The government claims to be promoting growth yet its actions are all about levelling down. They follow an old socialist agenda of tracking down any and every way the better off half of the country make money, increase incomes, save, invest, own property and buy nice things and set about raising taxes on them all. This is a great way to lower growth, lose talent and create misery.
Its first effect as we saw last autumn with all the speculation about higher taxes is to undermine confidence. People cancel purchases, defer investments, put off transactions.
Then the actual tax rises hit. The big NI rise was a tax on jobs so vacancies plunged and unemployment rose. The family farms and small business taxes led to closures and sales. The gathering attack on wealth drove many rich people out of the UK, meaning they will no longer pay any tax . Many younger people who want to work hard and get on have left to get a job or set up a business abroad.
This year the result of the last budget is likely to mean lower OBR forecasts requiring more spending cuts or tax rises to hit deficit targets. The government seems focused on tax rises, so we will go round the same vicious circle. First comes less confidence on tax rise stories, then the further damage from the actual tax increases.
Levelling down cuts jobs, tax revenue, confidence and growth. It increases public spending as more need benefits and are out of work.
September 1, 2025
Seems to me to be a very slippery slope to the budget – can’t see this governnent surviving the bond markets for much longer.
September 1, 2025
Rees-Mogg “in 2000 our GDP was 90% of the US and our electricity prices were then similar, now our GDP is 60% of that of the US and our industrial electricity prices 4 times those of the US.”
Thanks very much to Blair, Brown, Ed (Climate Change Act) Miliband, Cameron, Theresa “Net Zero May”, Boris, Sunak, Starmer and Ed yet again!
This from his video “How to fix Britain & why the NHS is broken”.
September 1, 2025
I listened to the various guests yesterday discussing Badenoughs proposals to drill baby drill and cancel net stupid. None of them were convincing and the punter who was questioned about leaving the ECHR said it was being examined.
There was no mention of cancelling the daft policy on heat pumps or banning new ICE cars by 2030, just waffle.
Net stupid has been the engine of levelling down since it was brought in by treacherous May as this is effectively stealing peoples money.
2TK and his band are just doubling down on the nonesense at the samevime as taxing us into oblivion.
Losing the well paid industrial jobs has reduced tax take and with the demise of the motor industry this is set to continue.
We cannot afford 4 more years of this slash and burn policy of this openly Marxist shower.
Reply Reform has said it will get rid of ECHR. Conservatives have said ECHR should not apply in migration cases and moved amendments to current law which Labour voted down. Conservatives will set out how to get rid of adverse international law in non migration cases at their Conference.
September 1, 2025
R to R.
Big picture; both Labour and Conservative parties have been found to be dishonest, incompetent and corrupt, so they are not, for the majority of voters, acceptable as leaders of this Nation. It matter not what either of these parties says/promises. The only alternative now is Reform, an unknown, inexperienced quantity. When they get in, my fear is that they will come up against a Civil Service with it’s own agenda and will not be able to make the necessary changes. The greatest problem facing our Country is the Civil Service; Reform had better be making plans.
September 1, 2025
Anyone with the capacity to make plans is barred from Reform – see Habib and Lowe. This is how the narc Farage has clung to his spotlight and platform for 25 years. He has cut down anyone with talent.
I am as desperate for a viable political hope as any of you. Reform is NOT that hope because Reform is owned by Farage, he can’t be voted out!
We have to stop playing and understand that we are fighting for the survival of the British nation.
We need THE BEST.
September 1, 2025
where do you propose to find it?
September 1, 2025
Definition of madness…?
September 1, 2025
Precisely Mr Wragg.
They’re not cancelling Net Stupid. Just proposing to use our natural resources in the North Sea …. if you can believe her which, let’s face it, would be the triumph of hope over experience.
September 1, 2025
So Serco are moving asylum families into brand new £300K flats in a Suffolk village. Proof if it was needed that channel paddlers rights superceds the indigenous population
How did we get to this point of taxpayers paying £1200 per month to house aliens when they can’t access these properties themselves.
