Best Of

My dislike of Reeves was kindled when I heard her pre-election chit-chat with Bad Al and Rory Stewart.

In a generally soft-ball interview, Stewart innocently asked whether her tax plans would be sufficient, and Reeves jumped down his throat and started ranting about Tory effrontery.

She’s obviously quite a bitter individual, and as we’ve now discovered, destructively useless as well.

She's bitter that she never held a real job in the city and I think she not so secretly hates the economic engine of the UK because it chewed her up and spat her out early in her career and shunted her into a customer service role for a retail bank.

The rumour is that the top rate or tax will go up to 49% (47% IT and 2% NI) or a 64% marginal rate in the £100-125k income band. Any of the last few Labour supporters want to tell me that either of these rates aren't work disincentives?

This country is a joke and the Laboir party are having a laugh at our expense.

I think there is a bigger problem lower down in the payscale.

From my anecdotal experience the people dropping to 4 day weeks are typically people on £50k - £80k who are paired up, have a mortgage, and/or have kids, so the leisure/work balance has hit the top rate of tax at 48% here in Scotland and the decision is obvious. Those on £100k in my line of work tend to be highly driven and for them, frankly, the cash is only a small part of why they work so hard - it's more about prestige/power. I think this is why the £100k band effect is difficult to discern in the data.

Essentially the Treasury is taking advantage of the hustle of people working for their first flat or are highly driven, and the inversion point on the laffer curve is actually very high for these individuals - possibly even as high as 70%. If I were Reeves, I'd be much more concerned about how to keep parents and people with mortgages working 35+ hours, where the point could be as low as 30%.

We are now in a situation where 25 % of teachers are choosing to work part time. This has been a problem with doctors for a while but the problem is now spinning down the public sector ranks. Those earning around £50k look at what the government is proposing to take of any increase and choosing more leisure time instead.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/07/one-in-four-teachers-now-part-time/?msockid=286f17fc1c606c5a0eb002b31dff6dac

I agree that the really high earners tend not to be motivated by money as much as by status or ambition but an ever increasing share of our work force are looking at the numbers and saying sod this.

My dislike of Reeves was kindled when I heard her pre-election chit-chat with Bad Al and Rory Stewart.

In a generally soft-ball interview, Stewart innocently asked whether her tax plans would be sufficient, and Reeves jumped down his throat and started ranting about Tory effrontery.

She’s obviously quite a bitter individual, and as we’ve now discovered, destructively useless as well.

She's bitter that she never held a real job in the city and I think she not so secretly hates the economic engine of the UK because it chewed her up and spat her out early in her career and shunted her into a customer service role for a retail bank.

The rumour is that the top rate or tax will go up to 49% (47% IT and 2% NI) or a 64% marginal rate in the £100-125k income band. Any of the last few Labour supporters want to tell me that either of these rates aren't work disincentives?

This country is a joke and the Laboir party are having a laugh at our expense.

I think there is a bigger problem lower down in the payscale.

From my anecdotal experience the people dropping to 4 day weeks are typically people on £50k - £80k who are paired up, have a mortgage, and/or have kids, so the leisure/work balance has hit the top rate of tax at 45% here in Scotland and the decision is obvious. Those on £100k in my line of work tend to be highly driven and for them, frankly, the cash is only a small part of why they work so hard - it's more about prestige/power. I think this is why the £100k band effect is difficult to discern in the data.

Essentially the Treasury is taking advantage of the hustle of people working for their first flat or are highly driven, and the inversion point on the laffer curve is actually very high for these individuals - possibly even as high as 70%. If I were Reeves, I'd be much more concerned about how to keep parents and people with mortgages working 35+ hours, where the point could be as low as 30%.

I missed an important point - there are many, many more people earning in and around £50k than £100k. So while I think sorting the silly cliff edge out is important, this incessant focus on the highest earners is unwarranted imo - there is more potential to generate more output lower down the pay distribution.

There’s also a significant cliff edge for many at £50k with the child benefit withdrawal. A number that hasn’t risen with inflation.

Being a single parent on £50-60k is really poor position now. Earning too much money for tax credits, cliff edge and liable for everything a couple would be, while into the 40% tax IC rate, energy costs, council tax, etc etc etc. it isn't a large income now.

