The government sounds as if it thinks it can do the same again as last year. Now it has a report of a large black hole or bigger deficit to tackle it can put up taxes on the rich.
It won an election saying it would keep taxes down, apart from VAT on school fees. It put them up by £40 bn last year saying it was a one off to get rid of an exaggerated inherited black hole. It gave a revised promise of one and done for tax raising budgets.
At the same time it put up spending by £70 bn, creating its own new black hole. It pencilled in £5.5 bn of cuts which its MPs refused to vote for, making things worse.
Now it is allowing the same confidence busting conversations about which taxes to raise to dominate the media in the long run up to the budget. All the discussion is about surrogate wealth taxes as if they were not numerous enough and high enough already. She does seem to have got it that more general business and jobs taxes are counter productive. That may not stretch to the gambling and banking industry.
She should note that CGT revenues have been falling for 2 years thanks to her changes and Hunt’s.
She should worry that cash receipts from spirits duty are down this year following her big hike.
She should see the queue of rich people and young talent leaving the country , reducing future savings and higher income tax receipts.
She should confess her tax on jobs slowed growth and put up unemployment.
She should work out what was the true net gain from VAT on school fees after allowing for costs of extra state school pupils. Why has the number of teachers gone down when state schools were promised more from the extra VAT.
Maybe she should have the courage to tell her colleagues No more Tax. We are at the point where in many cases a tax rise will deliver less money.
October 15, 2025
All good points. The strongest is surely that there comes a point where higher taxes reduce tax income. If you want to raise money you have to acknowledge that (even if you don’t believe the ample evidence that lower taxes can increase the total collected), a ceiling is reached where your objective fails.
The refusal to acknowledge this suggests that raising revenue is not the main objective. If the real one is “punishing the rich” that’s backfiring, since the taxes are hurting everyone.
From the cries of “KS is a w*****” to the more recent “shove your digital ID up your ****”, the contempt for this government amongst lower income earners is there for all to see.
I assume the real motivation is the global reset. Serfdom for everyone except the technocratic elite.
October 15, 2025
I believe your assumption is correct. Don’t forget it has the full support of Charles Windsor.
October 15, 2025
@Wanderer – the seeming attack on those with resources always fails, they leave. That leaves the Socialist those that support the ‘Workers’ (what ever that is intended to mean) no other option but to punish the very ones that seemingly handed the power.
October 15, 2025
This is the most incompetent, useless Labour government I have experienced since 1945. Roll on the day when the bond markets put it out of its miserable existence. It cannot come soon enough.
October 15, 2025
Labour are losing votes to Greens according to polling so Starmer will move further left to try to stem the flow. That means a wealth tax of some description and Reeves may be jettisoned as part of that. I see triple-lock pension payments are due to go up by 4.8% so that is one area she could cut spending – get the BoE to do their job and get inflation down to 2%.
October 15, 2025
As far as I am concerned ,they can cut the Triple Lock when I don’t have to pay the full Tax on my pensions, at the age of 86. I have also lost the Winter Fuel Allowance.
I have never been on benefits in my life. I don’t wish to pay more tax for those that are, or to fund thousands of people coming over the Channel each day. There are other ways to cut spending, but Labour like the easy way – and thinks we wont notice.
October 15, 2025
Why not cut spending on illegal immigrants? There is plenty of scope. Why do you suggest as a first step punishing British people who have contributed all their lives? Why should they have a cut in income? Raising a payment by inflation is, after all, only maintaining the value of the payment.
October 15, 2025
Can’t the budget be brought forward? I am no economist, but everyone is so apprehensive about where the axe might fall that I can’t believe this is good for the country. We are still several weeks away …
October 15, 2025
At his last Berkshire Hathaway AGM in August, Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha spoke at length on the coming sovereign debt crisis in America – and by inference, the rest of the world.
Buffett, 95, reading from a prepared script, warned that there is a limit on how much the American economy can be taxed before there are economic consequences. He spoke of the eventual necessity for savage spending cuts involving Medicare and Social Security for retirees. He also spoke of the American twin deficits and the huge servicing costs of their national debt
Social Security and Medicare, the two bedrock programs supporting older Americans, are drawing closer to insolvency than many might realize. The most recent data forecasts that by late 2032, Social Security’s retirement program will no longer be able to pay out the promised benefits in full.
