Best Of

FPT:

Sky news reporting not good for Reeves

67 billion rises in taxes in 18 months

Newsnight good for Reeves and more important the market likes it (according toi Newsnight)

So if you want optimism change channels!

The market likes it because she has created 22 billion headroom by taxing everything and anything

She has chosen high taxes and high spending especially on benefits when she should have reduced spending and taxes

Anyway let's see where it all settles in public opinion

I'm still on she has I think taxed a lot of the wrong tings, and missed other important things out ... too much of it is half-baked and tactical.

I think they have now missed the opportunity to be a reforming Government, at least without a second term.

Lots more people being found guilty I reckon. Sentencing of course is going to remain the same orbit - so prisons will become more full of edge cases where a jury wouldn't convict but a judge would.

Unless it's an immigration case, where that may be reversed.

That's quite funny, CR, but it's a serious question and I should think there must have been some research done in this area, and also on the optimum size for a jury, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

From my now much overworked sample of four I can say that in two of the cases the judge would have found differently. In one of them, the guy was obviously guilty but the judge didn't blame the jury for getting it wrong. He blamed the prosecution for presenting the case so poorly. (It was the poor sod's first case and he got in a right mess.) In the other I think everyone present was surprised when we returned a guilty verdict. I remain convinced to this day that we got it right.

I'm conflicted about the abolition of jury trials for medium level cases. I've no problem with most of the bizarre decisions .... the Colston statue, for example, although I did scratch my head over that of the Duchess of Edinburgh's outrider. It's always seemed to me that juries had, or should have, local knowledge which should lead them to a sensible confusion. In that connection I recall reading (I'm not THAT old) of the pre-WWII case of the Welsh Nationalists who set fire to a RAF base in Gwynedd, and the trial was moved to London because a local jury had disagreed, and the judge, and the State, very definitely wanted a conviction.

Jury trial dates back to ancient times; yes, but do we, in the 21st century get more 'accurate' results than, say, the Scandinavians, the French or the Germans? Who, as far as I know, rely on judges and assessors. (I'm prepared to be corrected on this.)

Do continental criminal lawyers get quite as combative as ours seem to, and are witnesses treated better or worse? Has anyone actually done any dispassionate work on this? Or are we simply seeing a knee-jerk response to what I hope is a short-term problem?

I'd understood that the continental legal system requires people to prove their innocence, rather than innocence being the initial presumption.

I would hope not. There must be a huge number of crimes that I could not prove I did not commit.

Most European systems have a non confrontational approach to trials (there is a proper name for that, that I can't remember). Anglosphere countries like the confrontational method.

Yes, and it seems to work perfectly well. The conviction (hah!) that you have to have a prosecution and a defence pitted against each other in order to determine guilt isn't the axiom that many seem to think it is. It's also possible, and in my view preferable, to determine guilt by carefully considering the facts of the case from a neutral standpoint, as is the case in many other countries.

That is dependent on your belief that the State is neutral.

It isn't.

Freedman's conclusion:

Barring unexpected scandals or disasters Starmer and Reeves should now be safe until the May local elections, giving themselves time to shore up support. But the cost of choosing this [less bold] option is that, once again, the truly difficult decisions have been put off for later and little has been done to deal with the big problems facing the country.

Yep, that's what @Sandpit and I were saying.

The country doesn’t want anyone to deal with the big problems

Then we will face the consequences of the big problems dealing with the country and not in the gradualist way we might have. As I said yesterday, I fear the risk of this has increased with this faux budget.

Does everyone agree Kemi came out best yesterday?

No,. I thought Reeves gave a confident budget speech that contained few of the trailed horrors advertised. After the fiasco of all the leaking over the last 2 months and doom laden talk it went well, despite the OBR prematurely publishing it. I hope that she has learned the benefit of budget purdah, and will get OBR water-tight. I am not a fan of this government and won't vote for them but she did alright. She lives to fight another day.

Badenoch's response was poor, containing little of substance and was hectoring and shouty. I was listening on 5Live and turned her off before she finished because it was so unlistenable. There was no insight or context. To say that the freezing of thresholds breaks the pledge on tax rises without acknowledging that the same threshold freeze was put in place by her own government until 2028 is just rank hypocracy. I really though she would be better as LOTO than she has been, and the opposition looks a long way off looking a viable alternative government, or even realising why they had such a crushing defeat 16 months ago.

You are falling for all the anchoring. Labour promised no more than £8.5bn in tax rises, we are now at £80bn from two budgets and the highest tax burden ever incoming. There are loads of "horrors", it just isn't one big thing, it masses and masses of small things or fiscal drag whacking people in every which way e.g. student loan repayments.

In news that will surprise no one the daily mail is not keen on the budget

My shares are up, and the pound seems to have recovered some of its recent losses. Why is the Mail not overjoyed?

I'm not sure that's what a Labour budget is supposed to do but I'd have thought that's the kind of thing Mail readers would approve of.

How many copies does it sell now?

AI tells me it’s 617k daily and 1.3m on Saturdays

For me the budget isn’t intrinsically bad, but it’s another massive missed opportunity. The country is drifting and Labour were gifted the chance and the majority to steer it in a new direction. I might not have agreed with their plans but a degree of boldness would have been great to see.

As the old cliche has it: inaction is action.