on this or is this a tactic he seems fairly sensible. He also seems to be a fan of Hydrogen which is also largely a blind alley far too energy wasteful and expensive. Still far more sense than Ed Milliband on this topic but the almost every one has. Let us hope he can educate Starmer and Miliband nearer to reality.
September 28, 2024
Getting the deficit down is undermining the Chancellor because the methods chosen are puny, political, and ill conceived. The product of socialist thinking, unrelated to reality.
As I understand it, the deficit is the difference between what the country earns and what it spends. Government must therefore assist the boosting of earnings by the reduction of taxation and the removal of regulatory restriction. Initially this might reduce government income, but ultimately considerably increase it via vastly increased commercial activity. Our old friend the Laffer Curve. The second thing they must do is markedly reduce government spending, while at the same time subject what they are left doing to very much higher productivity demands.
The problem and its solution is very much in government hands. I doubt it will happen becauss for many years political philosophy has take precedence over practicality. To practicality has been added complete zealotry, like Nett Zero, so ensuring its early demise. It has become the assylum run by the inmates. The whole business of government requires rehab and a reset. I do not see the present lot or for that matter their clone like predecessors ever achieving it, as they are the inmates. I await Reform, the only party to have suggested that they understand the problem and to have viable solutions.
September 28, 2024
Articulated what we already know that it is incoherent , lacking in strategy and mostly counterproductive
September 28, 2024
As I have told a few friends Reeves is like a person who goes to her bank manager and asks ”may I borrow £90?”
”What for?”, asks her bank manager. ”I want to create my own my own personal ‘wealth fund”’, says Reeves.
Put that way , it is of course ridiculous, but scaled down from the national economy to somebody’s personal income, that is what it amounts to! – and she claims to be an economist and Labour’s economic expert! No wonder she and Labour are economically incompetent and hopeless!
September 28, 2024
It will be a cold dark day in hell before we have another ‘woman’ Chancellor. We need somebody who can count.
reply Lots of women can count and are talented. Some men can’t count. The problem with Rachel Reeves is she is a socialist trained by a Bank of England that only knows how to lose a fortune on bonds, not that she is a woman. Sir Keir helped her make the huge mistake to rubbish the U.K. at every opportunity and threaten everyone with tax rises whilst taking money away from low income pensioners.
September 28, 2024
How many MPs or government Minsters have actually had any business experience where their own money has been at risk.
Very, very few, hence the reason we are getting stupid ideas, thoughts, proposals, and policies, and few in Parliament seem to question any of it with some even basic questions.
September 28, 2024
She’s falling down a Black Hole.
September 28, 2024
and the rest of the deranged Labour politicians will get sucked in to it!
September 28, 2024
They’re not working in the interests of the UK, any more than the other branch of the Westminster Uni-Party was. It is all going to the UN/WEF’s plan.
The UN intends to “level down” the west by destroying its historical manufacturing advantage and the WEF intends to appropriate any wealth “the peasants” may have accrued through command and control social engineering policies, which will keep them obedient while they impoverish them.
If you believe their objective is to improve the lives of British people, none of it makes any sense. If, however, you believe their intention is to systematically weaken the UK, in order to deliver a global, corporatist “utopia,” it does.
Two-Tier and his regime are just puppeticians. The people calling the shots are completely immune from any kind of democratic control.
September 28, 2024
+1 Donna. What you’ve said is the starting point for any sensible and realistic discussion of what’s happening in (or rather to) this country.
September 28, 2024
Donna +1
September 28, 2024
Donna :
Correct.
September 28, 2024
I agree. Read this week’s publication – The UN Pact of the Future.
This is global socialism. It aims to improve the World for future generations and make it equitable and balanced. This means the transfer of funds from wealthier countries to poorer countries. The UN requests $100 billion annually. Like the WHO’s recent missives, this is a PACT which does not require a majority vote to be enacted, unlike a treaty. This is the vehicle the Globalists are now using to bring in their communist policies without consent.
The document states it’s important for them to have oversight of the social media platforms to control the information people can see.
Everyone will be expected to have a biometric ID that marks them as a global citizen. Anyone found to be publishing disinformation will be locked out of their bank accounts and banned from travelling from their home.
All this pact will do is weaken Western nations and bolster the newly aligned BRICS countries. We are seeing the end of the Western empire and the rise of the Asian empire and our politicians are willingly giving away everything our generation and ancestors worked for. They should be in jail for treason.
September 28, 2024
A think tank has urged Reeves to cut ‘extremely valuable’ public sector pensions. When Liz Truss tried this the BofE literally staged a coup and caused a crisis in the bond markets. I worked in the front office in the City for 35+ years, including working with the head trader (J.T) at the BofE during the ERM crisis. Just like the coup on Biden the left wing media never print the reality of these stories. We do not live in a democracy any more.