American Social Security, like ours, is funded by a dedicated payroll tax, but the gap between what goes out in benefits and what comes in through taxes is growing as the baby boomer generation reaches retirement age
YouTube has video of Buffett’s talk.
October 15, 2025
It’s a liebour government john. They always raise taxes or find new ways of taxing . We are in the same boat as France , parliament refusing to countenance any reduction in spending when we are technically bankrupt.
Tje damage being done is deliberate and designed to confiscate all our assets
Agenda 30 is coming along nicely.
Coupled with the mad net stupid agenda we are being crucified by these Marxist
Today wind is supplying 3.2gw with 71% of our power coming from gas and nuclear
We are burning our precious gad and exporting to Belgium Holland and Ireland. Someone should have a word in Milibrains ear.
October 15, 2025
Exactly the Tory tax increases had already taken us to the point where tax ratec increases decrease the tax take.
“She should work out what was the true net gain from VAT on school fees after allowing for costs of extra state school pupils.”. This “gain” will almost certainly be negative after a few years – economic and educational vandalism and spite. If one person who was working and earning say £100k leaving them enough for two school fees stops working and moves them to state schools the government would loose about £50k in tax and NI and then have to pay circa £20k for two more state places and the children will get a worse education too!
She says they are doing “everything for growth” but everything they do is anti-growth – net zero, rip off energy, the employment rights act, vast low skilled net cost immigration, an even larger state sector, vast NI increases, council tax increases, minimum wage increases, red tape increases… the only growth is in insolvency services and the parasitic sector of compliance with red tape, removals to overseas and state sector.
October 15, 2025
Growth too in the black economy, benefit claiming, bartering, tax avoidance and evasion, crime levels…the Transport police now refusing to investigate bike thefts if less than £200 value or if left at the station for more than two hours – most are left for the work day! Also publicising this to encourage these activities I assume. Perhaps they resent that they are missing out on parking charges!
October 15, 2025
They would prefer to mug people who have ticked the student railcard box rather than the senior one in error perhaps – more lucrative!
October 15, 2025
The only “pro real growth” policy (rather than parasitic growth) Labour has is relaxing planning, but this has not even happened yet. Anyway it is more than counteracted by the increases in NI, minimum wages (in effect a huge tax increase), increases in stamp duty, more OTT green crap building and heating red tape… thus making construction and development far less profitable or worthwhile to do.
October 15, 2025
Thousands of plans for homes available but not built, I have 7 approvals myself.
There are no buyers.
Solve that problem.
October 15, 2025
A shortage of development finance, affordable mortgages and very expensive to build with all the red tape, OTT green crap building controls, extra NI, min. wage increases… too.
October 15, 2025
The way for the state to save money on education (and improve it) is for more people to choose private schools and not force more onto the state system. This using some tax breaks and education top up vouchers. So the complete reverse of their current destructive policies or trying to force everyone onto state provision! The same with the NHS and healthcare.
Freedom and choice for people as to how they spend their own money on what they want too.
October 15, 2025
everything for growth…of taxes.
October 15, 2025
Labour in government = Tax,tax, tax again. Spend on pet projects, cripple the economy. get voted out.
It happens every time Labour get elected.
October 15, 2025
The trouble is that many of the problems source from the Non-Conservative Party’s 14 years of what might be loosely termed stewardship, and much of the electorate just wanted them ousted. It’s no wonder that so many now appear to be looking at the merits of Reform, on the basis of “how can they be any worse than the other two”.
October 15, 2025
Didn’t happen with Blair’s 3 terms.
October 15, 2025
Well Blair inherited a fairly decent economy and did not wreck it that quickly. After 2001, New Labour became a more traditional “tax, borrow and waste” government, and both tax and spending as a share of GDP rose.
Brown also so the gold at £175 now worth about 10 times more. Then we had the banking crash due to negligence bank regulation and over lending which was one of the causes the boom before the Brown bust. No return to boom and bust the dope used to say. Brown also gave us the PFI disasters and Blair the pointless, counterproductive and losing wars!
Gordon is a Moron is a good little book on the dire man!