September 1, 2025
Millions of soon-to-be-unemployed British people as JR points out today.
Going to be millions of daily flag-wavers.
September 1, 2025
Indeed and it is any wonder they are annoyed many working long hours paying circa 50% in tax and then having little or no disposable income after rent, food, heating, lighting, council tax, water, commuting costs but still cannot access a GP when needed.
Yet a boat arrival can have higher disposable income, work black market perhaps a bit of shoplifting too and all this paid for for him and special access to the NHS too.
September 1, 2025
R to R
Conservatives then in a place like Cameron and the EU pre-Brexit vote. Fiddling at the edges. 1. We’ll change it to our needs 2 We can’t change it so we’ll stick with it 3. Oh dear, we’ve been voted down.
Far better to be definitive and principled. If it doesn’t work, ditch it.
September 1, 2025
A series of doom loops until the tank runs dry. Then we can expect a dead stick landing at IMF airport. It is what happens when incompetent zealots are in charge.
September 1, 2025
At the rate we going, more like a very steep nose-dive straight into the ground I suspect AG!
“Zealots” ? Maybe but Clowns is a more apt description for this crew of incompetants
September 1, 2025
Addendum.
Never mind what they are doing to the economy. Their stupidest “Levelling Down” has been with education. Only complete idiots penalise the very best, on the lie that they can improve state education with the VAT gathered. If they really wish to save money for any virtuous purpose they should end welfare payments for a guesstimated 5.5million free riders.
Education is the seed corn of the nation that has been politically abused since WW2. It started with Anthony Crossland, Labour politician, yet another PPE from Oxford. etc ed
September 1, 2025
So ed you avoid established fact, I do not imagine you are ignorant of what he had to say.
September 1, 2025
Indeed so, Agricola. I think the government are steering towards precisely that outcome, when the IMF intervene and decide what has to be done. Then their inevitable harsh decisions to cut public spending can be laid at the IMF’s door, and Starmer and Co. can wriggle away, while of course blaming the previous Tory government for the mess they inherited.
September 1, 2025
It’s a depressing story. What’s so maddening it that this levelling down has been tried before and shown to be a resounding failure.
Hence many of us think the government is not deluded but is deliberately on this path, so as to change our society as the UN and global elite would have it.
September 1, 2025
Everything Reeves and Two Tier are doing is profoundy anti-growth – the richly deserved lack of confidence in the government, increasing the size of the state, increasing taxes, increasing red tape, the workers rights act, net zero rip off intermittent energy, increases to the minimum wage, inflation, higher interest rates, Chagos, vast government waste, open door to generally low skilled hugely expensive migrants, the no deterrent criminal justice system… the only exception is relaxing planning slightly but we do not even have that in place yet!
See Starkey’s vidoes Rachel Reeves is Liz Truss without the intelligence.
Doom loop economics higher tax rates leading to a strangling of the wealth creasting sector and thus a lower tax take. In engineering they call is positive feedback.
September 1, 2025
I did once hear someone on the BBC taking about “positive feedback” in relation to CO2 and climate change. The scientifically ignorant dope clearly thought “positive feedback” here was a “positive” thing. As in “I got some positve feedback on my press report the other day”.
The endless confusion (even by energy ministers, climate reporters and government energy “experts” between power and energy and their respective units is always amusing but depressing too. As in – this wind farm will generate 100 Mega Watts “per year”, or this battery has enough “power” to take the car 300 miles.
It is eather 100 Mega Watts or 100 Mega Watt Hours (which is a unit of energy) per year and enough energy or perhaps capacity to store energy not enough “power”.
The climate priests also like to say “this windfarm will power so many thousands of “homes”. They seem to work on about 7KWH a day for this calculation. But this is actually a figure which is an average for “homes” mainly using gas, oil or solid fuel for heating, hot water and perhaps cooking too. Switching to EVs and heatpumps and you need far more than this and hugely more in the winter peaks for heating, cooking and hot water. Alas the wind does not realise it must blow harder in winter!