September 28, 2024
Democracy is in the eye of the believer, which I don’t, and cannot remember when it might have existed.
September 28, 2024
If Miliband wants to even try to decarbonise the grid then he needs lots of new nuclear capacity to replace that going off-stream soon and to provide extra capacity. But in his blizzard of waffle and “initiatives” I haven’t heard any mention of this, indeed I read he is likely not to approve a new nuclear station planned for Wales. I think the fact is that in addition to being opposed to fossil fuel power stations he’s opposed to nuclear too.
Our electricity import from the EU is currently at 23% of our total. What if we have a cold winter and they have none to export ?
September 28, 2024
If our kind host isn’t going to expose the destructive ideology behind this state assault on truth, our fiscal sanctity and our very being then I see no point in his detailed analysis. It doesn’t achieve anything except confuse matters.
The voter must understand one simple fact. The three main parties are scum, they loathe this country and they all endorse a collectivist restructuring ideology that has no love for humanity, decency, morality, honour, history and truth. Don’t expect wind farm Charlie to come to the rescue either. Privilege and wealth trumps honour every time.
We can see the decline in front of our very eyes but for many they still cannot the perpetrators of that deliberately induced decline.
September 28, 2024
The big one if they do it is increasing CGT to make it by far the highest in the world, at least among developed economies. The threat of that CGT increase combined with the potential levy of IHT on foreigners is already driving many well-off people abroad, especially those with ties elsewhere. I know lots who’ve either gone or talk about doing so. Once people have gone and establish their life and their families in other countries they will not for the most part come back. This at a time when other European countries, and many further afield, are bending over backwards to try to encourage wealth creators to come to them.
The damage from this stupidity is incalculable.
September 28, 2024
So their dogma and misunderstanding of the basics of economy now come back to bite them as they scramble around for excuses. It didn’t take long for their so-called plans to fall apart.
Is it any wonder – labour have never even been able to spell the word; economy, let alone know the implications of messing about with it using fag packet planning.
With the GMB union now protesting the Green policies being imposed, how long will it be before we see a few U-turns from the worst government in living memory?
September 28, 2024
They need to go big in either (1) increasing sales (tax revenue) or (2) cut costs (decreasing the size of government spend) ….they’ve opted for option (1) and its going to be a bumpy ride
September 28, 2024
“The £3 bn a year of state investment through the National Wealth Fund and Great British Energy is tiny in relation to the total investment of well over £200 bn it would take to decarbonise electricity generation and to replace the nuclear power stations about to close through old age.”
The cost to decarbonise our electricity will certainly cost well over £200bn. The National Grid upgrade alone will cost over £200bn :
https://www.nationalgrid.com/document/149501/download
More like £1 tn.
There is no plan for nuclear. Whilst 26% of our electricity was nuclear in 1997 the NGESO Future Energy Pathway plan for 2050 is for only around 5%. They have delayed the ordering of RR SMRs by opening up instead a competition not decided until 2029.
The fact that nuclear, the only low CO2 emitting power which is affordable and reliable, is deliberately being shelved is further proof, if one were needed, that the current Net Zero project has nothing to do with reducing anthropogenic emissions of CO2 but rather impoverishment.
Nuclear, particularly SMRs and even smaller micro reactors, will be developed by the AI giants as they know that renewables will not give them the cheap, reliable power they need. Microsoft has just made a deal to re-start and buy exclusively the power from the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Whilst expensive, unreliable, chaotically intermittent renewable power is still the UK Government’s plan for the UK.
September 28, 2024
PS :
Of course, as discussed yesterday, the cost of decarbonising our electricity will depend upon Ed Miliband’s definition of a decarbonised electricity system and consequently how much de-industrialisation, impoverishment, economic and military insecurity and misery he is prepared to accept to achieve his Great Leap Forward goal. He can close down the hydrocarbon fuelled power plants anytime he chooses.
September 28, 2024
It looks like the plan to break up England into the kingdoms of the 9th century is proceeding apace.
“Dorset, Somerset, and Wiltshire councils have expressed interest in creating a shared authority.
The three councils are to to submit a request for devolution to create an area called the “Heart of Wessex”.
It comes in response to a request from the government to consider devolution.”
Of course, no-one has asked the people of Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire if they want yet another tier of government to fund …. and in Northumberland, when the people were asked, they said NO, but that doesn’t seem to concern our “democratic” government.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyex5xnj5xo
Quite how creating another tier of government is going to help generate growth is beyond me ….. apart from growth in jobs for the political guys n gals and their hangers-on, of course.
