With badly performing branches of government like the taxpayer owned Bank of England it is important to watch what they do more than what they say. Significantly this month they are not selling any medium and long dated bonds, interrupting their disgraceful loss making sales programme. I guess they took this  decision because a volatile  bond  market unhappy about the UK growth wrecking budget and Trump tariffs could tumble on the back of official selling.

Maybe they have now worked out that their announcement of a major sales programme of bonds on the eve of the  2022 autumn budget did help drive the market lower, leading to the predictable LDI plunge caused  by poor regulation of pension investments.

The Bank bought far too many bonds at excessive prices well into post lockdown recovery. It has wrongly been selling off some of the long bonds which have the largest losses instead of just running down the bond portfolio as they mature. In 2024-5 they sent an astonishing bill for £38 bn of losses to taxpayers, swollen by unnecessary sales.

Thank goodness we have been spared at least one month of these excesses. Long bonds are often trading at under half the Bank’s purchase cost given the big hikes in rates the Bank has put through.

HS2 our fully nationalised railway has cost a fortune and will never reach  the North as planned. The Post Office sends  taxpayers large bills for its losses and put key employees in prison  based on false charges and a botched computerisation programme.

Today Mr Reynolds, Business Secretary, has total powers to run British Steel, a company owned by the Chinese. So far he has co operated with the steel workers to exclude the Chinese management. Mr Reynolds has no experience of running an industrial business. He has presented no business plan to Parliament and has no announced  budget to pay the huge losses reported for the current business.

I have been responsible in the past as a company chairman for a steel rolling mill and other industrial plants. My advice to Mr Reynolds is

1. Make employee safety and employee engagement your first task.

2. Understand you need more orders for british steel than the Network Rail order. Construction and defence orders need increasing with ways of offering high quality and better value for money. Customers need persuading. They do not owe you a living

3. Understand  you cannot make this work without much cheaper energy. This business has been pulled down by the needless closure of UK coal mines and by the mad pursuit of dear energy. The current nonsense that gas prices are the problem overlooks the painful fact that electricity in the UK is four times the price of gas per  unit of energy. Net zero ideologues think closing steel furnaces, coalmines and fossil  fuel power stations is good news. They deliver us into the hands of China as we need to shift to imports.

So Where is your business plan?How  much will it cost? How  do you avoid spending money now which could go to the Chinese owners? How can you run it against the wishes of the owners? Are you going to force the owners out? What legal liabilities will rest with UK taxpayers?  Why was there nothing in the new Act about the split of the money once you start paying bills?

The  Act is a botched  mess. The draconian powers against the owners are coupled with complete muddle on who will in future be responsible. You cannot be in charge on odd days when you fancy it or see a need to intervene. You need to sort out who is in charge and what the plan is urgently with the owners.

So the government has failed to negotiate a settlement with the Chinese owners of Scunthorpe blast furnaces and the nearby rolling mill. The UK does need to keep a steel industry.

The government should buy the whole works and land for a token £1, sparing the current owner closure and redundancy costs.There might  need to be recourse to them if a new operator did need to make redundancies.The Chinese company would remain responsible for its debts and past losses. The assets would be unencumbered.

It should put out to tender a contract to operate and manage the works, accepting the least cost/ best bid.

It should encourage the nationalised Network Rail to carry on buying track from there. It should encourage the use of steel for its  construction  projects to use steel from there. It should use UK steel for all main defence purposes.

The government was wrong to water down its proposal of local enquiries in just five towns into the scandal of the rape gangs. They attacked children in the most disgusting way. It is thought this happened in  at least   50 towns and cities.

One of the issues is did senior local Councillors and Council officers help cover this up? They should not decide whether to hold an enquiry, and should not conduct it.

Katie Lam MP spoke for most people when she challenged the  Minister seeking to smuggle the dilution through an almost empty House of Commons. Rupert Lowe has also done good work on this issue.Bring on a proper enquiry with full powers of independent investigation.

This year the ten year government borrowing rate has always been higher than the brief spike top rate under Liz Truss. This  is the result of a very bad budget killing growth and an April of the government putting up managed prices, taxes and inflation. Still Rachel  Reeves talks of the disaster rate of 2022 without stating her rates are always higher. She says she has brought stability . She has brought no growth and rising inflation.

The turbulence brought by Trump’s tariffs and the US/ China tariff war sees UK bonds  and the pound falling as well as US Treasuries and the dollar. This is not surprising. The budget and the Spring statement left little  margin in the figures compared to target. Events of the last week hVe probably eliminated the margin in the numbers. Reeves is back to looking for spending cuts and fending off Labour demands to hike taxes more. With thousands of rich people  heading for the exit her revenues will now be squeezed. With

During the last two Parliaments I pressed the Treasury to make it more difficult for Councils to borrow large sums of money. As so often it took time to persuade Ministers and their department that waste was afoot and spending was too lax. I watched as various Councils went on a buying spree for commercial property, and renewable  energy projects.