September 1, 2025
The Sun will not behave either it prefers to shine on long summer days rather than on very short, cloudy, cold winter days. Very uncoperative of them perhaps Miliband will introduce a new “wind and sunshine, a minimum delivery regulations act shortly!
September 1, 2025
All politicians know is ‘blind positivity’ – in other words they try to clamp down on any rational criticism.
We had an example on this site not too long ago. An aspiring Tory MP who did not know whether Britain had a viable gas and oil capacity or not!
Honestly, these party hacks and prospective hacks make Farage look competent. I can5 get any more cutting than that!
September 1, 2025
Actually in medicine /endocrinology a positive feedback loop can be either a good thing or a bad thing.
September 1, 2025
Indeed sometimes but in engineering it usually means disasters like thermal runaway in batteries or climate (to hot or cold) to nuclear or conventional explosions, instability and crashes with aircraft and cars… negative feedback is usually needed to keep thing smooth and under control.
September 1, 2025
Levelling down is what the UN and the WEF require. Two-Tier is simply following the Orders and is applying them rather more enthusiastically than the Not-a-Conservative-Party was.
Mind you, Angela Rayner doesn’t seem to be levelling herself down and neither do the other (senior figures ed) of the Labour Party Variety.
September 1, 2025
My thoughts exactly.
Everything from education to social standards have been dragged down to the lowest common denominator.
September 1, 2025
Re: Rayner. She’s only doing what all other people do, acting on the incentives provided. Now if they’d realise that and design policies around it things might start to get better…
September 1, 2025
Indeed she is being rational given the absurd tax system that prevails. Just as the boat migrants are and the people who choose to live on benefits as they are no better off if they work after commuting costs etc.
She is of course being a total, do as I say and not as I do, grade 1 hypocrite, but then to be a socialist you virtually have to be, as we see with Miliband, Two Tier, Reeves, Rayner, King Charles, Blair, Lammy, Brown, Abbott…
September 1, 2025
@Lifelogic,
We all know Labour are cr-p.
The problem is when so called ‘righter-wings’ like Trump are doing socialist things like investing government money in Intel.
Are you still a big fan of socialist Trump?
And what do you think about Trump slapping 10% tariffs on UK?
September 1, 2025
@Donna – yes agreed, following orders just as the other crowd. Even those in waiting attended the same socialist political religion meetings. The ‘Great Reset’ by means of destruction, they all make Klaus Schwab proud. The Unelected, Unaccountable, dedicated to the “Purpose – influencing global agendas and decision making, public-private cooperation”
What is so wrong with democracy, not perfect but safe, that we have leaders that take their orders not from the electorate(safe option) but the unelected, unaccountable. – isn’t that why we have elections for open debate a consensus that is open. Behind doors religious meeting for the few fights Democracy for the benefit of the few, mainly the pockets and the egos of the few.
September 1, 2025
‘The real road to power for the proletariat and its allies, Marx, Engels and Lenin maintained, was not into the Parliamentary cul-de-sac but through proletarian dictatorship. As Lenin wrote in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky:’
It would appear that we have a Parliament of followers not leaders, not democrats, servants of the Nation and the People
September 1, 2025
Ian B
The USSR was no path to power for the proletariat. They were the stepping stones for the elite. Our current socialist zero achievers remain exclusively proletariat.
September 1, 2025
The wise heads all know the economic direction we are on will result in a massive run of the £pound. The socialist mindset reflected in what the Labour government are currently doing with fiscal policies is not a secret.
The abiding question is. Why are they determined to undermine the economic strength of Great Britain and Northern Ireland?
If is to ensure resubmitting to EU control of our affairs because our economy is destroyed, they are doing a fine job of securing that policy.
