Tomorrow I give my lecture at All Souls Oxford on how to promote growth.
Chancellor Reeves would be well advised this week to be studying the US model. The US has outgrown Europe and the UK all thus century so far, and is forecast to grow more than twice as fast again this year. President Trump is determined to up their growth rate further.
Central to doing so, he has made his peace with the US tec giants. Regulations and taxes will be adjusted to assist their growth. The policy has got off to a great start with the announcement of a $500bn 4 year investment by three of them. This compares with our Chancellor claiming a£600 m gain from her China visit spread over 5 years. The US announcement was 1000 times size of the UK!
The US will expend her oil and gas industry. We will close ours down. It will cut taxes. The UK has just put them up on business daring to employ people. The US welcomes billionaires and millionaires. The UK criticises them and taxes them out of the country.
It is going to take sone changes for the UK to grow faster than the US.
January 23, 2025
it is not in the Reeves/Starmer DNA, so please get used to it. They are not on any road to Damascus, so do not anticipate meeting them or changing their mindset.
There was a convention that members of HM Forces would not be subject to IHT on death. As they put their lives at greater risk than the majority of us, and in particular politicians who expose them to risk , it was considered an acceptable incentive to a military career. Now the thin lipped are proposing to differentiate between getting killed by an enemy and falling off a motorbike. Both can result in a widow with children to bring up. This is the mindset we have destroying the country.
No amount of sensible lecturing at All Souls will put us on a path to economic success, because this collection of no brains see wealth creators as the enemy. Only running out of available money will stop them. As we have witnessed in their actions to date, their mendacity has no bounds.
January 23, 2025
Agreed Agricola. In this Labour Government ideology beats growth every time. Hence the higher NI rates, tax on farmers, VAT on private schools, net-zero policies….
We need to stop listening to the words and judge on actions/outcomes.
January 23, 2025
Never Judge any politicians on their words JR perhaps excepted.
Cameron claimed to be a low tax at heart Eurosceptic to become leader! Starmer promised to smash the gangs, promised the farmers not to introduce IHT, promised the winter fuel allowance would remain, promised a budget for growth, promised not to increase NI or taxes on “working people”, told us the Southport mass murderer was a Welsh Choir Boy when he knew the truth within days…Sunak even told us the Covid Vaccines were unequivocally “safe” and were effective not according to the stats.. Has he corrected the record yet or is he waiting for Trump’s people to expose the reality.
Boris claimed he had delivered Brexit (well half right).
Circa 90% of MP think or claim there is a CO2 climate emergency!
January 23, 2025
It’s the first step on cuts to expenditure on our armed forces; expect real money cuts soon, and closer arrangements with the EU, that well known military power.
Goldman Sachs tells us the BoE will HAVE to cut interest rates…. oh, well how will we find enough fools to buy Gilts to fund increased borrowing from reckless government spending? The fragility of our debt market needs to be clarified; if BoE cuts interest rates then £ will fall and foreigners will sell their Gilts. We’re going to be broke within the year.
January 23, 2025
I am surprised there is no Lifelogic in the eleven posts.
I was expecting an ‘Allister Heath is surely correct in today’s Telegraph’ post from him.
January 23, 2025
Luckily the government has a captive investor able to print money to buy gilts, the Bank of England.
January 23, 2025
Probably, don’t suppose our economist chancellor knows about the Weimar Republic, or Zimbabwe, or Argentina. Just a sniff of QE 2.0, and sterling will fall faster than Starmer’s approval ratings….
January 23, 2025
We’ve already had four rounds, the smallest being £60 billion after the EU referendum.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicsectorfinance/timeseries/fziu/pusf
If the Bank just reversed its sales over the past two years that would be £220 billion.
January 23, 2025
@agricola +1 all so very true
Its the fight to destroy the UK that is the only thing they seem to peruse with vigour. And we keep getting told ‘the Great Reset’ is a figment of our imagination – but how else can you define the direction they have chosen to take?
January 23, 2025
It might not be in Labour’s DNA but it is not in the Conservative Party’s one either. I am reading a very interesting book ‘Vassal State: How America runs Britain’ by A.Hanton.
