Normally I would welcome a better government surplus in January, the one month each year when tax exceeds spending by the government. The Treasury is claiming credit and implying it is doing well on spending. If only. The figures show the surplus is all down to a massive tax hit on the UK economy. Total tax revenue this January was 13.8% higher than January last year, or 10.8% up in real terms after allowing for 3% inflation. VAT receipts were flat because people are so squeezed by the taxes they are not buying so many discretionary items that attract VAT.
The reason I think these numbers should ring alarm bells, not celebratory peals of joy, is they mean less growth, fewer jobs, and a smaller economy next year to try to pay for the ever expanding public sector. Tax on jobs was well up. The results are there to see in rising unemployment and mass unemployment for young people, priced out of the market by high National Insurance and Business rates. Tax on self assessment incomes is well up. Some of that is making more people pay not just last year’s tax but also 50% of their estimate of this year’s on top, so the figures contain a one off of more than one year of tax. Some of it is taxing hard work, extra jobs and savings incomes, which is driving more people to end their small businesses, to emigrate to lower tax countries, or to give up some of their activities. Capital Gains tax is well up. Some of that will be the stream of wealthier people rushing to the exit cashing in their expensive homes and selling stakes in their businesses, so they will be one off profits for the Treasury. Tax on incomes is well up as more and more people get dragged into higher tax bands and need to pay a much higher rate on their pay award.
There is no sign of spending slowing down. The government is rushing to give more away, as with the £35 bn over the longer term to Mauritius for Chagos, the £20 bn a year of unacceptable Bank of England losses on bad bond trading, the continuing surge in sicknotes for life adding greatly to the long term benefits bill, and the ballooning subsidies for renewable energy and the forced electric revolution.
The high tax strategy has delivered a rare good month for the public finances at the cost of more damage to the economy in the months ahead. Next comes more regular tax payments from small businesses, hitting their cashflow. With then higher business rates and lethal National Insurance it means there will be more small businesses closing down and fewer new jobs from this vital sector. The government is still creating and pushing its doomloop. It hates the private sector and thinks it can tax it and tax it again without people leaving and businesses closing. They need to listen to those of us who have seen this from previous Labour governments and do not want them to go the same road to misery and defeat.

I rarely write about Opposition parties, regarding the main functions of this blog to be exposing and debating government aims, policies and effectiveness. A few of you daily want to talk about Opposition parties so occasionally I relent. I have never written before about the three newish parties that have emerged that are on the right over migration and have more mixed left/right views over economies and the role of the state.

Advance revolves around Ben Habib. He was a funder and adviser to Nigel Farage who fell out with the boss and decided to run his own party as an alternative. Reform now has Nigel Farage as a powerful leader assisted by four senior spokespeople covering some of the main topics but not including Foreign Policy, defence or the NHS. All five were originally Conservative members and supporters, with two of them going on to hold senior Ministerial positions in the last Conservative led Parliament. Restore has been set up by Rupert Lowe, elected in 2024 as a Reform MP. He was removed from that party by Nigel Farage over allegations about conduct which were not proved. He decided to set up his own rival concern.

Advance has set out a Mission statement. It is a party that believes in the sovereignty of the UK. It promotes UK Christian values. It wants domestic democracy to settle more things rather than international institutions and law. It seeks greater freedom and freedom of speech. There needs to be better law and order and freedom under one unified UK law stemming from Parliament. It wants to repeal the 1988 Human Rights Act and Equality Act 2000, withdraw from the ECHR, “end state sponsored multiculturalism and foreign religious courts”, abolish IHT, reform welfare to reward work, “protect British farming, support veterans, ban first cousin marriage, ban burkas and niqabs in public places”, mandate the Union flag on public buildings.

Reform saw 5 MPs elected in 2024. Rupert Lowe was removed from the party, and James McMurdock no longer is on the whip owing to an investigation into his conduct. Reform has subsequently attracted 4 Conservative MPs to join them. None has submitted themselves for re election despite their party’s enthusiasm for elections. Reform has secured the election of one new MP in a by election and has been leading the opinion polls over the last year.

Reform has removed their big package of tax cuts presented in their 2024 Manifesto, and have abandoned their more recent ideas of abolishing the OBR and changing the Bank of England. Robert Jenrick, a former Conservative Immigration Minister has become their new Treasury Spokesman. He is saying conventional things to reassure markets. Nigel Farage has led big campaigns to highlight the illegal migrant problem. The party would take the UK out of the ECHR and make further legal changes to be able to deport illegal migrants. “Stop the boats”, “Secure and defend our border” “Deport illegal migrants” and “Scrap Indefinite leave to remain” are the four leading policies on their site. They have modified the deportation promise realising that deporting people who have lived here for some time with leave to remain, and those who who came under special schemes from Hong Kong and Ukraine is not an easy or kind thing to do.
It wishes to restore sovereignty, presumably by pulling out of various international treaties and Agreements. It wants more visible policing and tougher approaches to law and order. It wants to make work pay. It will support farmers and scrap the Family farm tax. It will scrap net zero to cut energy bills, help small business , revitalise manufacturing, rebuild armed forces, help people have children, put Britain first, dramatically cut foreign aid (which has already been substantially cut by the past and present governments), make the civil service lean and efficient. These are still largely aspirations, with more detailed policy work awaited.

