Yesterday’s figures showed another small fall in GDP in January and very little growth over 3 months. No surprises.
The industrial decline I and others have been predicting proceeds apace. Industry and oil and gas fell again. There are the high taxes on car sales with the attack on popular cars throttling the vehicle industry.There is the ban on new oil and gas exploration and development speeding the energy decline. There is the upcoming closure of our last blast furnaces hitting steel . There is the closure of Grangemouth and the persistent damage being done to high energy using industries by our high energy prices.
If the government wants growth and wants more to happen outside London and the south east it needs to reverse these de industrialisation policies. The PM needs to reshuffle Miliband out of the Energy and Net Zero department and put in someone who does see the folly of switching to imports.
Meanwhile the Chancellor’s high tax policy is hitting small businesses, services and confidence. Still to come is the full imoact of the NI increase this April which will hit employment and lead to more closures of shops, pubs and restaurants.
March 15, 2025
All going to plan then
Import another 200,000 I’ll educated souls and increase demand but still we shrink the economy
Per Capita is down about 10% from pre covid times and the governments persistent tax raids are making things worse.
Rachel from accounts really does believe sha can tax us to prosperity.
As for the clown Milibrain there is no words printable to describe his antics.
March 15, 2025
Ian
You say, “All going to plan then!”
From the ‘conspiracy theories’ of what the WEF, the UN policies depict…. you could be right!
March 15, 2025
https://www.statista.com/statistics/282647/government-debt-uk/
If the forecast is correct, how is this not an existential threat to the entire UK? The higher government borrowing goes the more expensive it becomes as our credit risk increases.
March 15, 2025
@Ian Wraggg – Rachel never got to accounts,she maxed out in the complaints department before leaving her employ
March 15, 2025
+1
March 15, 2025
“Meanwhile the Chancellor’s high tax policy is hitting small businesses, services and confidence.”
It would be helpful to make paid work more attractive than state benefits. The aim is to encourage more people into paid work thus reducing the benefits bill as well as ithe likelihood of increasing the overall tax take
For example, low earners are taxed too highly.
An increase tax personal allowance would help as would a reduction in employee National Insurance particularly for low earners.
and
Employer National Insurance is a tax on jobs.The % rate is too high, and starting point is too low.
March 15, 2025
High earners are leaving so they will no longer be taxed at all. 500,000 a year leaving – so the 500,000 replacement not even included in the ‘ill educated immigrants’ calculation.
We will have the low earners in charge everywhere, look at the Government and see how well that works.
March 15, 2025
Lyn
Been the same for years, those with money leaving, those without and needing, arriving.
Yet those in charge refuse to believe it, thus no hope of changing things.
March 15, 2025
Correct, there has been a slight recognition of reality over an excess of scribes in NHS England. Will the sheep be moved to fresh grazing or the abattoire. If the politics of negativity and envy are to grow from the coming Spring statement then book your ticket out. It was highly significant yesterday that it was cheaper to fly to Benedorm to enjoy the Gold Cup than to freeze in Cheltenham with beer at £7.90 a pint. We cannot control our weather, though our energy minister thinks he can, rendering him sectionable, but the realisation that the price of beer and the whole experience can be infinitely more pleasurable 1200 miles away says it all.
March 15, 2025
Actually it can’t – you need to stand on the rails where you can feel the ground shake and hear the gasping for air and feel the heat. Else you have never experienced Cheltenham – believe me.
Remember – it’s a winter sport. It’s appropriate to be in drizzle or even snow.
March 15, 2025
It’s terrible. Bad weather and poor light. Plus rip off prices at Cheltenham.
No public transport on Boxing Day for Kempton park. Then you get stuck in the car park afterwards for ages.
Flat racing has the better weather. You can go to The Oaks & Derby for free. I have walked the course before the events. During COVID I watched from outside the course – across the road in the golf course with binoculars! No funfair so you could follow the horses all the way round.
The evening races are also attractive. Train from The City gets you to Sandown, Kempton & Epsom fairly quickly. They used to offer cheap season tickets for the evenings.