It was one of the Telegraph best books of 2024. Whether in banking, food, agriculture, manufacturing, health, … the weight of US companies is everywhere between 30 and 70% going to 100% for internet, computing and the like.
It explains how true US investment (with actual creation of companies) is amalgamated with the simple buying of British companies (usually by US private equity, without creation of anything much) in the FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) number usually bandied around by politicians.
Please try to read that book and see who in the UK the ‘call for growth’ in these conditions is likely to benefit, specially realising that most of the US companies active in the UK pay a minimum of taxes here and preferred to have them declared in Ireland, Netherlands, Luxembourg, or more tropical British dependencies.
January 23, 2025
You don’t need to read that book to know that the UK has been an unincorporated territory of the USA for a long time.And no-one is more responsible for that than the Anglo-American Winston Churchill.
January 23, 2025
Good morning.
So its back to the not-so-good 1970’s for the UK then ? And those young enough with real skills in the areas the USA needs will be flocking there, leaving poor (literally) old blighty and its Deliveroo economy. Just about the only industry we have managed to grow.
January 23, 2025
Delivery firms have done well, customers are sitting at home, some WFH, why spend money driving to stores for your purchase, you have to park and pay, you have to find the item of interest probably out of stock, find an assistant and hope they have a clue. That sums up UK.
January 23, 2025
Apart from economic hits and some other effects, much of the 1970s was excellent.
Money matters, yet the price of losing so many of the qualities and values that UK then had is higher, as many now realise.
January 23, 2025
The only good thing about the ’70s which I recall is the music. We won’t even get that with this re-run.
January 23, 2025
Cheer up!
We all know Labour is rubbish but their hands are relatively tighed compared to the 1970s.
Now is a time for rebuilding our Tory party so that when it gets back into power it has the vision, energy, talent etc to rebuild our great country for the next 15 years.
Cheers up!
January 23, 2025
You are joking, I hope, Ed !
Badenoch would certainly be better than Starmer, but that is in no way a complement.
The Conservative party is a busted flush. The 4.1m who voted for Reform in July are not going back, and since the election, at least 1-2m more voters, including me, have decided to abandon the party to its fate. More will follow when the local election results are known.
As Suella and JR-M have both said, the only way to beat Labour is for the Conservatives and Reform to work together. BUT, any coalition is going to have to be led by Reform.
January 23, 2025
as elon points out the 500 billion mentioned is not really secured, its very theoretical. lots of data centers wont, on their own, solve much.
but yes we need a strategy, ed miliband is saying the state and power companies should dictate where data centres are built here. absolutely the last people qualified to decide the best place for data centres go.
at least trump is offering hope, freedom, and pro American policies, quite unlike our own politicians.
January 23, 2025
Recent analysis revealed the USA has over 5000 data centres. Next in the world are Germany and UK with just over 500 each, well ahead of other European countries. These drive the digital revolution. They depend on reliable sources of abundant energy. If that fails, the businesses that depend on them to deliver global services will fail. Yet UK energy policy is a prescription for failure. It is a disaster waiting to happen – just like the uncontrolled fires in Los Angeles because the reservoirs were empty and the diesel engines fire trucks were parked up in garages because they were not EVs
January 23, 2025
that’s nonsense, I know of more than 500 personally, off the top of my head, sounds like they have been counting them like illegal immigrants, ie not very well…
data centres dont need to be local, other than for latency reasons in some cases, and resilience reasons in other cases, but lets be honest Miliband has no concept of any of that… so economic activity does not necessarily track locations of data centres… in many cases its better to have data centres in places with lower costs, in the UK that generally means further north or with lower council tax, big dependencies on the Telcos connecting them up and whether the local exchanges have physical space for connections etc… which again Miliband will have zero concept of…
yes UK energy policy is indeed a prescription for failure, It is indeed disaster waiting to happen, and more importantly it will impoverish us by putting bills up and forcing employers abroad so reducing jobs etc here.
January 23, 2025
The cost of Ed’s “unstoppable” intermittent, net zero, electricity will ensure few AI and data centres are located in the UK many high energy industries have already been murdered by Net Zero Teresa May (now in the Lords) and Ed’s moronic Climate Change Act. Voted for by nearly all of our totally deluded MPs.
