www.youtube.com/@guy.pinsent

Some think Mr Burnham is clearing the decks for an early election. They see him stuck with a long list of spending wishes and too little money to pay for them. So far his risky adventures have won him a seat in the Commons and got him the position of Prime Minister without having to spell out an  agenda. He  has changed very little that the previous  Cabinet was doing. So why not throw the dice again, they ask. Others think he should soldier on as he has a good inherited majority, so why take the risk of throwing it all away?  Backbenchers in marginals can see the current polls do not look good for them. I have no idea how they will decide this.

I have been offering him advice on how to manage the government better as I would like our government to be better run. I cannot give him advice on when to go to the country or what platform to stand on.  I think the new Conservatives under Kemi offer a much better prospect of running things better. So instead I will sketch a campaign the Opposition can run were Mr Burnham to decide to bet on an early poll. It would give us a good opportunity to change government before more damage is done.

The first claim to make is it would be a cut and run election. It implies that if he waited so we  could  see his  agenda for the next two years and his Plan for the next ten his popularity would decline. What is he hiding? Why doesn’t he set out his plan for government first? Why doesn’t he want to achieve some of his plan for government to show people it can work? Going early looks as if it is based on fear, not on bravery.

If he goes soon, cancelling the budget, the Opposition can say he did it to avoid the tax bombshell budget he has been planning. The Chancellor has refused to rule out yet more tax increases in the budget. We read of more people having to pay a so called Mansion tax, often on modest properties in London and dearer property areas. We see a big hike in capital gains tax given a good outing, a tax on enterprise and successful business. We await the new Tourist tax to be imposed by Mayors, another levy of maybe 5% on top of 20% VAT to cut jobs and close premises in the hospitality business. We read of bank taxes, more fossil fuel taxes and much else.

The Opposition can also say the early election is probably to tear up the old Manifesto pledges not to increase Income Tax, VAT and National Insurance. The Treasury will be telling the Chancellor there is a large black hole to fill and Mr Burnham will be demanding more spending. The Chancellor needs to fill in his own black hole created by his spending needs for defence. That will add to the fuel on the fire of the tax bombshell story.

Mr Burnham has indicated he wants a yet closer relationship with the EU and would like in due course to rejoin. This will alienate the majority who voted to leave, and the bigger majorities in polls who oppose the idea of more laws and taxes being imposed by the EU. The Opposition can expose the bad sell out deal Labour are planning in the so called Re set, which is all give and no take for the UK. We end up paying big bills, imposing bad laws and lose our ability to govern ourselves in important areas.

Above all the election allows the Opposition to expose the failure of the government to smash the gangs and to end illegal migration. The Home Secretary proposes an enquiry to study the problem. There is no need for study. We can all see the problem. The government will pay a heavy price for its lack of action. People are angry about the large payments to France when they escort the illegals into our waters. They are angry that the boat drivers are often not arrested, that the illegal migrants are not questioned about who they paid and how they heard about the boats. They are angry they are put up in hotels or former military accommodation with full access to public services often better than that allowed to the settle population. The issue is not where to house them but how to stop them coming and  in such a dangerous way. Voters want changes to the law and better enforcement of our borders. All the time the numbers keep coming  the governing party will struggle with an election.

So far inflation up, unemployment up, borrowing up, taxes up, government borrowing rates up, energy prices up, taxes up. Not the changes people wanted.

So bring the election on.

John  Healey with no hint of humour is critical of his legacy. He knows there is a  £4.7 bn plus black hole in the accounts. He should know as it was his insistence  on higher defence spending with no offsets to pay for it which caused it, whilst still leaving the defence budget short of where he said it needed to be.

Rachel Reeves inherited 2% on target inflation. She left with it standing at 2.9%, a  45 % increase in the rate. Her tax rises and cost increases for the public sector caused some of the problems.

Rachel Reeves inherited 4.2% unemployment, and put it up to 4.9%. Her National insurance rise, Business rates rises, Minimum wage rise all added to the pressures on firms  who have had to shed labour.