Prior to 2020 some Councils were buying up shops as they thought with rents  exceeding the low interest rate charged on government loans they could gain more income to spend. They did not realise the private sector and the property agents were thrilled to sell out to them as many in the private market thought shops overvalued and thought rents would fall  as online shopping reduced shop turnover. Covid lockdowns came along and accelerated that trend leading  to large capital losses on the shops Councils had bought.  Rents fell. When interest rates rose the disaster was complete with heavy losses.

Nottingham invested in its own energy company. It ran up large losses and put itself into Section 114 bankruptcy.  Woking made too many bad property investments whilst Thurrock came a cropper with buying solar farms. They too went into Section 114. Birmingham underpaid its female staff and faced large back pay whilst also losing on its investments which took it to Section 114.

The government has undertaken a round of expensive bail outs. Birmingham was granted £1255 m, Woking £331 m, Bradford £220 m and Southampton £122 m with others getting multiple millions. Far from Councils being starved of money some have lobbied for huge sums to dig them out of financial difficulty or bankruptcy of their own making.

Taxpayers do not want Councillors and their officers playing at being investors in real estate and energy only to lose them a fortune. A well run Council keeps Council tax down and concentrates on providing good service in core areas. Too many bad Councils grandstand, over reach, add services they should stay out of and land up in a financial mess. Too many want to wreck our roads at great cost and dabble in business in ways that prove costly.

It is rumoured the government decided to renegotiate the Scunthorpe deal they inherited to close the blast furnaces and subsidise an electric arc furnace to make recycled steel. It would clearly  be better to keep  the blast furnaces. Instead we read they may lose everything as the Chinese owners have rejected their  revised deal as inadequate.

The UK needs basic steel making, and the nearby rolling mill. The PM recently initiated  the  construction of a new naval submarine, but we hear we will need to import French steel to build it. In 1940 we did not have that opportunity when we needed plenty of steel to defend ourselves.

The main reason we are losing our steel industry is the crippling price  of energy here. Start getting more of our own gas out and we could build high energy using industries on that supply.

Car output in the UK has halved since 2017. Government and the industry has largely ignored this, as the main reason is the government policy to ban the manufacture and sale of all the popular diesel and petrol cars the industry has been making by 2030, with aggressive phase out and factory closure from last year.

You read it here first. It is official government policy to close all petrol and diesel car factories and sack all their workers over the next five years. They would like to open new battery car factories with new jobs instead, but have reported little progress in doing this. To replace what they are definitely closing would take many more approved projects with contracts underway to build the factories and new production lines it would take. Like most UK net zero policies it looks like a policy of close our factories and import the new cars from China.

Honda  has left the UK and the EU altogether as it could not  sell enough cars. Mini plans to switch most of its production to battery models made abroad, and is delaying an investment in production of two dearer low volume battery variants here.  The  Jaguar brand is losing market share fast and is planning a small battery range of very dear cars that will likely mean a tiny market share. It wants to lose most of its past customers who want a more traditional Jaguar. Ford no longer makes cars here. Stellantis ( includes Vauxhall) is negative on investing here. It has decided to close its Luton  works. It is making electric vans at Ellesmere Port but no cars. Even Nissan is concerned about volumes as it seeks to roll over a large loan it borrowed and considers the pace and scale of its commitment to new battery car capacity.

To save the car industry the government must stop the £15,000 a car tax on “excess” petrols and diesels. It must relax its electric timetable, allowing the industry to carry on making petrol and diesel cars people want to buy.

The UK government found out the hard way that raising taxes on businesses for daring to employ people  leads to fewer vacancies and more job losses. Still it refuses to cancel the damaging tax. It does not seem to have learnt that increasing the already high taxes on people with savings and investments drives millionaires as well as billionaires abroad and will result in less  tax revenue, not more. Under the 1970 s Labour government it became a damaging brain drain as it was called. Our pop stars joined entrepreneurs in the rush for the exit. When the following Conservative government made major cuts in tax rates on the better off many rich people came back and revenues from the wealthier soared.

The government does understand extra taxes imposed on our exports to the US are damaging and like me would like to get these  taxes called tariffs down. It could start by offering to take our tariffs off US exports in return for the US cancelling tariffs. Played right Trump’s tariffs could be an opportunity for freer trade from lower taxes through a deal.As the government  knows US tariffs are wrong it should  see UK tariffs would be even worse. They are a direct hit on UK consumers.

The last few months have shown just how much economic damage higher taxes by the UK government can do with growth extinguished, inflation up and new jobs cancelled. The US tariffs have led to a big market sell off as investors fear reduced growth and disrupted trade. The Uk government needs to use the excuse of the Trump tariffs to reboot its own approach to growth. As it knows US taxes on our exports are harmful and need reversing it needs to see its taxes on jobs and wealth have already proved to be destructive. Remove these taxes.Take up ideas for saving wasteful public spending from this site and elsewhere without robbing from pensioners and people on disability benefits.