January 23, 2025
I have worked in large UK and Saudi Data Centres. They require a vast amount of energy and cooling and running. Hence why some companies consider putting them in far northern countries. The diesel storage tanks (yes they use diesel for the backup generators – loads of them) are taller than a house.
I have a solution which will save vast amounts of money. But alas with the LibLabCON and their insane Nut Zero policies it will not work.
January 23, 2025
@iain gill – so-called big tech in the US are not standing still they have bought or are building their own Nuclear facilities to ensure their future. The UK? It is reliant on foreign Governments that are heavily subsidised by the UK taxpayer just to keep the lights on.
As you infer big State interference will take us backwards.
January 23, 2025
Data Centres will need to be built where the interconnectors make landfall! Relying on solar and wind is a joke. So hope to hook up to somebody’s electricity surplus. The Grid can only do so much.
January 23, 2025
Are these the inter-connectors and power cables that the Russians are currently mapping out for their Submarine to be able to cut or explode perhaps?
January 23, 2025
Data Centres won’t be on their own. They’ll have potentially billions of people following, eager to reach nearer truth based on so much info analysis.
The collective knowledge of the world’s medical input lead shorter paths to cures for cancer and much else. Discovery of a single fact may be capable of attracting a £ trillion in income contributions from those who value knowing and using it, on any subject.
Many years ago Volvo revealed how effectively simple seat belts saved lives, without charging for informing others. Millions of individual can search, learn and conceive solutions to their own problems too, whether together, or alone as you indicate.
Trump promotes freedom for all, except those guilty.
January 23, 2025
Forget Milliband, Starmer, and the woman from Accounts. Let’s just focus on rebuilding the Tory Party! Let’s have more HOPE!
January 23, 2025
Tech isn’t my thing but I saw an interesting comment yesterday from a French tech entrepreneur regarding China’s Deepseek and how it might destroy OpenAI’s business model:
“Most people probably don’t realise how bad news China’s Deepseek is for OpenAI.They’ve come up with a model that matches and even exceeds OpenAI’s latest model on various benchmarks and they are charging just 3% of the price.What’s more they are releasing it open source.”
January 23, 2025
Liebours growth strategy is targeted at the Public Sector.
Everything is ideologically driven to increase the power of the state.
The waves made by Trump will eventually wash up on the Shores of Europe and the people will see just how bad the governance has been.
The world is turning right and we are out of step
January 23, 2025
Indeed.
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Margaret Thatcher.
Not eventually but very quickly, Reeves and Starmer are already at this point. Further tax rate increases will raise less tax not more. We are already in an economic doom loop.
January 23, 2025
Not if they can control what we see, hear and read.
To paraphrase a former UK politician – “A digital Firewall is descending upon the continent of Europe.”
January 23, 2025
Need for a growth strategy – most certainly. Rachael Reeves and this government have an anti-growth strategy. Confidence is vital, but once again Labour have talked the UK down and the prospect of all the insanities of Net Zero, rip off energy, higher taxes, more employments laws, wars on farmers, small businesses, car drivers, employers, private schools, the wealthy and hard working, non doms…
Compare and contrast Make America Great Again or the negativity and lies from Socialist Starmer and Reeves. Her vast NI increases have not even hit yet but unemployment is rising.
The deluded zealot Ed Miliband warns Trump that net zero is ‘unstoppable’
The Energy Secretary said “going green is vital to reduce Britain’s reliance on ‘rollercoaster’ fossil fuel markets”
Net zero was always insane and is already dead in the water as far more than half the world is talking no notice whatsoever. What on earth is green about reducing CO2 Ed? CO2 is tree, plant and crop food, odourless, harmless and the gas of life on Earth. The UK will not complete with energy cost of 3-5 times those of the US, China and many other countries.
January 23, 2025
Well put, LL !