The population’s demand is for stability and a positive well managed future.
If they can be pushed into thinking a collective of dependent nations i.e. the EU all in the same creaking economic boat of despond is preferrable, to the endless spiral of doom currently being delivered, then the one world objective will be back on track.
Is that what Starmer’s game plan is?
Is he nothing more than a patsy for the desires/intentions of the real power brokers controlling the future options of mankind? Is Starmer simply the Judas goat?
September 1, 2025
Yes. I think it’s deliberate. They are deliberately tanking the economy so we are forced to go to the IMF and the bailout will come with the “string” that we must rejoin the EU and ditch Sterling very firmly attached.
September 1, 2025
@Rod Evans – Ah, Rod, good Socialist thinking(Not yours), a run on the £pound means that UK goods are cheaper for others to ‘buy’…………. Then one forgets, May, Johnson, Sunack/Hunt duo, and now Starmer/Reeves have banned production off-shored the abilities to sell in the UK, import only, so cost rise.
September 1, 2025
You sum it up well in your post today John.
Certainly our two daughters, who do have a traditional work and responsible financial ethic are saying, “what is the point, when millions of others seem to be just living off the State out of choice, and we are paying for it”
Work for 16 hours a week only, and the Benefit system seems to reward you.
Spend all of your money each week/month (so you have little savings) and the Welfare system will support you.
Qualify and get on Universal Credit, and a World of extra Benefits is at your finger tips.
Work hard and long hours to try and improve your standard of living, save, invest and try to be as self sufficient and self supporting as possible, and you will be legally robbed with ever increasing taxes of all kinds.
We now have what in effect will be retrospective taxation on Personal Pension Funds, the value of your house, and then after all that if that if you have more than £325,000 left as a single person with no children, they will take 40% of that as well.
September 1, 2025
Indeed doom loop yet again. The wealth and hard working leave the rest do not work or do not work much, do a bit of DIY or Bartering or even just illegal black market work. It seem the government do not really bother about this from boat people after all – Two Tier policing and justice yet again.
September 1, 2025
Who in their right mind would come to this Country to invest ?
Who in their right mind would stay in this Country, other than for perhaps family reasons ?
All I see are thousands coming here to take advantage of our generous and broken welfare system !
The sooner this lot go the better, it would seem they have no shame on accepting personal gifts, maximising expenses, and manipulating the system (perhaps legally) for their own financial benefit.
No it is not confined to the Labour Party, for decades Politicians have got this Country into more and more Debt through miss management and incompetence.
The irony is those of us who have been prudent (remember that phrase) and lived within OUR means, are expected to pay for their errors, mistakes, and incompetence.
September 1, 2025
As I have said before all the many UK taxes in the UK combine to take circa 90% of you wealth off you over 20 years. The other 10% you will probably need for HR advisors, Tax Lawyers, Accountants Fee, Licence Fees, motorist mugging taxes and similar!
September 1, 2025
I’m not sure why anyone would think this Labour government would be any different from the others.
Having people dependent on the state is one of the abiding aims, dependency means control. I do understand people I do understand people wanting to leave here. I do understand people being sick to death of being fleeced, so yet another government who should represent them, wastes their money on virtue signalling to the world and his Uncle.
However, if money is the only loyalty of some, leaving the rest of us to battle on, don’t expect to be welcomed back with open arms, and please, don’t come back and start shouting the odds of what we must and mustn’t do.
September 1, 2025
‘ Tax rises’ You ain’t seen nothing yet ……. Rachael from accounts.
September 1, 2025
But higher rates will not even raise any more tax in the end just kill or frighten off the golden geese that lay the golden eggs. The doom loop is already spinning!
September 1, 2025
Levelling down is rather polite, it seems more a case of dragging down to me. And it’s not just via taxation, there seems to be a hatred of success in the state school system rather than learning what drives success and copying to other schools
September 1, 2025
The so-called “levelling -up” of B Johnson didn’t work, either, though.
