The nationalised portfolio’s financial impact is dominated by the excessive losses of the Bank of England, which I have long commented on. All the time the Bank sticks with its OBR costed plan to lose £257 bn running off its bonds since 2022 the nationalised portfolio will be heavily loss making.The Bank split three ways over what to do with the stagflation it has helped the government create. It couldn’t even be bothered to comment on why it is selling all those bonds at a loss.
Labour is adding Scunthorpe Steel, Great British Rail, Great British Energy and British Nuclear to the lists.
HS 2 has always been nationalised. It will be a big spender and borrower for the next few years. It is likely to be a loss maker when it does open for business, unless all its capital is written off.
The Post Office has been making large trading losses in recent years. It is now sending a further large bill to taxpayers to compensate all the staff it so badly mistreated. Where is the business plan to get into profit?
Great British Rail takes over the subsidies needed by currently nationalised Network Rail and will probably want additional subsidy for operating the trains from the old franchise companies.
Great British Energy will be a spender and borrower in its early years, backing higher risk higher cost projects
British Nuclear will spend a decade working up plans and pilots for smaller nuclear and building out Sizewell. It will be all cash out and more borrowing.
Scunthorpe Steel will present big bills for losses to keep open uneconomic furnaces, and then to sack people and out in new steel recycling facilities
With all these big spenders and heavy loss makers it is no wonder public spending and borrowing is running far too high.
August 8, 2025
Good morning.
There is going to be a point where the Markets will have to say; “Enough is enough “! Because we cannot simply afford this kind of largess. There will be a tipping point where the State is consuming too much wealth and cannot tax anymore. Money in people’s pockets is finite. They do not have the luxury of printing it themselves. The government will recourse to more money printing and more population growth to keep the plates of the economy spinning.
At some point the music has to stop. And the sooner the better.
August 8, 2025
The sooner the bond vigilantes put a stop to this reckless governments spending the better. All the Quangos you list are a drain on the taxpayer especially Energy. Milibrain will be shovelling money at a futile gesture of Carbon Capture which as never worked at scale and increases generating costs by a third.
Of course this Marxist government is happy to nationalise industries because that’s a basic requirement in their playbook.
Our great grandkids are going to ge paying for this stupidity for years to come.
Rill in Reform.
August 8, 2025
‘Carbon capture’ was, of course, given its first breath of life by the last government. I seem to recall Cummings having had the idea.
August 8, 2025
Well said Mark, roll on the point of implosion.
August 8, 2025
Quite soon, I think. The BoE is probably clearing the decks of its Gilt holdings to make way for the coming deluge of new issues. This coming autumn budget is going to be make or break for our economy.
Interesting to note the long Gilt yield has hardly moved since the .25% cut, so cost of debt has not changed. Watch new issues coming this and next month.
August 8, 2025
Indeed Mark. The American economist John Mauldin talks of a time of reckoning. He predicts it will happen at the end of this decade, when financial markets will adjust – potentially painfully.
Labour is doing it’s part in accelerating the UK towards default, not just with privatisations but also in allowing state spending to keep rising, taxes rising and total borrowing rising. You can only defy gravity for so long, as every watcher of cartoons (& that is what we have in charge) knows.
August 8, 2025
When the plates stop spinning…..guess what? yes they crash to the ground!
August 8, 2025
Unfortunately this is what happens when you elect Mp’s with No business experience at all, who then compound the issue by hiring more and more unfit regulators who’s remit is little understood by anyone, Ministers included.
No wonder the country is in such a mess, that those of us out here who can manage their own financial affairs are being legally robbed with ever increasing taxation (some of it retrospective) to the cover the mess successive governments have made of the countries finances.
What is the point of trying to create or run a success of a business, or even your own personal finances, if it is going to be raided more and more every year, to fund politicians financial incompetence and lunacy.
August 8, 2025
We might as well save money and sack the regulators for all the good they do. I queried a water bill for one of my houses, which has been empty for 3 months and used only a few litres of water. The response was that UU has had to increase prices by 27% to cover their increased costs, and only a small part of the bill is for the actual water used. I wish I could put up my income by that much. We have to pay for new reservoirs to supply additional water to the increased population that we never asked for. This country is fast becoming bankrupt, yet this government continues to waste our money at every opportunity.