January 23, 2025
Rapidly implementing Theresa May’s net zero strategy is clearly the best strategy to achieve growth in the economy. Miliband should undertake a competition to determine the best grid-scale electricity storage system – several are being developed by British Universities. A “levelised cost of electricity” study shows that the type of system being developed by the British start-up Gravitricity is cheapest.
https://gravitricity.com/about-gravitricity/
January 23, 2025
What makes this ambition affordable for start up or electricity hungry business?
January 23, 2025
An interesting idea SG that may be adopted for specific applications but it’s not going to be ecoonomic at scale as you need deep shafts and lots of them. Just get on with nuclear and gas. Trump has changed the rules of competition. Do you think the rest of the world can afford to ignore this? This government is digging a very deep hole but they won’t be able to store anything in it apart from the ashes of the UK economy.
January 23, 2025
SG
You will need batteries the size of a city to store enough electricity to keep the UK from power outages if we move to reliance on renewables.
And the huge costs of such a system will be added onto our electricity bills which are already the highest in the world.
If you really want growth then we need cheap energy, lower taxes and less state interference.
January 23, 2025
Qualified engineer here. Thanks for the laugh on gravity storage !
January 23, 2025
An annual competition would be better, and synthetic liquid fuels should be included.
Not cheap, but then in reality none of this will be cheap and energy security is critical.
https://www.saxton4x4.co.uk/news/synthetic-fuels-stats#
“The cost of producing synthetic fuels is estimated to be around $4 to $6 per gallon.”
January 23, 2025
SG :
Gravity based systems cannot store electricity at grid-scale. They can only be used instead of batteries for small, instant supplies of electricity for grid stabilisation to prevent a grid tripping from connection to chaotically intermittent unreliable renewables. Do the maths.
The only serious research into grid-scale electricity storage was that of the Royal Society using hydrogen. Their findings, that they’re now admitting were too optimistic to be true, was that storage would double the cost of electricity.
Good for the growth of the Chinese economy and energy grifters’ bank accounts not for the nation.
January 23, 2025
SG :
PS:
The cheapest, easiest and safest way to store energy is in the form of hydrocarbons.
January 23, 2025
Unfortunately I cant attend but if there is any subsequent video or materials I would be very keen to watch / read them. I believe Reeves feels the only way to stimulate economic growth is through govnt investment. Govnt investment would only be useful if our main growth issues were structural. They are not. They are cyclical along with private sector underinvestment. We need to make an accomodative consumption and private sector investment environment and that means reducing taxes and rolling back regulation. Both are anathema to Socialism and that is why Reeves’ growth strategy will never work.
January 23, 2025
Government has no money to invest, so it takes the money from investors, thwarting sensible investment backed by expertise and energy.
I’m afraid we are dealing with very stupid people. This is the inevitable result, and of course they don’t enjoy the mental agility to change their strategy in the light of new evidence.
Like the Biden administration, the only solution is replacement.
January 23, 2025
The searing lighting of sense and the effects of what Trump’s policies achieve will force change on Rachel Reeves: if she’s still in office before the thunder following blows her further beyond remote wilderness.
In the meantime, she should study every word of SJR’s All Souls lecture, and prepare to follow his sensible guidance. Only then might she avert the inevitable storm her damaging actions have risked on so many people and businesses here.
January 23, 2025
The Institutionally left-wing Civil Service and the Student Union Marxists in Government are following the Soviet Union’s model for government: central control; 5 year plans; production targets and destroy the farmers and small businesses.
Gridwatch at 0745:
Nuclear 4.06 GW
Gas: 17.48 GW
Biomass: 2.5 GW (chipped trees shipped from USA using diesel, so NOT “green”
Hydro: 2.08 GW
Inter-connectors 4.35 GW
Wind: 5.56 GW
Solar: 0
All those marvellous windmills, costing us an absolute fortune, and we are importing more energy in the form of inter-connectors and chipped trees.
The quickest way to achieve growth would be to ditch the Net Zero SCAM, repeal the Climate Change Act and then lock Red Ed and the Climate Change Committee into a large container and drop it off a ship somewhere between Shetland and Greenland.
January 23, 2025
It might get so windy in the next few days that the windmills will have to be braked, zero GW from many.