Perhaps Levelling in all its forms = socialism… we really need Dispersion… good people into good, well paid jobs, employing others and pulling them up. Clever people into Grammar schools and skilled people into Technical schools. Rich people free to employ and buy from poorer people to help them, not pay excessive taxes to prop them up.
September 1, 2025
My company desperately needs to expand. Business has been good, mainly it would seem because our competitors have gone off the boil, and I assure you more in spite of than because of this Labour government.
But do we dare expand? Do we dare commit resources to a fit out of additional premises and the added cost of rent and business rates when the next budget, the one after that, and the one after that as well, are likely to hit us with ever more taxes? All because of rows of Labour backbenchers who refuse to allow the government to cut spending.
So we wait it out to see what happens next, as do many, many other businesses in this country I suspect. The uncertainty promoted by this government stifles growth and investment.
We hear over the past couple of days the idea of increasing dividend tax to 20%. The tax won’t be levied on dividends paid abroad; they will get it tax free. So much for taxing the rich. Message to entrepreneurs – don’t bother.
September 1, 2025
“Levelling down cuts jobs, tax revenue, confidence and growth” – but all that helps cut CO2 production. Wrecker Miliband must be delighted with Wrecker Reeves.
September 1, 2025
Of course “levelling down” is the government’s policy. Socialism depends upon making and keeping people poor. And the best vehicle for economic de-industrialisation and subsequent impoverishment is Net Zero with its lie that we must do this to “save the planet”. The Clean Power 2030 project is costed by NESO as “over £40bn annually”. Drinking the far left’s Kool-Aid so deeply it was the Conservative Party, under PM May, who put Net Zero 2050 into law so that our energy policy is now decided by activists, the CCC, and the judiciary, many of whom we are discovering are members of the Fabian Society, a far left organisation whose logo is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It was the Conservative Party, under PM Borealis Johnson, who supercharged Net Zero with his Strategy and decided we should become the Saudi Arabia of wind to provide us with “abundant, cheap, British renewables….and ensure reliable power is always there at the flick of a switch.” An energy policy that is designed to include rolling blackouts, euphemistically called, Demand Side Response, as an intended measure to reduce peak demand when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun isn’t shining
September 1, 2025
Same old, same old. Take Money from the economy (Taxes) the economy suffers, taxes decline, release Money into the economy and it funds its own growth increasing the Tax take – self perpetuating.
Coming on the back of the last administration with the largest tax and borrowing in some 70 years, using the old parable ‘a straw to break the camels back’. There door was opened, the ideas cloned – Socialist Britain arrives
The one stupidity that has remained from all the factions of the Unipary, is that Government spending is growth and that Governments know how to spend other people Money better.
Spending from earning creates a future, sending the UK’s tax-payers money to prop up Foreign Governments, is exporting the seed corn for a future. Especially when there is no need for it.
We have a corrupt Parliament that wants to destroy the UK, lead by their chosen Leaders(Government) that are at the forefront of this destruction. Not one of them seems to want to stand up take responsibility and be accountable – so why are they there?
September 1, 2025
What this government does not recognise is that there has never been a clamour in this country for high taxes, or a communist-style purge of richer people (just as there has never been a clamour for high immigration or high welfare payments).
Firstly, why doesn’t it stick to its manifesto? (I didn’t agree with much of it but I do accept that we’ll have to live with it). Secondly, why doesn’t the government just do what the majority want them to do? It isn’t hard!
September 1, 2025
Levelling down with the third world by mass immigration and giving money away abroad.
The political class have lost all legitimacy.
A Parliament that puts foreigners before British people is both treasonous and illegitimate.
September 1, 2025
Yes, it seems that many in the government seem to take a “global view”, forgetting, of course, that people in the UK elected them.
They seem to belong to the same school as the “borderless world” freaks.
Same on the BBC (more freaks) which now mainly shows foreign news.