October 15, 2025
If we may liken Reeves to a scorpion – and I think we may – the British taxpaying public are the unwitting frog upon whose back she has hitched a lift to avoid drowning. We can guess the rest. Unless, of course, there is a benevolent hawk zooming down from on high, timing its moment to snatch and devour the scorpion and thereby spare the frog.
October 15, 2025
I have serious doubts about whether Reeves (or indeed Starmer) is now actually running the show. The long run up to the budget could be a signal that some very radical changes to the tax “book” are planned – or simply that there is so much internal debate and ‘kite’ flying going on that they really still don’t know what they are going to do come the day…
October 15, 2025
Even if they know what MUST be done, stated ad nauseam by JR on this blog, their problem is that they don’t want to do it because that is a surrender.
They are on the horns of a dilemma namely, Surrender (do the monetarist thing) or be defeated (go bankrupt).
October 15, 2025
They seem determined to stick to the doom loop option, this destroying growth with all her policies in every direction. This while doing her silly rain dance of “we want Growth, Growth, Growth”. An “economist” but with zero grasp of real economics. Plus Ed Miliband an energy Sec. with zero grasp of energy or climate realities!
October 15, 2025
In a calculated insult to POTUS Trump and his attempts to get an end to the Ukraine war, Putin, the war criminal has quietly called up 2 million Russian reservists.
Despite throwing thousands of Russian and N Korean conscripts and Cuban mercenaries into their summer offensive, the Russians have gained little territory and have suffered WW1 levels of attrition. Attacking prepared Ukraine positions has cost the Russians 2000 killed a day according to MoD estimates
At last, Trump may have seen the light and is now threatening to supply Zelenskyy with highly accurate long range Tomahawk cruise missiles unless he agrees to a ceasefire
Trump should add weight to his threat by reinforcing Europe with 10,000 boots on the ground, backed up by the USAF. That would get Putin’s and his flunkies Peskov and the deranged Medvedev’s attention.
October 15, 2025
@SG. “…according to MoD estimates”.
I’d have more confidence in what Pfizer say about their vaccines than this!
October 15, 2025
Apparently the Russian Armed Forces now number 3.2 million – according to SG.
Should be a pushover.😂 according to MOD estimates.
October 15, 2025
The economy’s wrecked already. The Not-a-Conservative-Government prepared the ground for her with the Covid Tyranny followed by the highest taxes since WW2. Truss tried to reset the course we were on, but the Establishment and the Party Grandees deliberately prevented it.
Nothing Reeves does will improve anything; everything she does in November will just make it worse. Like Wile.E.Coyote …. she’s already over the cliff edge with her legs still frantically spinning, before she crashes to the ground.
October 15, 2025
Political dogma and the politics of envy have no ears John.
The idea of self help, a good work ethic, savings, investment, and a wish to better ones self and family are now policies of the past I am afraid.
The Government now want its increasing share of your personal wealth (no matter how small) first, because they think they know how to spend/waste it best. !
October 15, 2025
On the one hand they are talking about wealth taxes. On the other hand the Chancellor is talking about making the UK attractive to inward investment. How is she going to do that except by giving them preferential tax arrangements? So who are these wealthy who will face higher taxes? Evidently not wealthy multi-nationals, they are exempt. It will be moderately comfortable British people who will face the pain.
Why do governments consistently think the way to prosperity is to hammer its own people and give preference to foreigners?
October 15, 2025
This blog rarely comments on football. However, the England men’s team gave Latvia a good 5-0 thrashing last night and qualified for next year’s World Cup – without losing a game or conceding a goal.
Congratulations to an outstanding team – and mention must be made of the thousands of England fans who travelled to cheer on our national team on a rainy night in Latvia.
October 15, 2025
Did they have the nerve to wave the English Flag?
How very dare they.
October 15, 2025
…and they should take ‘the knee’ for the entire 90 minutes …..and not just football; chess players, jockeys, cyclists, etc, they should all take the knee
October 15, 2025
@Donna
I wasn’t there, but the game was broadcast live by ITV. Lots of fans were wearing our flag, though many who had painted the Cross of St George on their face found that the ink was running by the end of the game. It was raining very hard in Latvia last night. And there were quite a few Union Jacks
October 15, 2025
Sg. Bread and circuses.
October 15, 2025
That may not stretch to the gambling and banking industry.
That is a big leap Sir John.