January 23, 2025
Yup, but we’ll still be paying for them …. NOT to produce any electricity. We still won’t have any power from the solar panels either ….. and I expect more of them will be destroyed by the storm.
January 23, 2025
Spot On Donna
January 23, 2025
Looking across to the right of my screen I notice Sir John’s tweet dated December 11 2022 that solar and wind together had slumped to just 4% of our electricity. At this moment wind has risen to about 29% so it would not be impossible to increase windmill capacity to supply all of our electricity all of the time if only the surplus could be stored when the wind is producing more than is needed. I cannot see batteries as being the way to do that but I could envisage synthetic fuel doing the job. It would not be cheap but at least we could potentially escape from dependence on foreign powers who are not necessarily reliable friends.
January 23, 2025
SMRs would be a far better, British-made, solution.
Where are they ? It looks like the civil service is doing its best to stop us building any.
January 23, 2025
The Civil Service or GBN?
– world-nuclear-news.org 31/10/2024 ‘UK now aiming for SMR and Sizewell C decisions in Spring 2025’.
– gov.uk 11/11/2024 ‘Negotiations begin for UK’s small modular reactor programme’.
– cetas.turing.ac.uk 15/01/2025 ‘UK police not equipped to protect SMRs, analysts say’ (Report by clicking inside).
January 23, 2025
Nuclear power would make us independent of foreign powers and wouldn’t require a back-up system because it wouldn’t be intermittent and would be reliable.
January 23, 2025
Can’t wait for the Green lunies to have to publish the CO2 footprint of each windmill – to be replaced every 20 years – wow.
January 23, 2025
Oh, Donna, you are so right !
Why is it that almost the entire political class across Europe, and especially here, cannot see how they are impoverishing us? Or, is it that they just don’t care and are perfectly happy to see us get poorer?
Thank goodness for Donald Trump ! But why does it take someone like him to show us the error of our own politicians` ways ? It is begining to look like only Nigel Farage has any chance of turning our fortunes around.
January 23, 2025
It’s literally ridiculous that Reeves asked a bunch of regulators – OFWAT, OFCOM etc. – for suggestions on how to get growth. I would assume that none of them suggested abolishing themselves which would be the most effective answer they could have offered. They are there to set regulations to protect the public and so abolishing any of those regulations will have a downside risk and it should be up to politicians to make those decisions. I note the FCA, showing a sensitivity to self-preservation, pointed this out to her fully aware of the inevitable blame-shifting she’d indulge in if looser financial regulations (on crypto for example) attempting to generate growth went wrong.
OAM let’s see how far she gets with her Heathrow 3rd runway plan – that will surely be stopped in its tracks by NIMBY MPs of all parties and activist lawyers and judges both here and on the ECHR.
January 23, 2025
Off topic:
Alok Sharma, former Business Minister, attended the Covid Inquiry yesterday and admitted that the Government knew the Covid jabs would cause deaths and injuries because they had been developed at haste and the testing regime had not been as thorough as would normally be the case. They had carried out a cost/benefit analysis (which they didn’t bother to do for the Covid lockdowns) and concluded that the risks were “worth it.” They anticipated a £1.7 billion bill for injury compensation, to be paid by taxpayers since Big Pharma was indemnified from prosecution.
They then attempted to coerce the entire nation to participate in their mass medical experiment, which they KNEW would cause death and injury for some and they used the MSM to close down any discussion about those harms and to vilify anyone who tried to raise the issue.
I don’t remember Whitty, Vallance, VanTam, Johnson, Handcock, Sunak, Gove …. or anyone else who stood at the podium urging everyone to participate in a mass medical experiment explaining that the jabs were going to cause death and injury for some people and the testing regime had been less thorough than normal. In fact, I seem to recall they told us, many times, the exact opposite of that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh1WRo2857Q
In other words, Andrew Bridgen (former MP) was right. And they tried to silence him, as well.
The NHS is STILL pushing these dangerous jabs.
January 23, 2025
So the government concluded the risks were “worth it”. I would like to know if the members of the government and MPs got themselves injected with the real juice. Or is that an injury to their majesty?
January 23, 2025
Sir John
I hope for a positive reception tomorrow.