Restore Britain is the work of Rupert Lowe. He has developed a large following through his social media skills and especially by holding an Enquiry into the shame of the rape gangs in the UK and promising to follow up with further action. He says he is identifying a “list of rapists, police officers, social workers, council officials, politicians. We will take out private prosecutions and civil litigation”. He says he will run hundreds of candidates at the next election who will not be politicians.
He wants to abolish the asylum system and deport any illegal arrival within 24 hours. Existing illegals will be deported. He wants more to leave than arrive and to cut back severely on legal migration. “Millions must go”. People who refuse to engage or to try to work will lose benefits. He wants to slash taxes on work and enterprise, including ending IR 35 and doubling the VAT threshold. He will back domestic energy production, manufacturing and farming. He wants to assert the Christian culture in Britain under a single law and court system. “Halal and kosher slaughter will be banned on British soil . The burqa will be outlawed”. There are some published back up papers. The one on Deportation for example says there will be “voluntary departures reaching around half a million or more a year driven by a hostile environment, and between 150,000 and 200,000 enforced removals a year”. Restore has recently recruited a group of former Reform Councillors on Reform’s largest Council, Kent County.

All three of these parties have much in common. They all major on migration and all have tougher policies to stop the flow and to remove people already here. Restore is probably the toughest. They all stress Christian culture and wish to be more intolerant of other cultures. They all three say they want to make work pay and to have some tax cuts but none have yet spelled out how they would reduce public spending in practice and in detail to make this feasible. It is likely a General Election is some years away so they have time to work out what they would do. Reform will also have to explain what it has done, as it has won some important Councils where people will now wish to see if they have found better ways to run government and to rein in wasteful and undesirable spending. So far Reform Councils have put up both spending and taxes. On current poll ratings Restore and Advance will be able to say what they wish with no check on their ability to put it into practice. Enjoy your chance here to say what you like and what you dislike about these three similar menus.

When I first wrote about Mr Windsor calling him that some of you objected. He has now been stripped of his titles and is we are told being questioned about his handling of government information when a Trade Envoy.

I will not be writing about his past actions nor about enquiries into them. These matters need to be looked into by those with access to the records and the courts will decide if any case is brought. Meanwhile Mr Windsor is innocent and of no significance to the government of the UK.

The question of what Mandelson said and did as Ambassador and as a Cabinet Minister under Brown is of more relevance and interest. We await the release of the documents ordered by Parliament.

For a restatement of my analysis of Bank losses, with charts see Facts4eu today:

EXCLUSIVE: Bank of England’s bond trading has cost us all £100 BILLION in last 3 years, 2023-2025.
GB News does big splash on our report on Bank’s losses.
These are set to rise to an astronomical £288 BILLION.
“That’s a lot of black holes, Rachel,” says Lord Redwood.

Full story: https://facts4eu.org/news/2026_feb_boe_constrictor
Pls re-post our X: https://x.com/Facts4euOrg/status/2024384550613225853?s=20
AND could you please re-post our X with the GB News article: https://x.com/Facts4euOrg/status/2024394382149927233?s=20
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Facts4EU/posts/pfbid0nQZHoYnms2xzFTddQm19DfWqEECJGKi3TsvzfqLFNKn6UJthMgfSNGRxhSVqrsFHl

It was a previous Labour government that signed a Treaty to establish the US/Uk joint base on the Chagos islands.It was a Labour government that ordered the islanders to leave their homeland. It is now a Labour government that gives the islands away without consulting the Chagossians. Worse still they now order Chagossians off their islands under threat of 3 years in prison and forceful eviction.

This is the government’s worst deed to date. A government that says it has no power to detain or deport strangers with no UK connections or rights arriving illegally at Dover asserts the right to evict people from their former homeland for the second time.

The disgraceful contradictions abound. This government said it wanted to give away the Chagos out of colonial guilt. Yet it is trying to do so yet again ignoring and abusing the islanders pit did treat badly in the 1960 s. It cannot stand a single local returning to a Chagos island away from the Diego base, yet it countenances Mauritius and maybe the Chinese being free to settle the other islands. It thinks it can throw islanders off their islands but claims it cannot stop illegals coming to the UK and demanding free hotels.

All this is immoral and deeply anti British.

As an MP I had no wish to lie to the public . I also saw that those who did lie usually came unstuck. They would begin by a first lie or cover up to avoid unpopularity or bad report around a single mistake of theirs or their government. Critics got to work to attack them, and soon they had to lie about other things. The first lie would be revealed by surrounding truths. They ended up having to create an alternative reality they wished was true. Over time they destroyed their reputation for truthfulness by too many lies. When a government gets a reputation for lies its time is up. It means whatever the government says about the future and how things might get better, the public do not believe them because they are used to them lying.