Punishment taxes are counter productive however much money they raise.
October 15, 2025
She should work out what was the true net gain from VAT on school fees after allowing for costs of extra state school pupils. Why has the number of teachers gone down when state schools were promised more from the extra VAT.
Why is more not being made of this – lower receipts and fewer teachers. This encapsulates how virtue taxation does not work.
October 15, 2025
Stop asking difficult questions and move on. Think of the positives – like our leading role in the Gaza cease fire as described by the PM so modestly
October 15, 2025
@Narrow Shoulders – its the Socialist ideal, its not the tax but the removal of those that don’t support you being the prime objective.
October 15, 2025
We are disincentivising work. We are creating an even bigger black market in cigarettes. We are impoverishing ourselves and the poor are getting poorer.
Meanwhile, the public sector is getting ever more bloated, living off of our money. Many skilled people in the NHS are being prevented from doing their job due to poor structures and poor administration messing up appointments and other tasks.
The roads are a nightmare; driving tests; the judiciary, education, council services etc. In fact, just about all of the public sector is performing poorly and not doing the basics.
How much longer must we put up with having our money taken by threat of imprisonment, only to see it wasted on the already well-off, under-performing public sector?
October 15, 2025
As taxes on the working population will be self defeating, I forcast that Labour is going to follow the advice of the young zealot who was put in charge of the Resolution quango. He has identified the only wealth left which cannot be moved abroad or sold without attracting high capital gains tax, which is now charged on unreal gains. The value of housing has peaked at ridiculous levels after near zero interest rates and massive immigration, all caused by governments.
They will try to grab it by CGT added to IHT and even on owner occupied houses at values in the South where Labour has little support. They will raise supplementary annual taxes on high value houses in order to force low income owners to sell and pay CGT and even better- die.
October 15, 2025
One of the ideas is that they will impose an annual property tax in lieu of all the other property taxes. It will be charged based on ‘what you paid for the property’.
Those who have lived in the same house for 50 years will not be able to afford to move!
October 15, 2025
The 2007 CDS melt down seems like yesterday. I was in the middle of it at the world biggest bank looking after CDSs. We didn’t use mortgage backed CDSs and had no direct impact on us. I was well aware that it was caused by a misunderstanding of a “demographic” defaulting easily on their mortgages.
At the time I posted on this site that the next crisis would be because of migration. The longer it went on the worse the crisis would become. Simply because the driver of migration was either business wanting uneconomic workers or workers wanting uneconomic jobs. Where “uneconomic” meant privatising the profits and fiscalising the costs. This would I said – lead to the next crisis being a Government crisis where standard of living would fall, taxes would fall on the middle classes and the working classes could not compete with the race to the bottom on wages and living standards. I also said it would take 15 years. So here we are. Please go and dig out my posts.
The crisis is the Conservative and Labour party being wiped out in a once in a 300 year event.
Then I said the only solution would be like removing a harpoon.
I’ll add to that now when the harpoon is removed it needs to be done systematically in a medical manner. So stop the bleeding, stabilise the patient, remove the item, treat the infection etc.
The gravity and scale of events has not sunk in to the political classes.
October 15, 2025
I value your posts, I wish I could say I enjoyed them.
The political class finds the destruction of Europe incredible. They just cannot credit it.
May could not comprehend the obvious destruction of the Conservative Party which she continued to flog.
Bolt down the hatches.
October 15, 2025
My husband says this is always the result of Corporatist Fascism.
The political meltdown and destruction of the established parties happened in Germany almost 100 years ago.
He says France and Italy have suffered similar in more recent years. Macron and Meloni being the replacements.
Personally I don’t believe Farage and Reform are sufficiently capable to constitute a replacement.
We need all the talented people out of the woodwork to form a capable alternative.
October 15, 2025
We do indeed need all the talented people…..search high and low, good luck with that.
October 15, 2025
This administration s a fine example of opposition MPs spending too much time in their own think tanks to notice the changing conditions on the outside. Rachel Reeves has been a truly hopeless economic influence on the nation’s growth and wealth creation delivering the very opposite set of conditions necessary for an economy to flourish.
Her destructive policies have depressed entrepreneurial spirit and frightened real wealth holders and spenders out of the country. The insane attack on British family farming will go down in history as a turning point for all the wrong reasons.