She boosted public spending by £145 bn more than the Conservatives were planning for 2027-8, which many on her side will see as good news. The problem is they do not think it was enough and much of it was wasted. Runaway bills for benefits, a failure to stop illegal migration, the give away of the Chagos and the costs of Starmer travels abroad all added to the bills without adding to our standard of living.

She planned an additional £97 bn borrowing for 2027-8 compared to Conservative plans. This has helped drive up interest rates, greatly adding to public spending as it becomes dearer to service the rising debts of the state.

She inherited a ten year borrowing rate around 4% and pushed it up to over 5% by her overspending and overborrowing, a 25% increase in costs.

She was part of a government offering 300,000 new homes a year average for five years. With her higher interest  rates she did  not even manage 200,000 a year.

He needs to show he is a strong defender of UK interests. The US President despises weak leaders.

He could begin by telling the President the Falklands are British and the people there want to stay British. The UK has the navy and airforce to protect them from Argentina.

He should say the  UK is backing the Falklands in getting oil out from the new Sealion field.

He should say he is reversing the give away of Diego Garcia. The UK will keep the freehold of the base and will honour the Treaty with the US over its use.

He should praise the Greenland Agreement.

He should reassure the President the UK is going to meet its NATO spending commitments . He should scold the President for his comments on our navy and remind him of the support and sacrifices the UK military have given in military coalition with the US.

He should seek review of tariffs imposed by the US against the UK and remind him of past intentions to have a free trade agreement.

One of the most misleading net zero arguments is that the UK ‘s policies taxing, subsidising and banning our way to more use of renewable electricity are creating so many jobs. They often claim 1 million or 1.1 million already.They imply that renewable power , batteries and new green products deliver this.

The ONS presumably under pressure from government have had  several goes at trying to define and count green jobs. Their latest estimate in March 2016 gave us a figure of 652,100 full time equivalent jobs, not 1 million. Within this total only 69,600 jobs arise from renewables.

The larger total includes 129,000 people in waste management. The bin collectors and tip managers have miraculously been granted green status though those jobs pre date the green policies people usually refer to. It includes 12,600 forestry workers, where tending woods and felling timber predate modern greenery by centuries. 24,700 jobs cleaning up sewage and 37,400 jobs in ensuring good water quality have been recategorised as new green jobs. 8,400 jobs in maintaining and restoring countryside also slide across. 18,500 jobs are government civil servants and quango staff, and 47,500 work for a wide range of environmental charities. That’s 278,000 jobs that have little to do with the net zero policies and would continue if we were not following a green power transition course.

It is true Green transition has created a lot of jobs and new factories to make solar panels, wind towers  and turbines. Most of these are in China or Germany. An entrepreneur in my past constituency who had a successful international business making steel bridges invested in a state of the art very automated plant to make wind towers in England. He could not win enough orders at realistic prices owing to fierce German,EU and Asian competition and action. There were no buyers for his excellent plant so he had to close it and sack the employees. He  had to write off his substantial investment.

My speech in Lords

Jealousy is not a great emotion. It produces bitterness and unpleasantness. If it gets woven into politics, it usually ends up damaging the people and parties pursuing it, rather than helping them. I remember that a previous Government did not like grammar schools very much, and they decided that the parents of children in the surrounding area of a grammar school, where a big majority would not have children attending the grammar school, could be given a vote on the future of the grammar school. I think they thought that that would result in the abolition of grammar schools. However, when they held a vote, they discovered that the parents of pupils who had not got into the grammar school had no problem with the fact that very bright pupils had got into the grammar school; they saw that as a good for the wider society and the local community, not as a bad. There is a warning there.

We are fortunate in this country that we have some outstanding private sector schools, some of them very famous and well known. Some of them deliver a high quality of education. Labour will point out that they are able to do that partly because they have more income per pupil going into the school because they can charge much higher fees, and there is some truth in that. But there is also truth in the fact that the energy and the standards they set, and what they expect, also contributes  to their great success. So, when we have a great achievement like that, clever Governments want to build bridges, not create barriers. They wish to see how we can allow those well-endowed schools still to flourish, but also how more of us can benefit from that process.