March 15, 2025
Oh book into the Holiday Inn, you can watch all the Epsom races out your bedroom window. And your Champagne glass tinkles as they pull up.
March 15, 2025
If you want to experience horse racing you do it from the saddle or motor sport from within a vehicle, spectating is for voyeurs. I have been to Cheltenham, enjoyed the crack, even seen the odd horse, but from the comfort of a hospitality suite. I lived within five miles at the time. Frankly I can’t imagine paying to watch sport, even the ones I have indulged in nationally or internatiinally. I have no objection to anyone spectating for the vacarious thrill of being close to the noise and sweat of others competing, but when I indulged myself I preferred it first hand. Now I am way too old.
March 15, 2025
Streeting has extended the cull of duplication and middle-management admin empires in the NHS to include the Integrated Care Boards – another part of the disastrous 2012 Lansley “reforms”
The NHS headcount reduction following the scrapping of the QUANGO NHS England (12,000) and the next round (35,000) is now 47,000. The total budget for NHS England’s administration and spending programme alone was £3.2bn in the 2023/4 budget, around 2% of the total NHS spend.
Slashing 47,000 duplicated NHS jobs will save at least $800 million in staff pay each year, to which one can add an estimated £2.9bn going forward in reduced pension costs. Clearly, this sum is earmarked for defence
None of Streeting’s job losses involve clinical staff, doctors, nurses or lab people. Hopefully, by next winter those severely ill patients currently languishing on trolleys in corridors will be accommodated in new wards vacated by NHS admin
March 15, 2025
I doubt it will make any difference to the corridor waits etc. We are short of beds and clinical staff whilst the pen pushers increased. Don’t forget it was the genius Osborne who cut 13,000 beds in his austerity programme to balance the books, which he never achieved, nor will this lot.
March 15, 2025
There’s been no reduction in headcount yet so this is all just conjecture.
I think there’s one reason why Two-Tier has announced the abolition of NHS England and bringing the NHS back under “democratic control.” It’s so, at the next General Election, Labour can re-run the old “Three Weeks to Save the NHS” campaign slogan … claiming that the Reform Party wants to privatise it, when they have consistently said that it would remain free at the point of delivery.
March 15, 2025
‘Free at the point of delivery’ is certainly good for the patients, but that’s no guarantee with any party (Con, Lab, LibDem or Reform) that even more medical acts (diagnostics, MRI, X-rays, routine hip/knee surgeries, …) will not be passed to the private sector (most of it on the FTSE: Ramsay/Spire/Bupa or with links to the UAE: PureHealth/Circle) who will charge back the NHS … and obviously the taxpayers.
March 16, 2025
hefner
If that improves the quality of outcome and speeds up treatment, why do you oppose it?
March 16, 2025
Sam, did I say I oppose it? No, I was just pointing out that ‘free at the point of delivery’ can mean very different things in terms of actual costs to the taxpayers, a point you don’t seem to consider, or did you?
March 16, 2025
So for you it is ideological. Healthcare must be provided by State Employees, regardless of how inefficient, expensive and incompetent the service is – or how poor the outcomes for the patients.
If I needed treatment and it was “free at the point of delivery,” I wouldn’t care if the provider was a private company.
March 15, 2025
And there will be an increase of those on stretchers hoping for attention – you and the Govt hope – young men scrapped of the Russian Stepp.
I wonder whether chucking the cash down the NHS black hole is not preferable?
March 15, 2025
Pushkin-To the Slanderers of Russia (1831)
Then send your numbers without number
Your maddened sons,your goaded slaves
In Russia’s plains there’s room to slumber
And well they’ll know their brethren’s graves!
March 15, 2025
SK – How many NHS England employees have been a) given redundancy notices? How many have had contracts terminated? How much is this predicted to cost in the short term? I will believe 47,000 job cuts in none medical positions when I see it.
March 15, 2025
I’m surprised the fall into negative growth wasn’t worse.
Down here in Dorset, where we have many small businesses which rely on consumer, hospitality and tourist spending, the consequences of the Stagflation Budget are already becoming very obvious. And that’s before the April Tax Hammer falls, plus the 5% increase in Council Tax.