As for growth, while it is right we all keep banging on about as it creates a future foe us all, I feel those that need to act are not listening. Fundamentally they are not listen, hearing or working with those that empower and pay them they prefer to fight the people over their very personal ideological agenda. Country and the people do not come before their religion or self-esteem. We have essentially a Socialist one party State running parliment and we are stuck with it.
January 23, 2025
From the MsM ESG rules are Destroying Industry, says Mark Rutte general secretary of NATO – tell us something we don’t know.
January 23, 2025
At this point I will just say that we do not need a special trade deal with the US, and nor should we expect much economic benefit if the government aligns us with EU rules without any say, or tries to cosy up to China, and Ed Davey is very ignorant if he really thinks that a customs union with the EU would “turbocharge” our economy. None of those proposals would get us back to the long term trend growth rate of about 2.5% a year that prevailed for six decades from after WW2 to the global financial crisis of 2008, since when it has been roughly halved:
https://globalbritain.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Ewen-Stewart-Chart-1-UK-GDP-per-capita.jpg
January 23, 2025
Sir John
It would appear that the problems are seen and recognised from every quarter- only the religious nuts that have infested the HoC and Government that have deluded themselves this century to believe a Socialist Ideological religion must prevail above the needs of the people and the country.
Allister Heath(Telegraph) – “Britain is being systematically lied to by our delusional political elite ”
“Britain is cooked. Thirty years of malgovernment, ideological derangement and relentless self-sabotage have ruined us. We are careering towards quasi-bankruptcy, our international reputation shot, our society fractured, our citizens impoverished, unhealthy and demoralised, our public sphere strewn with litter, and our institutions discredited. Crime and disorder are at intolerable levels”
January 23, 2025
It’s profoundly encouraging that common sense is returning to the US. More than a pity that it’s going to be a bit longer before the same happens in the UK and we can rid ourselves of our clown government.
January 23, 2025
So now you can tell all those poor souls at Souls why virtually everything has gone so wrong for poor old Britain and what your plan is to put things right!
January 23, 2025
Is this believable from what some call the media – it could be click-bait
In an echo of what President Trump announced – “Boosting the UK economy must trump Labour’s dash for net zero”, says Rachel Reeves as new push for growth sets collision course with Ed Miliband
Its not speeches we need it is action. Also echoing the Big Man lets have and practice “drill baby drill”
There seems to be just a glimmer that the UK’s energy price being 4 times that of the US is hurting UK Industry therefore growth…. Red Ed closing things before viable resilient replacement are in place is the Miliband in destruction mode. The Government is sending taxpayer money to Foreign government to let us keep the lights on, and that is dependent on political whims – Is the State coffers being depleted. All the while we(the UK) sits on top of the answer
January 23, 2025
Strangely almost no emphasis given to a major plank of his strategy. Large cost cutting, reduce the size of the state.
It is a well known in business that in a turn around you take costs out first as they have an instant effect.
English politicians addicted to spending are desperate not to give way so we get this spin that only about growth being the solution.
It continues the thread of ‘dishonesty’ that runs through our political establishment. Related to this is a recent report saying our livings standards haven’t improved over the past 14/15 years and today, an estimated one million illegals immigrants living in the U.K.
That’s the result of 14 years of Tory government. Why do they even think they have a right to exist?
January 23, 2025
Growth Strategy = Cheap Energy
Growth Tactic = Cancel Net-Zero
January 23, 2025
Successive European governments, especially ours, have been marching relentlessly towards stagnation. This has been going on for at least 15 years but Boris, Sunak and Starmer have accelerated the process greatly.
That it takes a man like Donald Trump to show us what we are doing wrong, is very depressing.
Our politicians cannot do any of the things they say they want to do unless they generate the money to pay for it first. It is blindingly obvious that the key to generating the income necessary is through lower energy prices, yet all over Europe politicians are doing exactly the opposite. And ours are certainly in the vanguard of this headlong rush to impoverishment.
We need a moritorium on Net Zero of at least a decade. Without one, we will lose most of our remaining industry and countries that take a pragmatic approach like China, India, and the US, will be the main beneficiaries.