My parents were not rich enough to send me to a private school, but I benefited from the fact that my local state primary put me in for a competitive examination to get a place in a direct grant school. I was fortunate enough to pass that exam, so I was able to attend as a day pupil with a free place what was primarily a boarding school paid for by richer parents who sent their children there. It worked harmoniously; we benefited from the exchanges between us, our different backgrounds, our different aptitudes and the different contributions we could make to that school.

A previous Government thought that that kind of thing was wrong, so the direct grant school idea disappeared and those schools had to become fully fee-paying schools or perish. Then there was the assisted places scheme, which was a similar kind of operation, and that too is an excellent idea, because it gives people from low-income backgrounds, who would respond well to the ethos of the school offering the place, that opportunity. Again, it blends the excellence of the private school with opportunity for those who can compete for the places.

Quite a lot of our great public schools, as endowment charities, are aware of their need to pursue wider charitable purposes in the educational area. So some of those great schools help the surrounding state schools by offering lectures and specialist tuition, organising joint events and being good members of the local community. Again, that is something we should value. Of course they should do that as charities, but it is there and it enriches the wider experience.

We have some extremely good state schools, and I am very proud that they should be there. But we also have some state schools that could do considerably better. That is where having both great state schools and some great private schools, which can act as mentors, guides or lighthouses to illuminate a better future, can be so valuable. The  Government should look again at the opportunity for social and educational enrichment that can come from more sharing of facilities, more joint venturing and more cross-feeding of good ideas from state sector to private sector and from private sector to state sector.

This unfortunate policy experiment that the Government have unleashed on private sector schools is very revealing about the wider debate on the impact of certain policy interventions. One of my persistent themes, as noble Lords have probably picked up, is that tax is usually very damaging and that it is usually something you impose to stop people doing things rather than to encourage them to do things. The Government decided to unleash three very big tax rises on these private schools: the VAT that we are describing, which directly has to be paid by the families of the pupils going there, as well as the very big hit on business rates and the very big hit on employee costs. Of course, the main item in a private school’s budget is employment, not just of the teachers but of all the support staff, some of whom are not that well paid. These jobs are at risk the higher you put up national insurance, along with the other two taxes.

We have seen, and have heard already in this debate, that the result of this treble tax attack has been a substantial number of school closures, as predicted. It is not good enough to say, “Well, there have been openings on the other side”, because we know that those openings are of different kinds of schools, often with different revenue streams including government money. You cannot get away from the fact that you have lost quite a lot of good schools, which just found the treble taxes too much.

We also know that some 33,000 places have had to be found in state schools as a result of the displacement. That is 33,000 families and individual pupils whose lives have been profoundly changed. It is not easy for a child to change school at an unusual time—other than when everybody is changing school, going from primary to secondary—because you lose all your friends. You go into a new school and maybe nobody wants to be friends with you, because groups of children can be cliquey and difficult. The Government seem totally insensitive to those kinds of issues. They think it is worth while to change the lives of 33,000 young people and their families for some greater good, which just seems to be the idea that they do not really like people being able to buy a decent education for their children.

I would imagine that the cost of those children transferring is around £300 million a year, applying a very rough multiple to the number of children. A Government who are very short of cash are not well advised to invent a policy that immediately imposes an additional £300 million a year of public spending. We wait to see how much extra revenue growth there has really been because, as we heard in the Scottish example, you can end up worse off when you take the balance of disappointing revenue into account with the extra costs.

One of the social consequences of imposing a tax on the schools, which means higher fees for parents to pay, is that many of the schools will not close but will change the people they educate. So we will see a pattern where these schools will be for very rich foreigners—that is, an export—and for very rich people at home, but all the other strivers who would like that are priced out of the market. Surely that is the opposite kind of social change to the one that Labour should want. It should not want the schools to be only for the children of billionaires or multimillionaires. Would it not be better if they reflected society more widely and offered education to a wider number in the community? So please, Government, think again. Understand that these schools can be a great bonus for our society.