Labour and the lefty goons in the Treasury have no understanding of rural life or the rural economy. Everything they have done appears to be part of a deliberate mission to destroy it. Perhaps the long-term intention is the 21st century equivalent of the Highland Clearances: to force people out of the countryside so that they can cover it in windmills and solar panels ….. so much more profitable for “their Masters and mates.”
March 15, 2025
One can only think that the runaway train that is our economy will start to accelerate downhill next month as ENI and employment regulations really start to bite into SMEs. Since they employ over 90% of our workforce and generate half our commercial income, that is going to be very bad news indeed. Starmer needs the war in Ukraine to keep peoples attention away from the ‘bad news’ stories.
March 15, 2025
“Labour and ths lefty goons of the Treasury”, have no concept of how wealth is created. The single unit of the human body require food and oxygen. If you reduce the supply of either, the body first wilts and then dies. The tools of wealth creation are being deliberately handicapped and eliminated, whereas they should be designed to maximise it. It is only then that you can indulge political and moral aguement as to how it should be shared. If politicians fail to grasp this basic reality progressive decline is inevitable.
March 15, 2025
Donna, from April they’ve pushed up lower wage groups in order to take the money back in family bills from council tax, nursery fees, every week spending from supermarkets to home deliveries as all their costs have increased considerably. The only survivors of Reeves budget are the self-employed so watch out because you’re the only ones left, she said she wouldn’t put up income tax or national insurance, she hasn’t said they won’t have to pay employers NI, nor as she said she won’t introduce a new tax for social care.
March 15, 2025
@Donna. Those 15 minute cities beckon. Rural Dorset will only be for the elite’s second homes and Blackrock Farming Inc.
March 15, 2025
Ed Milliband is in China:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/14/ed-miliband-coal-china-net-zero-climate-change-beijing/
“The Energy Secretary is in China for a three-day visit starting today to discuss climate change and the net zero transition.
He had originally planned to steer clear of directly addressing China’s coal use, despite the world’s biggest polluter hitting record levels of new coal-fired power last year.
However, a press release on Friday morning from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero stated: “The UK will also share expertise on phasing out coal, having closed its last coal-fired power station last year.””
How can he possibly educate the Chinese in only three days? I would have thought it would take him at least a year.to fully share his expertise on how to wreck an economy and take mankind back to the Stone Age.
March 15, 2025
I wonder if the “inscrutable Chinese” have had additional training in hiding the smirks whilst Red Ed is “advising” them.
March 15, 2025
He will be lauded in China and they will laugh at him and us when he leaves. He is their best ambassador for Chinese growth. How do you share expertise in phasing out coal. All they did was blow up the power stations.
March 15, 2025
Denis
The Chinese don’t want to be re-educated. They’re making too much money and taking control of so much under the guise of net zero. They’ll nod and agree and then carry on as before. They’re laughing at us , politely of course!
March 15, 2025
Also in China yesterday,at a meeting of senior Chinese,Russian and Iranian diplomats, a joint statement was issued supporting Iran’s right to develop its nuclear power capability.
PS I hope the Americans are not stupid enough to believe Israel’s claim that they have destroyed Iran’s air defences-a nasty shock is in store for them if they do and offer material support for an Israeli-sponsored attack on Iran.
March 15, 2025
March 15, 2025
Labour destroying the economy. Twas ever thus…..
March 15, 2025
The Labour economy is growing: downwards into increased sluggishness.
Labour policies give enterprise the kiss of death.
March 15, 2025
The political class is stupid. It legislates taxes and regulations that destroy this country’s ability to compete with imports, let alone create exports to pay for the imports. It will all end very badly indeed.
March 15, 2025
Indeed Recession awaits unless the Chancellor changes policies, which is unlikely to happen.
I expect more legal type theft and taxation policies to be announced in a couple of weeks when the Spring statement is due.
No encouragement to save or invest for anyone in this Country any more, or indeed in most of Europe.