Lie is a tough word which MPs are not allowed to use about each other in the Commons. It is true there are degrees of lying. When a government is defending a questionable or dangerous policy like keeping the pound up to a specified rate or interest rates down the spokesmen must not say anything that implies they could lose their battle with the markets. The reassurances will turn out to be lies if and when market forces overcome the policy. This is a small category of necessary lies. Today the government must not say anything that could destabilise the bond market more and make it difficult for them to borrow such huge sums.

There are unintentional lies. It is easy in the heat of a live interview to mis quote or mis remember an important fact. The offending MP should make an early correction. There are lies which the author claims is just a difference of opinion. Climate change theory is fact to its advocates and a scam to its critics. The headlines require unpacking to see what is true and what is false beneath the high level claims.

This government does peddle too many untruths, or too many bad policies which subsequently have to be moderated or cancelled. It has misled us over the legal reasons for its wish to undertake a needless surrender of the Chagos islands. It has claimed to have a growth strategy when most of its tax, spend and regulatory changes have been anti growth. It has lied in saying getting closer to the EU will boost our GDP, and arguing that Brexit caused a big fall in output and trade.

The PM’s judgement has often been called into question, and the government has too many times changed its mind or argued a poor or false case. Credibility is crucial to successful government. Anything that smacks of untruthfulness is another hit to the government’s reputation and ability to govern. MPs are dependent on the value of their words. Lying devalues them, and can result in people no longer listening.

This is a reissue of important data

Conventional wisdom says that the UK received an economic boost from joining the EEC, wrongly called the Common Market at the time. It also alleges there was a further boost from the EEC transforming itself into the EU and completing its so called single market in 1992.

I believe in checking the data. If you look at the graphs and charts of our economic output there is no sudden favourable burst in 1973-5 when we first joined, and no sudden surge in 1993-5 when the EU announced single market completion. Nor is there any sign throughout this period of any upward tilt in our economic performance, however slight. If you gave people the charts and asked them when a significant favourable event occurred they would not have chosen 1973 or 1993.

Worse still is that in practice both our time in the Common market and in the single market impeded our growth and helped destroy important parts of our industrial base. These were the years of big decline in everything from fishing to steel and from market gardening to shipbuilding.

The 20 years from 1953 to 1972 prior to our entry into the EEC saw the UK grow by 95%. That was a growth rate of 3.4% a year. I have left out 1945-1952 as years obviously boosted by recovery from a war and affected by demobilisation.

The next twenty years in the Common market, 1973-92, saw our growth slump to just 42%, under half the previous 20 year period. That was an annual rate of 1.76%

If we then look at the 28 years 1993 to 2020 when we were in the single market and customs union, total growth was 59%. That was an annual growth rate of just 1.66%.

So we grew much slower in the EEC/EU than out, and slower still once the restrictive and bureaucratic single market was completed. These numbers flatter the later EU period as they are not per capita. They are not adjusted for Labour’s relaxation of control on economic migrants after 1997. Our per capita performance has been very poor recently.

Labour has done its best to align the UK with the EU’s high rates of youth unemployment and has now succeeded, and with the EU’s higher unemployment rate where it is almost there. How has it done it?

1. Ban on all new oil and gas, destroying and failing to create many high productivity high paid jobs. In line with EU decarbonisation policy.
2. Ban on all new petrol and diesel car output by 2030, a more severe version of an EU policy, destroying many UK factories and jobs.
3. Dear energy prices under an EU type emissions trading and carbon tax scheme, leading to mass closures in petrochemicals, plastics, paper, cement, ceramics, steel etc
4. Coming adoption of more anti food growing farm policies from EU sources on top of anti food UK grant schemes
5. Giving away 12 years of our fish to EU, preventing rebuild of UK fishing industry
6. High taxes on employment and business premises destroying jobs in shops, leisure centres, hospitality and entertainment – UK policies
7. Imports first policy in craven negotiations over trade with China and EU where we already run huge deficits. Imports cut GDP.
8. Productivity collapse and huge losses in the public sector hold the UK back and keep borrowing, taxes and interest rates too high.Home made disaster.

This was wrongly posted this morning, clashing with a far more urgent piece. I have withdrawn it for a later date. Today we must debate Starmer’s sell out to the EU. I debated this last night at 10.20 on 5 Live.

The PM yesterday argued from history that the UK only has security when it is bound to Europe. Which book said that?
Did he read the chapter about the Italian/Roman invasion and the slavery that followed?
The chapter about the Viking raiders and colonisers who seized lands and riches?
The chapter about the Norman/French invasion, the theft of English lands and the putting into serfdom?
The chapter about the huge seaborn invasion by the Spanish Armada which we fought off?
The chapter about the planned German invasion of 1940 and the battle of Britain?
The chapter about Spain backing Argentina in taking by violence the Falkland islands and now seeking to take over Gibraltar?
The threats, invasions and conquests have always come from Europe. The UK has often had to fight alone to defend herself.
Instead of making empty promises abroad, the PM needs to rebuild our defence at home. The seas are our moat, but they need reinforcing with an Iron dome, a rebuilt weapons supply industry and stronger armed forces.