I am quoting from the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s published letter to the governor of the Bank of England, sent on 17.9.26

The letter arises from the many phases of the Bank buying bonds at high prices to drive longer term interest rates down under Quantitative easing, and now reversing the policy under Quantitative tightening to get rid of the bonds it bought so badly.

This letter gives the Bank of England permission to tackle the losses and sales of bonds.

Quotes are in “ “ .

“The APF has been authorised by my predecessors to hold assets, primarily for monetary policy
purposes. In addition, and as set out below, I am today authorising a segregated portfolio of
APF gilts to be held for non-monetary policy purposes. Under the terms of the existing APF
indemnity, HM Treasury will continue to indemnify the Bank and the Bank of England Asset
Purchase Facility Fund (BEAPFF), so that any gains or losses arising out of, or in connection with,
the APF, including in relation to this segregated portfolio of APF gilts, are borne by HM Treasury.”

JR Chancellor here granting permission

“The MPC’s multi-year path for QT
I acknowledge the decision taken by the MPC to unwind the APF through an annual sales pace
of £20bn in purchase proceeds terms until gilts held for monetary policy purposes are fully
unwound by the end of 2034…….this is equivalent to an
average annual stock reduction of £46bn”

JR: this is a cut from £70 bn year to Sept 2026. Says he acknowledges but as he is paying the bills and as this affects the size of the APF which Chancellors have approved he could have approved.

“The Bank Executive’s strategy for backing banknotes
……
Given that the APF already holds gilts, and that the MPC intends to run its portfolio of APF gilts
held for monetary policy purposes to zero, I agree that it is appropriate for the Bank Executive
to set aside and retain a portion of the APF’s existing holdings to reflect anticipated banknotes
in circulation. This will avoid …….selling gilts as part of QT, which is the best outcome for
the taxpayer. I …..welcome that this avoids crystallising the upfront costs associated with
transferring the gilts across the Bank’s own balance sheet. £120bn of the longest-dated gilts
will therefore no longer be held for monetary policy purposes and so will not be unwound as
part of QT. “

JR important. this means the longest dated gilts   sitting on the biggest losses will now be held to maturity to avoid taking large losses.

“I am writing to agree to the proposed changes…..

The implementation of QT
As you note in your letter, officials have been developing a model whereby all APF active gilt
sales are conducted to the government and not to the market. HM Treasury would instruct the
DMO via the Debt Management Account to purchase the APF gilts that the Bank Executive is
selling in its implementation of the MPC’s multi-year plan. Sales would be conducted at market
prices and in a pre-defined manner…… The DMO would subsequently on-sell the
gilts to the National Loans Fund for cancellation. The indemnity arrangements between HM
Treasury and the Bank would continue unchanged. HM Treasury would in due course instruct
the DMO to issue a corresponding amount of debt to finance such APF purchases through the
annual financing remit.
This sales model, whilst leaving the overall supply of gilts to the market from the public sector
unchanged, would see a return to a single public sector supplier of gilts to the market. ……
We will review progress before April 2027 such that, subject to a final decision to proceed,
implementation could begin in a way that allows this to be incorporated into the DMO’s annual
financing remit, as set by HMT.“

JR Interpretation: If they do this it takes the pressure of sales off the market and gets Treasury to buy back the bonds where they already have to pay the losses. Great deal for the Bank which gets out if a very badly bought portfolio and some reduction in losses taken by Treasury.As this will be the Treasury doing the buying it clearly is the chancellor’s decision.

I have left out some detail and various affirmations of Bank’s independence over monetary  policy so it is clear this is the Chancellor signing off and approving a sales and QT programme, restating Treasury liability  for the whole thing.

The Bank now acknowledges that its sales of bonds at losses has driven up interest rates a bit more.These changes will relieve a little of the pressures on UK debt.