I will run a few pieces on the other Opposition parties after my rare posting about the Conservatives.

One of the most distinctive policies the Lib Dems and Reform are adopting is more nationalisation.

Both parties think the taxpayer should run the water industry. LibDems want to convert the  companies into public benefit concerns. Reform wants to buy a 50% stake in them with taxpayer money. The government says it would cost £100 bn to buy the whole industry or  presumably around £50 bn for a half share. The Conservative Opposition and the government do not think this a good use of taxpayer money . They are against a big increase in government borrowing for this purpose when the state is already too much in debt.

The Lib Dems claim they do not need to nationalise. However, they want to put environmentalists on the boards, put the environment as a key aim, limit profits, control remuneration and returns to shareholders.  This means removing shareholder rights and rewards under normal company law. Existing shareholders would expect compensation or buy out. Why would the private sector invest more in public projects if a government treats shareholders in that way?

Lib Dems and Reform support the renationalisation of rail being undertaken by government. Both wish to see Scunthorpe Steel  renationalised. The government has not taken over the shares  in steel but is starting an expensive intervention into the company.

If a government did buy out the Scunthorpe shares presumably for very little it would have to commit to large and continuing subsidies . In order to save new steel making it would need to shut the two ageing blast furnaces and reline with extensive maintenance probably quite soon.  Maybe better to commit to building two modern blast  furnaces   and to allow MOD, rail and other state  steel buyers access to the steel to provide some orders..

It is difficult  to see the advantage of nationalising an old works when with less money you could co fund a new works with a partner that knows how to  make and sell steel.

Both parties need to reconsider. Nationalised British Steel lost taxpayers a fortune and spent much of its time making people redundant and planning its next works closure. Nationalised water tipped plenty of sewage into rivers and the sea and did not even measure and time the discharges or tell us what it had done. Water quality and investment improved with privatisation.

This is the talk I gave to the Policy  Unit in 1984 when we were advising on a potential reform of the City which became Big Bang. It was released with other surviving government papers after 30 years.I re issue it as Rachel Reeves is saying she plans a Big Bang style City reform. I don’t think so.The Reform Margaret unleashed brought in billions of new capital, new ideas, new jobs.

I have explained many times that this wesbite is not an official Conservative website and it does  not wish to spend a lot of time on Opposition party matters. It concentrates  as under the Conservatives on government policy and outcomes and encourages criticisms and proposals to make government policy better.

A few of you wish to endlessly submit the same criticisms of the past Conservative government, which I usually decline to post. This site allowed plenty of adverse comment when the Conservatives were in power. The electorate made clear their verdict. Your criticisms are now out of date as Conservative policy is changing. An election is a long way off so this is not the time to consider Opposition party draft Manifestos.

Please note that the Leader of the Opposition has apologised for excess migration and has announced new proposals to cut both legal and illegal migration further. She has announced that the net zero targets are unattainable, and has begun setting out  polices to reverse the worse follies of current net zero policy.  She has opposed the National Insurance, farm tax, VAT on school fees and small business tax rises. She has proposed welfare cuts, opposed the payments to Mauritius and the EU and high public sector wage awards not linked to productivity.  None of this is understood in the submissions some people want to make to this site. The electorate chose the Conservatives to be the Official Opposition and they are leading Parliamentary activity against unhelpful government policies and actions.The Opposition tables amendments to government budgets and bills based on these newly defined views.

This government is  more than one year into office. With its huge majority it could have changed anything over the last year that needed fixing. It has spent the year claiming everything it inherited was broken. It has gone on to break things on a much larger scale.

The Conservatives were cast aside because they allowed in far too many migrants to come and failed to deliver on their promise to stop the small boats. In their last six months they did toughen the law which started to reduce legal migration. The Rwanda plan was beginning to bring down illegal numbers even before flights had taken off.

Labour has now diluted the  law changes. It dumped the Rwanda scheme and has presided  over a big increase in illegal migration. It is proposing  more safe routes for people to come.It is negotiating to let in many more young people from Europe.  It has speeded up consideration of asylum claims leading to a big increase in numbers of claims granted. This is the opposite of the change many voters wanted.

We are now running on a Labour budget. By the time the Conservatives  were kicked out inflation was 2%, the Uk had been the fastest growing G 7 economy for six months  and unemployment  had fallen to 4.2%. The long term Conservative record had brought many more jobs and much lower unemployment. In 2010 unemployment was 7.8% and inflation 3%.People felt taxes  were too high in 2024 and growth should be faster.

Labour claimed the  one day peak  interest rates under Truss  crashed the economy. They have pushed longer term rates well above worst Truss  levels and kept them there all 2025 so far thanks to losing control of spending and borrowing.

Labour have put inflation  up to 3.6%. They have put unemployment up. They have put  taxes up. UK growth has been damaged. These again were changes people did not want.

Labour promised to end NHS strikes. In the first year they gave a large pay award to buy peace. This year strikes are threatened again with another very large rise being sought.

Governments usually look silly and become weaker when they seek to discipline their own MPs for disagreeing with them over policy. It is bizarre that  Labour MPs are losing the whip over the policy of cutting disability benefits when the government itself has said it was wrong and has changed most of the policy. Many Labour MPs have long proposed a bigger state and sought more people dependent on benefits, so it should have come as no surprise to their leader.