What a mess politicians of all persuasions have made of our World.
March 15, 2025
Unfortunately, being so focused on Net Zero (eg shipping our carbon emmissions elsewhere) will make us so poor that we will be unable to protect ourselves from the impact of any actual change should it occur. We seem to be trying to save the world without any care for our own well being.
March 15, 2025
Will Defence be exempt? All this ‘investment’ about to be made so that they can ‘pacify’ Russia, let’s hope it will not be motionless because of a lack of oil. Phew that would be terrible.
March 16, 2025
Ian T : Yes, an increasingly costly and mad push towards our desire for ‘Global Leadership’ and to be the ‘Superpower’ is the thinking. Massive amounts of money landing in pockets somewhere. And it’s here we see growth. Reported earlier this month, e.g. wind farm constraint payments: £ 252 million paid out in the first two months of 2025, up from £158 million during the same two months 2024.
March 15, 2025
Between Wrecker Miliband and Wrecker Reeves poor old Starmer is well set for a wrecked premiership and we are set for a wrecked economy.
March 15, 2025
Starmer will never ‘shuffle out Milliband’. He owes his whole political career and position to him as he found him a safe Labour seat when he’d had enough of the CPS. And then of course there is the special treatment of his pension arrangements.
March 15, 2025
One of our favourite local restaurants is closing and the owners have explicitly said that the main reason is the effect of the impending NI increases on profitability. Also yesterday I received an email from the National Grid ESO about what to do in the event of power cuts. That’s a first, and it shows how close the government is to imposing energy rationing. Yet still we have gormless MPs appearing on the mainstream media saying how all this is necessary to ‘fix the foundations’ ‘address the climate emergency’ or some other inane endeavour.
Living through inevitable and accelerating decline when we don’t have to is a truly sobering experience.
March 15, 2025
‘ I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little further on there are only flagstones, and a little further on still these break beneath your feet. Look back …’
March 24 1938
The one and only Winston Churchill.
March 15, 2025
But that’s the point — The economy is doing just what was planned for it. This labour government have no intention except to ruin the country, and in this they are succeeding very well!
If this isn’t clear to everyone then we need to rethink the old ideas of what a government is for in light of the new order. HMG have aligned with the globalists to bring us the NWO, and that requires bad things to happen to us.
What we have seen so far is but the start, so we should be able to imagine how bad it will get when we are constrained with oppressive 2 tier legislation and the NWO is implemented over our heads, complete with orchestrated actions to reduce the population.
The reality is that the NWO requires us to be complicit and mostly dead — let’s not imagine it will be anything but the loss of a real future for the vast majority of people.
March 15, 2025
‘Actions to reduce the population’
I take it you mean the indigenous population which they are doing with their tax plans. No sign of any action on immigration or ‘smashing the gangs’.
March 15, 2025
BH, I am trying to make any sense of your post. Are you considering the present DJT’s policies as steps towards the NWO with the world divided between the bits dominated by China, Russia and the USA, as in G.Orwell’s 1984?
And are the leaders and elites of these three countries what you call ‘globalists’?
March 15, 2025
Why would anyone expect growth given that all the Labour policies are anti-growth – employments rights bill, the war on private schools, vast tax grabs, open door to illegal and legal low skilled and criminal immigration net zero rip off energy, the minimum wage increases, Chagos… they are all doom loop policies.
March 15, 2025
Repeal Teresa May’s ludicrous Climate Change Act and disband the Climate Change Committee!
March 15, 2025
The climate change committee headed up by a pleasant enough classics graduate who clearly does not have much of a clue about physics, energy, climate or energy generation.
March 15, 2025
That was the work of Ed Miliband, May introduced the Net Zero nonsense.
March 15, 2025
Amazingly Theresa May only had to use an Order under the 2008 Climate Change Act to make matters worse:
http://johnredwoodsdiary.com/2025/02/26/dear-energy-sinks-the-uk-economy/#comment-1501089
March 15, 2025
Sir John
Entertaining thoughts on the economy today. If you set out to punish the Country and its People for the sake of Marxist Ideology – your creed is ‘no growth’. So no surprise there then. Wanting a Country and its People to be in your own personal image, is fighting them while forcing it(the Country) into decline and down the drain.