Sadly and very unfortunately she is aided in ger policies of national decline by her colleague Ed Miliband. His zealous devotion to the talk of further destroying British farming by constructing inefficient part time solar industrial complexes across our prime farmlands. The Net zero fixation of this and the last Tory administrations is destroying our manufacturing industries and associated support activities.
With that background already baked into the coming years financial outcomes we have the prospect of ever higher taxes and housing rates driving down disposable incomes which is now impacting the service industries our economy has become reliant upon.
We can not sustain this Labour administration until 2029 something has got to give and we have to change government policy and tack before it is too late.
October 15, 2025
@Rod Evans – Her advising ‘think tank’ has been moved to the 2TK camp and the Marxist doctrine from them is what he understands and desires, they have become according to the media those who have read their output become the architects of our next budget. The Chancellor may get to to deliver the Budget, but by all accounts it will be these others writing and dictating what is in it.
October 15, 2025
Tax is just removal of money from the economy, simples. Take money out of the economy, the economy stalls and less tax is paid, simples.
A Budget is for the greater majority of the Electorate is about how they manage their expenditure against what they are able to earn, again simples.
Nowadays a Governments budget has no correlation between what they spend, and what can be earn’t by the ‘Nation’. It is simply spending, and spending of other peoples money.
October 15, 2025
Yesterday we learnt that Ed Miliband has approved the Industrialisation of 3,000 acres of good quality farming land. Solar panels to replace food.
A lot of questions posed by this and similar projects – who pays? How much of the taxpayer money is being sunk into the project.
A big one is who makes all (and I mean ALL) the equipment, the UK has the facilities and the abilities to do its own manufacturing of solar panels, and it does, yet the Government consistently prefers to line the coffers of foreign powers with taxpayer money for it never to return. We have seen to date Ed Miliband has a preference for propping up China with UK taxpayer money. Initially the foreign quotes for equipment might appear to be cheaper than the home-grown version. The bit missed is that home-grown means taxes paid in the UK, foreign means taxes propping up competitor regimes. Home-grown means the taxpayer money swirls around the UK economy feeding the economy, causing the economy to grow. Foreign exports of UK taxpayer money just support competitor countries for it never to come back, causing the UK economy to contract.
Then of course how do you replace 3,000 acres of good productive farming land. When the idea of subsidies for solar panels and the feed-in tariffs was first introduced, a friend of mine who had around 10,000 sq feet of factory roof he could cover jumped right in. It worked out as such a profitable proposition, he the did a deal with others that had roof space. He paid for the installation, they got the electricity, he got the feed-in tariffs. Needles to say it blossomed and everyone involved is happy. It profits everyone and those profits pay taxes in the UK. The other thing to notice was not a single acre of good quality farming land was taken out of production.
How many industrial complexes could we cover without a single acre of productive farming land being lost. How many Government building should we cover first, why hasn’t the Palace of Westminster, Buck House and so on been covered with solar panels?
Those that call themselves MPs all 650 need to wake up and get real before they throw the whole country away
October 15, 2025
Miliband buys from China because home-grown production increases our CO2 emissions. Making solar panels is very energy intensive. And anyway his idea is to de-industrialise and rely upon China. Instead he will create millions of UK green jobs by banning agricultural machinery and fertilisers, both large emitters of ghgs.
October 15, 2025
Yes, gesture politics. Starmer is giving Gaza (via NGOs) £20M for humanitarian aid. We may as well dig a hole out there and bury it in the sand for all the difference it will make. I might be impressed if Tony Blair was funding it but then I’d start wondering why?…
October 15, 2025
And how many Gazan young men is Starmer bringing over under the cover of a super injunction?
October 15, 2025
“Ed Miliband has approved the UK’s largest solar farm to date, covering 3,000 acres – that’s 2,000 football pitches – of prime farmland in a “mass industrialisation” of Britain’s countryside.
The Energy Secretary approved Tillbridge Solar farm near Gainsborough, Lincolnshire on Tuesday. Once operational, the site will generate enough renewable electricity for up to 300,000 homes when the sun is shining.”
Gridwatch at 0900:
Gas 67%
Wind 9%
Solar: 0%
So those 300,000, massively subsidised solar panels despoiling the countryside would, if they were already installed, be providing NOTHING.