August 8, 2025
While there is nothing intrinsically wrong in nationalisation as a concept, the british and government in particular are incapable of managing such. Remember, for the current front bench these industries are their first shot at running anything. There is not an ex welk stall owner amongst them. The cronies they might reward to run them will be equally incapable. The choice of Rasputin to head the delivery of energy and therefore the viability of what industry we have left is a classic insanity.
I have just spent a week in the North and Far North of England, clean, tidy, well ordered, and generously welcoming. Apart from the need of an injection of high tech industry, there can be no better place to live. When talking of levelling up, it is the sclerotic, crime ridden south with its woke compliance that desperately needs it.
August 8, 2025
I live in the beautiful North, but there are plans to rip it apart with wind farms, cable corridors and solar farms. Nowhere in this country is safe from the political vandals.
August 8, 2025
Shhhhhhhh!
August 8, 2025
These problems should have been rectified many years ago with investment when times were better and more effort to keep what was British instead of selling off everything in sight .All the capital from sales which has been transferred elsewhere has depreciated into disappearance.
August 8, 2025
Along with all our oil revenues from the North Sea which dwarfs the the sell offs.
August 8, 2025
Yes. So are you saying British Nuclear and British Energy, both resulting from the Tories starting the obsession with Net zero and now carried by Labour could be funded solely by private capital? I don’t think so.
The French builder of our power stations so skin in the game, is franticly extracting itself from putting up the vast amounts of capital needed.
HS2, we know your view, so cancel and write off? That’s the logical outcome of your opposition now.
Post Office, Tory Legacy, a declining market, static at best, profit generation at best modest. Business plan for the sake of it? No chance of generating the billions needed for pay back. How much did the Tories lose us on Nat West.
‘British Steel’, Scunthorpe desperate attempts by previous government to subsidise, engage with almost any stake holder. With the highest energy costs in Europe, no chance of a profit. So, would you close it?
BOE the political noose tightens, this one you might get.
So again a list most people I think would agree with but it merely highlights ineptitude over decades.
A classic finance dilemma. Good money after bad? Cut your losses? Tomorrow I look forward to your solution.
Reply Post Office problems began under Labour. Labour paid too much to buy up RBS/Nat West.
August 8, 2025
I have read that Sizewell C according to some forecasts may end up costing £100bn or more, and the public will be on the hook for that as it will not be financed by a CFD, but rather by the Regulatory Asset Base model which guarantees a return on the agreed asset base cost. That is insanity. Part of the reason for the high cost is an expectation of a very long build time.
It’s still not too late to cancel the project and replace it with Korean design reactors that have been built on a 5-6 year timescale on budget, and are a properly proven design whereas EPRs (especially with all the design modifications imposed by the ONR) can only be considered experimental, with a history of problems at every installation site. Provided the ONR are told not to interfere in trying to redesign the reactors themselves they could be built for much the same price as the Czechs recently agreed, which was $9bn/GW (and the Koreans were prepared to lower the price for a larger order) – or under £7bn/GW, or around £20bn – itself about half the £38bn cost that was formally announced.
August 8, 2025
The usual way out of this dilemma would be for the workers to rise up but I suspect they are far too comfortable.
August 8, 2025
Who are the workers? Are they the people who don’t claim benefits?
August 9, 2025
Exactly How many millions are now on Benefits of one sort or another I wonder.
Answer far too many hence why such a large percentage of the voting public vote for more and increasing public spending on benefits, and why we will never get out of this financial mess.
August 8, 2025
Those are the real ‘Black Holes’ with no attempt to manage the economy, the budget, the spend and even more damning no attempt to grow the economy to pace for all these runaway projects.
If anyone thought the Socialist WEF ‘Great Reset’, putting the unelected unaccountable in the EU back in control, was a myth, a conspiracy theory, think again it is the only thing that adds up for the necessity to trash Nation and expunge its very existence.
Is the Government, its Parliament, concerned of course not everything is going to ‘plan’
August 8, 2025
I’d suggest that our automotive manufacturing industry is also nationalise ….our goverment controls, where they can build, what they build, how they build, the number of products sold, and supply subsidy & fines
August 8, 2025
@glen cullen – what ‘automotive manufacturing industry’ ? I guess you were being cynical there is not a single UK owned manufacturer left it was trashed after Labour last got it hands on it.
The UK was at one stage the 2nd largest producer in the World and the Worlds largest exporter by a long way. The UK government nationalised it, trashed it consigned thousand of jobs to the scrap heap and walked away.