September 1, 2025
Off topic but important news and ‘levelling down net-zero’
”Breaking: no acceleration in sea level rise detected worldwide – A new peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering”
https://clintel.org/breaking-no-acceleration-in-sea-level-rise-detected-worldwide/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
No sea level rise = No radical climate change = No net-zero
September 1, 2025
A Telegraph item, so probably fiction
‘As Parliament returns this week, one of Labour’s priorities for this session is delivering its “back to the 1970s” legislation to bolster the power of trade unions – and their cheerleader, Angela Rayner.’
But it does resonate
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/09/01/angela-rayner-to-launch-devastating-assault-on-business/
What some seem to miss, is by administering all the malicious retribution now in one hit, that the profit & loss charts in 2 year time will all show up ticks against today. So come the Election Labour will be able to sell massive improvements for the Country. The fact it is in a worse place than 10 year ago and has declined against all it competitors will mean nothing against the only reporting coming from the ONS & OBR.
How sad we are and how we get taken for fools time and time again. At GE traditionally only 6% of the electorate change religion – so they are the only ones to be sold to. Voting for 16 year old’s and asylum seekers alone seals the election
September 1, 2025
Every Labour Government leaves the UK worse off. The difference with this current one is that it is doing it faster than any of its predecessors. Is it deliberate or just plain ignorance by the PM and Ministers?
September 1, 2025
@Keith from Leeds – they have been longer to wreak the Country(5 years) thanks to the Conservatives changing the Law to extend Parliamentary terms. All the while the democratic world sticks with 2 years and then are required to seek approval from the electorate.
September 1, 2025
Klaus Shwaab once boasted that the WEF had infiltrated every government. All the weak leaders, Macron, Trudeau, Arderne, Merkel etc were trained by the WEF as young leaders of the future. Why did they only select weak characters?
This suggests they are being manipulated by….?
Why are all western countries doing the same damaging things, net zero, high taxation, masses of undocumented immigration.
September 1, 2025
@Sharon – yes even 2TK has gone on record in the media saying he finds those outliyers, the unelected, unaccountable Socialist preachers of that cabal as his preference to the UK Parliament
September 2, 2025
Why? Because they are implementing UN Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030. That’s where it originates.
September 1, 2025
As One of the Union representatives said to me in a negotiation, “ equal misery for all.” It has changed as the times have changed and the likes of Angela Rayner have floated to the top. An extra phrase has been added. “ except for those who wangle their way to the top.”
September 1, 2025
Its the same every time. Vote Labour, start looking for a job.
September 1, 2025
Levelling down includes the effects of the european working time directive on UK labour force attitudes, and the ‘extra-benefitting’ jobs in the public sector that sucks ambition out of the electorate. We must work-to-live, say the twenty-somethings. That means 35 hours per week with at least seven weeks’ holiday per year, all the sick leave they fancy, plus more wants more. They don’t want to put the hours in in the private sector growing businesses, they don’t want to take over family businesses, and when they do, I frequently read that they kill the company, laying off 250 here and 35 there, because of the daft expensive rebranding and other negative changes they make. Eventually, it will be sold to a foreign M&A that moves the core jobs abroad and eventually closes down the UK local workforce when no local connections exist.
Then these kids doing 35 hours per week with the extra perks they demand also want the old pay levels of their previous 45 hour week parents, with their four to five weeks holiday per year. Yes increased time off is an improvement, yes a four day week will be lovely, but don’t expect the lifestyle of those doing 50 hours per week and working to build something.
September 1, 2025
Extreme Socialist Bernie Sanders applauds Trump’s plans to invest 10% of US government money in Intel.
Couldn’t make this stuff up.
September 2, 2025
Levelling down is a nice way of saying motiovated by destructive hatred. Not just levelling down, tearing down. It isn’t even envy. It is blinding hatred. The only things going up are the foundations of British society and culture being torn up. The animals have taken over the farm.