The Mad King is decompensating live on social media

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3m57bbcxvwk2c

Do you mean

- decomposing
- composting
- ?

Decompensating: the final functional collapse of a declining bodily system that has previous been kept running by compensatory actions or medications.

E.g. You can compensate for the effects of aging by injecting your President with stimulant drugs for a while, but eventually their cognitive decline will be too advanced for those treatments to have any positive effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompensation

To conflate other posts, before long Trump will be pinning medals with shaking hands on boy soldiers in the Rose Garden.

Edit: still one of the most remarkable pieces of footage from WWII.

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1004475#:~:text=Excerpt from the last Wochenschau,the boys wearing their medals.

I suspect most of them died before Hitler did.

I was in Chester Cathedral today (and saw the Lego model). There is a narrative there of Jack Cornwell who was killed in the battle of Jutland aboard the HMS Cheshire. He stood by his gun with pieces of shrapnel in his chest trying to set it up to fire at the German fleet. He died of his wounds and was posthumously awarded the VC. He was 16. He was one of 5 "boys" killed on that ship on that day.

Today, of all days, it brought the horror and tragedy of war home to me like nothing else. I am becoming an old softy but by the time I had finished I had tears in my eyes.

The budget is still two weeks ago and it feel like Reeves has been leaking rumours of tax grabs for months.

I am surprised there is any economy left in the UK.

The general impression is of a scandal-ridden retirement home with a country attached.

Reeves looks and sounds like a grudge-carrying HR apparatchik intent on closing down the afternoon tea service because of “colonial overtones”. Starmer appears to be essentially redundant, sequestered from reality and having outsourced his social media output to AI.

Lucy Powell appears have decided her role is essentially to speak in opposition to current leadership. Perhaps she should consider resignation!

Shall I put you down as a maybe?

Also, since everything is the Tories fault, they are actually still in power.

As for Polanski’s policy that he will “try to persuade Putin not to use nukes”, I don’t have words to fully articulate my contempt.

It’s about as plausible as Gandhi’s belief that if Jews went willingly to the gas chambers, it would represent a moral victory over Nazism.

There was an alt-history story, where the Nazis made it to India. The Nazi general listens to Ghandi, politely. Then orders him shot. In a “also, order more paper clips” kind of way.

Being meek did not save a single Jewish life, in WWII.

A distant relative got out of the camps, with his sister. Teenagers.

Somehow made it back to the family home in Poland.

The NKVD put them on a cattle car train for being “ruling class” - like the Germans the Russians wanted to decapitate Polish society to create their own ruling class.

So at the first stop, his sister distracted a Russian soldier. And then he bashed the soldiers head in with a piece of metal. And they left the train.

Ended up in America. The family has the piece of metal - broken fishplate I think.

The budget is still two weeks away and it feel like Reeves has been leaking rumours of tax grabs for months.

I am surprised there is any economy left in the UK.

The general impression is of a scandal-ridden retirement home with a country attached.

Reeves looks and sounds like a grudge-carrying HR apparatchik intent on closing down the afternoon tea service because of “colonial overtones”. Starmer appears to be essentially redundant, sequestered from reality and having outsourced his social media output to AI.

Lucy Powell appears have decided her role is essentially to speak in opposition to current leadership. Perhaps she should consider resignation!

We have had months of speculation and negative headlines which have seriously damaged sentiment and investment. We are in this mess because the budget last October really did not come close to addressing our problems. Spending, already well beyond what we can afford, was not controlled. No margins for disappointment were left. The productivity increases were no more than wishful thinking and not clearly linked to any actual policies. The cuts that were floated were not delivered because the Labour party as a group are wholly delusional and Starmer is weak, bordering on pathetic.

So, it became inevitable that rather than setting us up for the Parliament we would have to go through the same again 13 months later. And what is truly depressing is that we look like repeating the exercise with public spending continuing to rise faster than the economy can grow or throw off tax receipts. So we face the risk of another repeat next year and all the negative headlines and sentiment all over again.

We need substantial decreases in borrowing, so much that it requires both tax increases and spending cuts. Seriously difficult as NATO falls apart, the price of borrowing from the market continues to increase sharply on rolled over debt and the NHS, as usual, is falling apart. We need a Chancellor who is willing to be both honest and educational with the British people. Reeves is not that Chancellor and Starmer is not the PM to demand it.