August 8, 2025
Why is the BoE governor still in a job with inflation well over 2% ?
This is the kind of complacency that results in public services being so badly run.
August 8, 2025
Perhaps if he thought his job was under threat he’d orchestrate another coup?
August 8, 2025
Things go wrong slowly, and the UK drifts along for years and years, but then they go wrong quickly, and the UK will find itself bankrupt almost overnight!
We have dishonest MPs, Ministers, and the PM, who no longer regard lying as a serious offence. They have no vision, no desire to make the UK a growing, prosperous economy, no respect for our culture and our past, and allow excessive immigration, both legal and illegal.
You can only conclude that they hate the UK and want to destroy it.
Our media are almost as blind when they keep talking about raising taxes to balance the books, when they should be constantly demanding lower government spending! What an utter shambles this government is!
August 8, 2025
@Keith from Leeds – I bet you only spend what you have coming in and if you want something extra, you either cut back elsewhere or find ways to earn more. That’s the World of the hardworking UK Citizen, that gets abused daily.
Our Legislators, the HoC, the HoL, the MPs, the Government have just become a bunch of hangers-on awaiting promotions to a Quango. Not one defends democracy, but everyone wants a quiet life by off loading responsibility to the unelected unaccountable preferably in foreign lands.
August 8, 2025
HS2 – the fact that no-one was interested in investing private money should have been a warning that it was never going to work. Railways around the world do not make a profit, let alone something as crass as this, with only the wealthy ever being able to use it to shave a few minutes off the journey time (lost anyway due to the positioning of the stations). Yet successive governments let the lunatics have their way and I have no doubt there is quite a bit of corruption involved which will never be discovered.
August 8, 2025
You see if levelling out worked there wouldn’t be any need to go south.
August 8, 2025
If the HS2 capital is to be written off, surely instead, it would be more productive and a benefit to the nation, (although that never seems to be in the politicians mind,) to take on the NHS PFI monies that it spends a considerable amount of its income on. That is a black hole where it costs hundreds of pounds to change a lightbulb in addition to the base costs.
August 8, 2025
Illiterate legislation is also a major cost to the wealth creating sector.
When a commercial property becomes VACANT the owner has 3 months business rate free, and then, having lost his income pays business rates. I believe this is the only country to adopt such a moronic policy and it contributes to the degradation of the High Street.
But to add insult to injury, on gov.com the ‘vacant’ (ie lease free property which is available to be relet) is referred to as ‘Empty’, indeed the legislation is called ‘Empty property relief’. A corporate fast food company ‘emptied’ a property 3 months prior to the end of their lease, and a council inspected it and confirmed it as being empty, and awarded the business rates relief to the outgoing tenant rather than to the landlord. It transpires they have been doing this as a matter of course.
The Council therefore conspired in the avoidance of business rates.
This is a detail, rather like non VAT registered businesses (the tiny ones) having to pay 20% VAT on their already world beating energy bills.
Who has a head for detail? Who will resolve these very real grievances?
August 9, 2025
OFGEM have a consultation running on how to make energy bills supposedly fairer.
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/call-for-input/energy-system-cost-allocation-and-recovery-review
The biggest problem is that their overriding priority following the ill considered 2023 Energy Act is delivering net zero. If they had the consumer interest obligation that they inherited from their predecessors (OFFER and OFGAS) they would be objecting to net zero and working out how to unwind it (or at least would do so after a change of senior personnel).
At the moment small businesses with consumption levels similar to households find themselves with bills that are 2-3 times those paid by households under the OFGEM cap. These bills help to kill off small businesses. Not only are the unit rates uncapped, and around 50% higher in consequence, with no easy competition for supply (you can’t use a website comparison tool for a business meter – you must go through a broker who wants a commission or try to find out how to contact the relevant sales teams at suppliers yourself) but also OFGEM have imposed very large standing charges – almost six times a domestic consumer, just for a connection.
It is among the issues I will be raising with them. They have a major problem, as net zero will result in sharply higher costs, most particularly to enable EVs and heat pumps in people’s homes on top of all the extra cost or a renewables dominated system. The reality is it is unaffordable, whether by households or businesses large or small.
August 8, 2025
The only way t make naytionalising everything feasoible is to do away with money or to have a voucher/money system that no other country buys or shares. So everyone becomes an employee of the state and is issued food ration s,. Healthcare and other services are all ‘free’. The result is tyranny of people because the state has to decide how many people work in each activity – there is no labour market and no market for goods and services. No debate can be allowed. People must do as they are told by the state.