The UK needs to wake up it needs MPs, that will serve those that elect and pay them. We don’t need these religious nuts in for themselves and political ideology, worshiping a gang leader. MPs that will work with and not against the People,( those that get things done), would mean the whole Country will prosper. At the moment the whole of Parliament is devoid of people that understand their true purpose.
0.1% trivializes the problem, the billions it represents is greater than what is in the dream of a ‘black hole’
Driving everything that is productive, earns the Country its Money out of the Country for personal self-esteem and religion is asking a Country to commit suicide
March 15, 2025
I agree that the GPD figures were no surprise.
Yet the BBC ran an article yesterday headlined “UK economy shrank unexpectedly in January”
…here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly3mdlk70no
The BBC must be listening to the wrong people.
Mind you, having listened to some of the so-called experts on the Today show, I am not surprised the BBC is surprised.
March 15, 2025
Is it a surprise because the OBR didn’t predict it?
If the economy isn’t going to plan, is that because the OBR’s forecast that Rachel Reeves claims she follows is wrong, or is it that she hasn’t followed their advice though she claims she does?
The OBR and its forecasts also need scrutiny, and maybe they are another candidate for the chop along with NHS England.
March 15, 2025
@Dave Andrews – strange isn’t it the OBR, the ONS and even the BoE are all recent inventions, the have all failed to carry out their basic prescribed functions. All accountable to no one. All costing us the taxpayers with no oversight. They should be removed in a heart-beat, the downside to that these positions appear to be jobs for the guys to keep them happy as they can’t get real jobs
March 15, 2025
This government is betting growth on Milibands return from China, with a bunch of wind-turbines and solar panals
March 15, 2025
Maybe the real reason our net-zero minister has gone to China is to sweeten the Chagos deal …..why has a senior minister gone to Chain when we have a foreign minister and a trade & investment minister to look after our foreign affairs
March 15, 2025
From the MsM today
TwoTierKier our absent PM is to host talks with the EU. He feels at home with the EU, they don’t see or hear him – so there is no criticism of him creating a two tier State and dishing out malicious punishment by decree. How much of our money will he throw at the EU, how many UK lives will he sacrifice to keep in with his Lords and Masters in the EU?
He then thinks his threats to Russia have meaning to anyone but himself.
All the while the UK has no management, and the kids are out to play ramping up the stealing money of money from the hardworking productive sector to dish it out to unaccountable unelected pall’s.
We have no Government or Parliament working for the UK or its people. The key ‘working with’ and for the UK and its People, it went missing years ago from Parliament and Government, so much so you cant refer to them as ‘our’ (parliament and government)
March 15, 2025
“The hardship of a green economy is better than a scorching planet.” – Milliband.
March 15, 2025
We all appear to be signing from the same hymn sheet but will anybody listen, certainly not the Tory party.
March 15, 2025
My comment posted on a Daily Telegraph article:
During the 60 years between 1948 and 2008 the UK economy grew by 2.7% a year on average. The fastest 8 year period was 1992 to 2000 at 3.3% a year, the slowest 8 year period was 2000 to 2008 at 2.2% a year. But over the 16 years since 2008 the average growth rate has dropped to 1.1% a year and has been consistently low close to that level for the two consecutive 8 year periods. So this is not a problem that started with this Labour government or with the previous coalition and then Tory governments; it started in 2008, under the previous Labour government, when something happened to cut our long term economic growth potential. An obvious candidate would be the impact of the Global Financial Crisis, but why should that have had such an enduring effect? Which is why I look at something else that happened around then, the 2008 Climate Change Act, with its demand for decarbonisation of the economy, which in practice is very likely to also mean deindustrialisation, and that in turn will mean degrowth.