I was concerned to hear BBC Radio 4 turn interviews with Rachael Maskell into Chief Whip type interviews where the interviewer puts pressure on the interviewee to change their  disloyal stance. A neutral broadcaster surely should concentrate on the policy disagreements and the drama of the votes without identifying so prominently with the heavy handed and wrong headed approach of the government was  unsurprisingly failing.

Maybe it is because the PM spends so much time wanting to please  foreign leaders, and because he thinks international law and the EU should direct more of our laws and budgets that he does not get the mood of the country. Many of us are fed up with the huge sums given to foreign governments and new migrants. We want that spending controlled. We are not wanting pensioner or disability benefits hit.,

Even The Bank of England saw more  inflation coming this year, though they estimated a little less than we got in June. Education was up, thanks to the VAT on school fees. Services are up, pushed in part by the big increase in National insurance. The cost of housing is the biggest contributor to the wider measure of inflation CPI(H) which soared 4.1% . No wonder when we keep inviting in thousands more people but fail build enough new homes for them.

The Bank is keeping UK rates much higher than European or Japanese rates to try to squeeze inflation down. It is fighting the government occasionally by not cutting as fast as they would like.Even the Bank can see the government’s tax and public sector wage policies are pushing up prices.

So what should the Bank do now, with wider inflation double the CPI target rate?

For a UK government that has no money they are very good at spending. That is of course   why they do not have enough money for crucial services and welfare benefits. This week it was the turn again of the battery car industry. This time they have been offered a £650 m bung to try to bring the price of battery cars down a bit. The subsidy is not even limited to UK car makers, saying it is for UK and other manufacturers. Broadcasts say it does not apply to Chinese cars, yet that does not appear in the official UK government press release. We await details of which cars do qualify. Whatever the outcome China will be a winner as they export many of the batteries or materials for the batteries which is such a big proportion of the total cost of a battery car.

In the same week the Foreign Secretary decided that Singapore, with GDP per head two thirds higher than the UK, needed a £70 m grant from UK taxpayers to speed transition to low carbon activity. Singapore performs so much better than we do economically thanks to lower taxes and  better state spending control.

The government statement said that its spending plans now include £4.5bn to “supercharge the switch to electric vehicles”. Battery cars enjoy tax advantages. When supplied free of charge through the Motability scheme they are also VAT free. The government is giving subsidy to companies to install charger points, benefitting Chinese car exports as well as domestic product. They are also spending on encouraging home charging, which tends to help better paid people who have driveways and larger homes where it is easier to fit a charger.

These policies are damaging as well as being expensive. They are hastening the collapse of the UK car industry, based as it is on successful petrol and diesel models. It is helping China with its dominant  share of the battery and battery car market. The UK is not protecting its industry with high tariffs against Chinese cars in the way the EU and US do. As with the other net zero policies this is a policy speeding the de- industrialisation of the UK.

The UK was short of transport capacity as the new century dawned. The pathetic failure to build much in the last 25 years has compounded the shortages. Hundreds of thousands of new people each year have been invited in  with no thought of the need for roads and trains for them to use.

I am writing a couple of pieces about the difficulties of getting about. I am taking as an example  three speeches I have made by coincidence this year in the Tonbridge/Tunbridge  Wells area. The first was an Investment lunch in Tunbridge Wells, where I was setting out the prospects for world economies and markets. The second was this week’s guest speech to the Freedom Association meeting . The third was on the following evening when I was being questioned on my experiences of government and the UK economy at a  meeting in a village to the east of Tonbridge.

My computer told me the journey should take around  1 hour 30 to 40 minutes   by car from my home to the venue, and about 2 hours 30 minutes  by train from my local station with a 20 minute walk to the station and a 30 minute taxi ride from the destination station. That made it a total time of 3 hours 30 minutes door to door by train allowing a few minutes to find the platform and train at the stations.

Despite this obvious drawback of the train , allied to the fact that it would work out considerably dearer than driving my own car, I decided to undertake the train journey for the Investment lunch. To make it easier I planned a train journey from London where I had meetings before setting out for Tunbridge Wells.

Even though I was starting in London, it would take two changes of tube train and a longish walk from the station to the venue. I allowed extra time for the possible delays on the tube and for a possible late mainline train.

All went unusually smoothly until we neared Tonbridge. The train stopped in a  station and we were told there was an incident on the line ahead. The train would wait for as long as it took and there was no indication of how long it would take to clear. I made a dash for the taxi queue, got a cab and sat in traffic jams on my way to the hotel in Tunbridge Wells. All my allowed time for delays and more was used up and I only just made it to the time of my speech. There was a nice big taxi bill on top of the train fare.

This week I had  no need to be in London Wednesday or Thursday. The train seemed a very unappealing option for either journey, with several  changes of train and the need to find taxis I could rely on to do the last few miles. I resolved to drive there and back each evening, covering a distance there of around 70 miles. See tomorrow what happened.

Summary of train issues

You need to look at door to door time. Often getting to and from  the station is expensive and subject to delays. The Councils who want us all to go by train try to stop us getting to stations.

The train is never early but is often late. Trains are subject to cancellation or unacceptable delays, making them difficult to trust for important meetings unless you go hours in advance of need leaving open the option of an expensive taxi to rescue you. Government owns  the track and signals which often cause delay, and runs bad timetables.