No wonder the economy’s f…ed.
October 15, 2025
@ 5.30
Gas 59.5%
Wind 8.3%
Solar 1.4%
Nuclear 7.1%
Biomass 7%
Hydro 2.2%
Interconnectors 7.9%
Storage 2.7%
October 15, 2025
Adopting self-defeating measures has never troubled the party of the welfare scrounger, the public sector parasite and the bogus asylum seeker of course and now Chancellor Reeves is on notice her own back-benchers will brook no spending cuts. A bleak future for this maladroit Chancellor with few good choices available to her.
October 15, 2025
In sales, a producers want customers to buy, so their brands offer discounts and promotional incentives. Allowing 50% off a price may be over-generous, so a balance is devised. On the left scale pan is the weight of demand and on the right side is the promotional cost. The objective is not to place excessive weight in the promotional pan on the right, but to use the minimum amount consistent with tipping the scale into an affirmative decision, achieving purchases cost-efficiently.
With tax, essential requirements have inelastic demand: taxing them heavily still pulls in the revenue. Rachel Reeves’ taxes repel consumers who have choice. Taxpayers want fairness, but she acts like a fairy in hobnail boots and combat fatigues. People move away from where she kicks them in their pockets, or they move out of the country altogether.
October 15, 2025
Radical Left wing Labour MPs have always been more interested in extreme ideology and dogma than sound governance, but under Blair and even Brown, they were in a minority and didn’t count for much.
That all changed when Miliband opened the floodgates to membership of the party and many more far left people joined the party, and many of them are now MPs. That is why Starmer could not move Miliband to housing, Thieves could not put through even the most modest of welfare cuts, but was able to put VAT on school fees. That is raising no money and is almost certainly a net drain on the State Education System, but they don’t care about that, all that counts is their own particular kind of political dogma.
And we will all pay a high price until we can oust Labour from power.
October 15, 2025
Wind farms and biomass plants subsidy cost between July and September 2025 totted up to £657.7 million, all of which is added to our electricity bills. The cost for the last four quarters was £2.4 billion
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/10/14/cfd-subsidies-rise-to-657-million-in-q3/#comments
She could stop all wind farm & biomass subsidies
October 15, 2025
Or the subsidies should be paid by Mr Cold and his colleagues who love expensive power.
October 15, 2025
They, the Civil Service, know that “taxing more is self-defeating” and socialist Parliaments since 1997 have allowed them to do it. High, wasteful spending, and “running out of other peoples’ money”, is used to justify high taxation, a device to destroy personal wealth. Socialists have used the entirely false claim that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 cause global warming and extreme weather events to justify Net Zero a device to sabotage our energy, industry, national security and wealth. Carbon taxes and subsidies now amount to a total of £200bn since 2002 (2024 prices) and are currently running at £26bn/year. NESO costs its “Clear Power 2030” project at “over £40bn annually”. This is just the spending we know about. There could be other spending we do not know exists because it is hidden by a super injunction.
October 15, 2025
I’m sure the Labour Government will tax itself to annihilation. The sentiments being expressed on the streets of northern towns like Consett, which has been a Labour stronghold since the Party was established until in desperation it tried voting Conservative at the election before last (and got Holden) is astonishing.
A poll this morning predicts that the Conservative Party would return 7 candidates.
Reform can’t elect 5 MPs without losing 2 in short order. Nobody knows who the hundreds standing under their banner are, all selected by the incompetent party machine. The core of Reform, specialists in campaigning, are trying their hand at drafting policy and discovering the difficulty, with u-turns all over the place when their ideas are challenged.
Let’s hope against hope that the able political animals get together and provide a sound alternative to Reform. Otherwise I believe the British people, with nothing much to lose, will stake it all on the Reform spinning wheel.
As Starkey says, this could be the end.
October 15, 2025
Nobody knows who the hundreds standing under their banner are, all selected by the incompetent party machine.’
– and there was me thinking you addressed the Libdems, Labour and Conservative parties.
October 16, 2025
I address them too. That’s why we are in this mess in the first place,
October 15, 2025
I think much of the gambling industry is inherently evil and should be banned or taxed to collapse.
Otherwise I agree.