Goodbye England. You had a good run for 1100 years, but you’re too difficult to control and the Globalists now want you gone.
September 28, 2024
It appears that this incompetent Government haven’t heard of Feasibility Study, the essence of improving any business productivity. Ed Millipede writing to the National Grid asking about output capability and costs when for months he has been shouting that getting rid of fossil fuels is a given, that Net Zero is likewise is a good example of this. They jump on the minority bandwagons and go 100% on their ideology without having the intelligence to think things through. Take the WFA, over and above the issues identified by Sir John, how many elderly pensioners are going to suffer hypothermia and associated medical problems and require hospitalisation? What cost then to the already stretched NHS. This inept Government doesn’t know because there’s no Feasibility Study, they’re too focussed upon grabbing their own freebies!!
September 28, 2024
The next Budget is important for the future of our country & needs to be well thought through
So far they have delivered a black hole of depression
Confidence in UK plc – Fail
Leadership – Fail
A Vision for our country – If there was one it got struck by reality
Some have got it this lot have not
September 28, 2024
It is informative that before the election the present Chancellor was being lauded for acumen. After the election the acumen has evaporated (if it ever really existed). Couple this with the Energy Secretary who has gone on about Net Zero for at least the last 20 years, and who may therefore be expected to know about it, essentially asking others NOW whether what he has preached is possible – and you are left with a dysfunctionality the Previous Cabinet would be proud of.
September 28, 2024
How do you fund new Industries if you cancel those that are earning? i.e. kill a known income stream for the Country before a similarly resilient alternative is even found.
There is still an export jobs mentality, then import what we are more than capable of producing – the difference wealth creation has been exported with the jobs never to return and the funding stream for a future then dry’s up. That’s madness
September 28, 2024
The similar situation in a nutshell, today it reported Brighton Council kept bumping up parking charges with part of the thinking that revenue would increase, they now have a £1.6m shortfall in parking revenue.
Then add in the tourist’s and the day trippers stayed away and local business the ones that pay the council rates are in decline. Loose, loose based on ideology not common sense
Punishment without a viable and reliable alternative is just that punishment, or as colloquially said ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’
September 28, 2024
sounds rather like Wokingham Council, over the last several years.
September 29, 2024
@Mickey Taking – i don’t know which learnt from which. Today it is reported Kent County Council pays more in interest on debt than the do on all the services they supply
September 28, 2024
1. Is 2600 million not £2.6 billion? I won’t let this undermine the excellence of this piece, but it did make me pause…
2. As I may not have the opportunity to write again, may I say how much I admire you, and have done so for at least 40+ years? You have always been one if the wisest heads, in Parliament or out.
Reply Typo for £2600 bn economy as the 1% is £26 bn makes clear. Typo corrected.
September 28, 2024
Let’s hope the Falklands government approve Sea Lion and give Millipede the Longbow’s fingers
September 28, 2024
+1
September 28, 2024
Labour have, so far, made cash cows of the oil and gas sectors, pensioners, well off investors and private schools. This will crowd out productive spending and investment (in these areas) with unproductive spending and investment in windmills and loud mouthed union members.
The double whammy of reducing efficiency and increasing inefficiency will necessarily feed through to lower GDP growth and that financially costs every single one of us.
September 28, 2024
2TK today is blaming his lackey’s for another £16K of office expenses being misplaced ass it should be more donations for clothing. What else has he misplaced? Is he ultra-poor or just of a poor character?
September 28, 2024
His brain along with his morales
September 28, 2024
In the commercial world falsely labelling one’s work expenses or not declaring gifts etc is regarded as deceitful and devious and would lead to “you’re fired” .
Starmer blaming others for “incorrect advice” is just deflecting his inability to master basic reasoning given his own legal training and senior experience.
He excuses himself all the time whilst demanding no more excuses to others, apart from his friends.
September 28, 2024
“Taking fuel payments away from most pensioners is meant to save a modest £1.3 bn”.
The subsidy on the wealthy converting to heat pumps would amount to £4.5bn/year if the government ever achieved its intended target of 600,000 heat pumps/year.
This target will fail because 80% or more of local grids only have the capacity to supply 1 – 2KW/household continuously. This is well below the power required for a heat pump which will be needed to run 24/7 in cold weather. There is not even sufficient local grid capacity for more than 1 in 7 houses to have an ev.
September 29, 2024
Why did the Tories not realise the truth in Redwood’s summary? Because they failed to convey the truth of these facts to the electorate in word which the electorate could understand – but more importantly they themselves had failed to understand and take action during their 14 year period in Government for the resultant failings in their policies.