Miliband and Co will not just drive us to be the poor man of Europe once again : it will be far worse, because Europe itself will be at the bottom of the world economic order.
Without a Trump-like change of direction, Impoverishment awaits us ………….
January 23, 2025
It’s a shame your party didn’t listen to your sage advice. Instead, Osborne created blocks to growth and incentive. Is it right that a family with two children is better off if they both earn £50k than if one earns £100k, which is nearly £1k per month more? Was it right for Osborne to claw back the personal tax-free allowance at £100k, creating a cliff edge and disincentive? We have a punitive tax system for high achievers.
Corporation tax is up from 19%, starting at just £50k pa on an upward scale to 25%! When a nearby competitor was offering 12.5%, now 15%!
Even basic things like Statutory Maternity Pay. Many women are in a bind because they need two incomes to buy homes or even rent homes now. SMP is now £184.03 per week for 33 weeks when a full-time minimum wage is £429, soon to be £458. For financial reasons, many women find it necessary to go back to work earlier than they’d like full-time because they can only work 10 kit days; if they could work 30 kit days without losing SMP, they could either take the full 12 months off work or at least be financially comfortable during their 9-month leave.
January 23, 2025
How to promote growth?
The answer is to cancel Net Zero. Net Zero is inherently anti growth by its own definition and aims and is intended to be achieved by the rationing of energy, food and travel.
The start will be the rationing of electricity. PM Johnson wrote in his “Net Zero Strategy” on P19 that we will have electricity available “at the flick of a switch from abundant, cheap British renewables….”. Now we are finding that our electricity is the most expensive in the World and are told that smart meters “are essential for the energy transition.” These smart meters are clearly indicating that electricity will not be “abundant, cheap or available at the flick of a switch”. Neither can the electricity ever be “cheap or abundant” as the local grids cannot handle more than 1-2 KW/household and hence makes it impossible for everyone to take advantage of less expensive electricity when the wind blows and the sun shines even if the National Grid is upgraded at a cost of over £200bn.. No, smart meters are intended to switch off supply when the chaotically intermittent renewables fail. NESO has planned for up to 25% of demand to be cut in their Clean Power 2030 report.
The Net Zero energy policy is not one for growth and it was never intended to be.
January 23, 2025
Correct. By accepting a Smart Meter you are transferring to the electricity supplier/government the ability to switch off your electricity whenever they choose.
January 23, 2025
There are some interesting YouTubes about the outflows of brains, skills and money from the UK now.
Britain is finished.
Growth is for the birds.
January 23, 2025
It depends. ft.com 22/01/2025 ‘If the UK wants to lead in AI it must fund more PhDs.’
January 23, 2025
Indeed and the first thing would be to get rid of this government because they simply have no intention of booming the UK. Their policies are so engrained in the establishment though such that any new regime, Like the Truss one, that tried to put sensible options in place would be hounded out of office.
The groundswell of opinion against the way our parliament has allowed governments to harm the UK is growing by the day. If this rogue government carries on in the same way it is likely to get lynched, metaphorically speaking. But it is time we put our collective shoulder against the bad policies now being carried out to hound labour out of office, for ever.
We still have a chance to save our country. The alternative is full on netzero, a continuing industrial winter of discontent and total chaos as we sink into the mire.
January 23, 2025
Not quite O/T: Will we get an incisive comment on the SABA threat (by a US hedge fund company) on UK investment trusts? Or will such a takeover improve UK growth?
January 23, 2025
Was the £600m deal in exchange for the Chagos islands?
January 23, 2025
Mrs Reeves should certainly be listening to what you have to say, but so too, should the Conservatives. I have not yet heard or read anything to indicate the views you trail in todays post, chime with the opinions or intentions of Mrs Badenoch (I have never met her, so hesitate to call her Kemi), or Mel Stride. It is beginning to be time we heard something from them in this regard.
January 23, 2025
Growth will be elusive in a country where a small child is butchered and the government refuses to examine the matter and does nothing. Stasis, then dissolution.
January 23, 2025
79 criminals arrived in the UK yesterday; from the safe country of France …and it continues !
How can you have growth when costs continue to rise ?