October 15, 2025
Off topic. The European Human Rights Commissioner has confirmed that ECHR overrides all national legislation, even our ‘terrorism laws’.
Therefore we HAVE TO WITHDRAW.
He writes:
‘ The policing of protests relating to the conflict in Gaza has become ever more prominent since my visit [to the UK in July], especially following the proscription of the organisation Palestine Action which has been criticised by UN experts and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
I observe that large numbers of arrests have reportedly been made for displaying placards or banners expressing solidarity with the organisation or disagreement with the government’s decision to proscribe it. I am aware that “support” for a proscribed group is an offence under the Terrorism Act 2000.
In this regard I recall that domestic legislation designed to counter “terrorism” or “violent extremism” must not impose any limitations on fundamental rights and freedoms, including the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, that are not strictly necessary for the protection of national security and the rights and freedoms of others (see, for example, the ODIHR/Venice Commission Guidelines on Peaceful Assembly).
I ask the government to take all necessary steps to ensure that the policing of protests conforms to this and related principles of law.’
October 15, 2025
Even after brexit the uk isn’t sovereign ….we should leave the EU//UN/ECHRs
October 15, 2025
My thoughts exactly like millions of others.
October 15, 2025
+1 and we should ask the Commonwealth to grant us independence!
October 15, 2025
Yet the Commissioner says that “domestic legislation …. must not impose any limitations on fundamental rights and freedoms …. that are not strictly necessary for the protection of national security…” – so all we need is a Home or Justice Secretary to affirm that any and all measures are “strictly necessary”.
October 15, 2025
Given your thoughts and statements on Brexit, do you accept in any way that R Reeves is blaming mainly Brexit , but also Liz Truss and austerity, for the problems she is facing (no mention of covid having any effect which is strange).
Given all the evidence that you supply, why are the Conservatives not expounding your views
Reply Why not ask them? This is not an official Conservative party site. I welcome all support for my views and analysis.
October 15, 2025
Law of Diminishing returns applies universally like gravity.
How come so many Chancellors and Governments cannot understand that which the Laffer Curve is based on.
Taxing too much is like “flogging a proverbial dead horse” and counter productive . Basic Economics.
October 15, 2025
They could drop the chagos islands deal ….saving £18 billion plus
October 15, 2025
‘She should see the queue of rich people and young talent leaving the country’ My Son is one of those, as a well sort after design engineer the UK has been made unattractive. The UK Governments has removed the need for the bright and talented. Yet the USA has rewarded him in many ways, he is in demand – the ‘green card’ has now become citizenship. Watching him go through UK security at Heathrow recently with a US passport was odd, disconcerting and yet comforting.
October 15, 2025
‘She should note that CGT revenues have been falling for 2 years thanks to her changes and Hunt’s.’ Indeed, so it would be logical to assume that a more relaxed CGT regime would increase tax revenues. But Mel Stride did not mention that in his speech to your conference.
Reply He is not the Chancellor and was not delivering a budget
October 15, 2025
Our (non-existant) UK Air Defence System was discussed here recently.
This video explains how the Ukranians are using small ‘cottage industry’ style units to counter Russian drone attacks. Clearly not ‘Dad’s Army’ but certainly a new form of Home Guard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxpRxZXVz6I
October 16, 2025
Your joking, under our government(s) you can’t even hold a can of petrol, play music or display the union flag in your shed
October 15, 2025
109 years ago, Scottish Missionaries built the University of Fort Hare in the Southern tip of Africa. It educated 7 African Presidents including Mandela.
Yesterday the students burned it to the ground.
I suggest Overseas Aid is scrapped. They want no ‘white Saviours’. Accept that.
October 15, 2025
Both you and your correspondents can see the obvious problems with the Chancellor, backed by the PM for now. The public sector cart is becoming too heavy for the private sector horse to carry. No one in this poor government has any understanding of how to run a growing economy.
This is the worst, greediest and most incompetent government in my 80 years of life. The economic adjustments they will be forced to make by the financial markets will likely destroy the UK economy for several years.
We urgently need a recall system for MPs to prevent them from ignoring voters for five years. Who voted for Wind farms and solar panels, and ever more expensive energy? Who voted for ridiculously high levels of taxation?
Why do they not cut spending now while they have choices to do so?