This seems to be what Starmer’s Gang want for the UK. Socialists believe that socialism only fails, as it has done every time and everywhere it has been tried, because it hasn’t been done properly, so the solution is to double down, go hard left authoritarian. Starmer’s Gang want a great deal longer than the normal parliamentary term of a maximum of five years. This authoritarian Gang is is very likely to postpopne the next general election due in 2029 until even it is prepared to submit to a verdict.
August 8, 2025
This “emerging nationalised portfolio” is all part of the plan, together with Net Zero to sabotage our energy, economy, national security and democracy. High, wasteful spending is deliberate to justify high taxation. They haven’t really started yet on destroying wealth but it’s surely coming together with population replacement.
August 8, 2025
PS : Net Zero with its ridiculous pursuit of expensive, unreliable, chaotically intermittent renewables requiring a parallel system of thermal generation for backup and grid stability (if the real plan is not to subject the country to energy rationing and rolling blackouts) and entirely wasteful and unproven technologies such as CCUS and hydrogen is the perfect vehicle for destroying the country’s energy and economy. If CAGW was not a hoax with Net Zero its “solution” then the plan for affordable, reliable low CO2 emitting energy would obviously have been nuclear fission.
August 8, 2025
It does concern me that Reform have some sketchy plans for extensive nationalisation that the country can’t afford to finance or afford the consequences in poor service delivery and high cost. Maybe they are quietly keeping their powder dry, but the reality we have discussed here is that the problems we have been identifying in debate here over recent days mostly stem from poor regulators and bad laws (some derived from supra national agreements) and political misdirection. These in turn promote bad management.
Those are the real problems that any party trying to unwind our disasters need to address.
August 8, 2025
….and half of qangos are just glorified nationalised think-tanks ….get rid
August 8, 2025
where jobs for the boys can sit and do little, except wait for the next nudge from a pal to move to an even easier sinecure.
August 8, 2025
No evidence of any thinking at all!
August 8, 2025
From Guido, “The Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill has today warned that inflation is now at a higher risk of remaining persistent. ”
Wake up people, inflation is the aim it can halve the value of debt – that’s the Uniparty Socialist thinking of our Parliaments dreams. The rest of the mess will be someone else to clean up, your grandchildren s, children. People forget we are still paying in hard cash for Gordon Brown’s mess nearly a generation ago, a consistent cost for ineptitude is now accepted as something we have to bear to appease an egotists self esteem.
August 8, 2025
You see Ian if products become too expensive cheaper versions of everything will be bought according to the individuals purse.Itvwont change a thing.There are ways around everything .
August 8, 2025
Sir John, if I may interrupt the flow. It may not achieve anything but we are trapped.
Petition
Call an immediate general election
We want an immediate general election to be held. We think the majority need and want change.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/727309
Reply It does not interrupt my flow. There is no chance of Starmer offering an election. He won a big majority and is entitled to govern as long as enough Labour MP s back him. Change can only come through Labour MPs.m
August 8, 2025
@Reply – From his well received position in Parliament I would suggest it is more than just Labour MPs. As these people are what are basically evangelical religious nuts, I would suggest all protest will be absorbed as self gratification that there plans are working.
5 Years, who was so afraid of the people that they refused to seek direction confirmation as would happen in a democracy? – that’s rhetorical
August 8, 2025
248 criminals were illicitly shipped, into the UK yesterday on the 7th August from France……not deterring the new ‘1-out-1-in’ policy
August 8, 2025
I imagine Border Force are handing out ‘review forms ‘ to the ‘passengers’, hoping for 5* comments.
August 8, 2025
These 248 criminals weren’t illicitly shipped into the UK. They were invited in with collection by either Border Force (?) or the RNLI or both and encouraged to come by the Civil Service, judiciary and “charities” with offers of free accomodation, £40/week pocket money, free clothing and mobile ‘phones, free entertainment and the freedom to roam our streets taking black market jobs. Since they are being safely escorted by the French vessels why do we need to come out to save them from drowning? They’re in no danger, they are even giving life jackets by the French navy which are given back at hand-over to be re-used for the next boat. It’s clearly a farce. And why are those with no identification not kept in secure camps?
August 8, 2025
+1
August 9, 2025
OR
indeed the boats only have to get into French chest deep water now and they know they are safe.