March 15, 2025
@Denis Cooper – the World is constantly throwing curve balls, those Countries with resilient self-reliant economies continue to grow by creating the funds for a tomorrow- that never changes. The UK has stupidly taken a wrecking ball to all its structures, removed the possibility to earn and fund a future, by shunning its people, banning industrial production by enforcing imports. They have banned energy production to enforce imports and so on and so on. They have created an energy source/facility that is 4 times our competitors, by importing and taxing it out of existence. Yet to maintain imports we have to earn, the Government and Parliament have maliciously banned that possibility – so who do they work for?
March 16, 2025
They are implementing UN Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030: transferring wealth (and the means of generating wealth) in order to “level down” the West.
We are being made poorer so that the 3rd and 2nd world can become richer. They stupidly think that other countries will do the same, including the countries which are benefiting most from their naivety. Which is why Red Ed is currently out in China supposedly explaining to the Chinese how they can destroy the coal-fired power stations they’ve been rapidly building in order to power their economy with cheap, reliable energy.
Our “Leaders” are as naive as John Lennon when he wrote the words to “Imagine.” They’re even celebrating their naivety by having a special coin minted.
https://www.royalmint.com/aboutus/press-centre/john-lennons-legacy-celebrated-on-a-uk-coin/#:~:text=Experienced%20coin%20designer%20Henry%20Gray,the%20artist's%20single%20and%20album.
March 15, 2025
At some point a political party will come out and state the blindingly obvious.
Net zero is a policy towards deindustrialisation and destruction of wealth. The result of that will be a declining economy and increase in poverty.
The Nation needs to reembrace the simple truth. Wealth and growth depends on energy availability and consumption.
Net Zero is delivering misery and poverty and always will.
March 15, 2025
It’s all going with the May/Johnson “Net Zero – Build Back Greener” plan to save the planet.
Phase 1 is to sabotage our energy, industry and economy with expensive, chaotically intermittent, unreliable, weather dependent electricity to maximise offshoring. Phase 2 is to cut our consumption with the rationing of energy, food and transport using the electrification of heating and transport controlled with smart meters and the introduction of CBAM to stop imports. The CCC say we will all be much healthier using “active travel” and eating processed plant food instead of meat.
Ed Miliband is in China this weekend to place the orders with coal fired China for our energy transition – wind turbines, solar panels (made with slave labour and leaving toxic waste lakes), batteries, evs, heat pumps and all the kit to carpet the country with electricity pylons – steel, cabling, transfomers etc.
There is absolutely no intention to grow the economy as socialism depends upon people remaining poor and the false science of CAGW and the pretended necessity to save the planet provides the excuse to run the country into poverty.
March 15, 2025
If, and it is a big IF, Starmer and Streeting do reduce the non-frontline staff in the NHS, will they allow the NHS money pit to swallow the savings, or use it elsewhere, like defence spending? Maybe, just maybe, reality is dawning on our PM and he realises that the UK is heading for bankruptcy if he does not rein in government spending.
But I will only believe it when he sacks Milliband and Reeves, replacing them with individuals who have a brain.
Several people I know were delighted when Labouir won the GE with such a large majority. Interestingly they have gone very quiet now!
March 15, 2025
How can the voters call for an early general election? As far as I know the parliament dissolves automatically after five years but the government remains in place, sensible in itself. If it fabricates some kind of emergency in order to stay in office and postpone a general election it can as far as I can see because becuae the legislation (The Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022) doesn’t actually state a general election must be held. Is it just a matter of convention? What can be done?
March 15, 2025
The turkeys are still voting for Christmas.
March 15, 2025
The problem is that this government hasn’t a clue about business, consisting of every ex-public sector worker and trade unionist -there is nobody who has any experience of private sector business.
To make matters worse, they are not listening to anyone who has the relevant experience.
It is blindingly obvious to those of us who do have the relevant experience, that a complete change of direction is needed, but it won’t happen until it’s too late. We are going to see a recession and a desperate financial situation where there is going to be a huge increase in borrowing to enable Reeves to contine to finance the overblown state.
Yes, Miliband needs to go but then so does the Chancellor who has so many very serious question marks over her past activities, including expenses ….. and falsifying her CV, and is doing at least as much damage in office.