Best Of

Good morning

In response to @NickPalmer questioning if the conservatives will cancel the farmers IHT, Kemi is to join Jeremy Clarkson on stage to address and support the farmer's demonstration outside no 10

Also Scottish Labour are announcing they will reinstate the WFP

She may well be appearing but I bet decent money that unless Labour backs down (and it won't) the policy won't be changed by 2032...

If the policy is implemented we will see the actual effects.

If those are negative then the policy will be changed by someone at some point.

Are you sure......governments have a habit of sticking to their guns for both ideological and political reasons. They aren't run like a business...the cliff edge at £50-60k and £100-120k make no sense on a number of fronts if you want to maximise growth / productivity and not clear they maximise tax take either, yet here we are still with them 15 years later. We also have cliff edges in how many hours people can work per week.

If we see the whole farming sector steadily shutting down then that will lead to higher prices and outbreaks of panic buying.

Not a good image for governments.

It ill behoves the Tories to whine about farmers (as opposed to landowners, which is what IHT actually applies to) given how little they've done to promote fiid security and stop the supermarkets grinding the farmers down, as opposed to demanding more cheap food imports from Australia etc.

Putting farmers on a sounder economic footing would have been a better way toi approach the whole issue, including a rebalancing of agricultural land from its currently bloated values. But I have yet to read about Labour dealing with things like supermarket milk wholesale prices.

It's just another thing to be outraged about, see 20mph limits and all things Ed Miliband.

The IFS, Dan Neidle have done the work on this and it's going to affect very few farmers. The tax-free allowance for a couple is £2.65 million and there are only 462 inherited farms worth more than £1 million (out of around 200,000). And it's only the value above the allowance that is affected by IHT.

Much that I like Dan Neidle - I think he's wrong.

Our Uni friend has just inherited part of a farm and it's gone up for sale for £5m - now I don't know how much land there is but as an anecdote it means I question Dan's figures...

Hmm. If we are going for land values alone, then that *part* of a farm must be more than 500 acres alone at current average values. That part of a farm is more than 2x the size of an entire average farm in the UK.

https://www.savills.co.uk/landing-pages/rural-land-values.aspx

Or does it have planning permission for building?

Mr. HYUFD, Starmer should give the green light for missiles to be used in Russia. Failure to do so would be pathetic.

He won't, he is too wary of Putin's response.

Macron has more balls and probably will follow Biden's lead and allow Ukraine to send French as well as US missiles to Russian territory. Though even then I suspect Trump will cancel that permission after his inaugration in January (albeit if the Russians do anything against US bases in Europe Trump would be aggressive in his response)

Good morning

In response to @NickPalmer questioning if the conservatives will cancel the farmers IHT, Kemi is to join Jeremy Clarkson on stage to address and support the farmer's demonstration outside no 10

Also Scottish Labour are announcing they will reinstate the WFP

She may well be appearing but I bet decent money that unless Labour backs down (and it won't) the policy won't be changed by 2032...

If the policy is implemented we will see the actual effects.

If those are negative then the policy will be changed by someone at some point.

Are you sure......governments have a habit of sticking to their guns for both ideological and political reasons. They aren't run like a business...the cliff edge at £50-60k and £100-120k make no sense on a number of fronts if you want to maximise growth / productivity and not clear they maximise tax take either, yet here we are still with them 15 years later. We also have cliff edges in how many hours people can work per week.

If we see the whole farming sector steadily shutting down then that will lead to higher prices and outbreaks of panic buying.

Not a good image for governments.

It ill behoves the Tories to whine about farmers (as opposed to landowners, which is what IHT actually applies to) given how little they've done to promote fiid security and stop the supermarkets grinding the farmers down, as opposed to demanding more cheap food imports from Australia etc.

Putting farmers on a sounder economic footing would have been a better way toi approach the whole issue, including a rebalancing of agricultural land from its currently bloated values. But I have yet to read about Labour dealing with things like supermarket milk wholesale prices.

Good morning

In response to @NickPalmer questioning if the conservatives will cancel the farmers IHT, Kemi is to join Jeremy Clarkson on stage to address and support the farmer's demonstration outside no 10

Also Scottish Labour are announcing they will reinstate the WFP

She may well be appearing but I bet decent money that unless Labour backs down (and it won't) the policy won't be changed by 2032...

She has committed to reversing it and it's hardly a lot of money

Hmmm. I could write a very long list of things Oppositions commit to reverse and then never do. In fact they often extend them.

We had a similar discussion a few weeks ago where someone (@Luckyguy1983 I think) was referring to incoming governments reversing out previous Governments stuff and both myself and @Richard_Tyndall pointed out it rarely happened. Just a minority of stuff gets reversed. A new Government has its own agenda for moving forward. Reversing out the old Government stuff is low down on the list normally. It does seem like a good way of moving forward particularly with social changes.

Imagine if, instead of raising employers' NI, Reeves had done as many are suggesting and broken their manifesto promise by raising income tax and/or employees' NI. What would businesses and other government critics now be saying?

At a guess: reducing people's disposable income will be hugely damaging to the economy - even lower growth due to less spending, and this will lead to redundancies and businesses having to close. The Chancellor must go!

To govern is to chose.

Starmer and Reeves chose to raise taxes on workers and business.

And then exempted the public sector.

They would have been better off spreading the tax increase and saying "we're all in this together".

The fuel duty increase should have been implemented as well.

Beautifully written piece in the TLS on life in Kharkiv now.

https://bsky.app/profile/jamesmeek.bsky.social/post/3latvtnhh4s2l

Horrendously sad.

It is. But I fear, like our very own Sean Thomas, Meeks is someone who travels and sees what he wants to see. War-weariness is also far from unusual: from listening to my grandparents, you would have seen plenty of war-weariness here in Britain in 1942, 1943 and 1944. That does not mean they didn't want to continue the fight. But we also forget how many people did not fully obey the rules, from black-marketeers and the people who used them, to the many who did not obey the blackout at all times.

Meeks is a good writer, but he needs a good editor. He *always* over-writes. And that's quite an accusation coming from me.

(If you want to see a video from Ukraine which IMV is better than that article, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQQCq1ijRjc Sometimes images really do cover 1,000 words.)

I'm sure they were all sick of the totally unwanted and unnecessary war from Day One. But life is about tradeoffs, and I imagine most of them probably realise, like our ancestors, that giving way to a mad tyrant would be far worse for them and their children - those that survive anyway.

We can only be grateful that none of us have ever had to make similar choices, and we should do all we can to help that brave country so we never have to.

Our government is making different choices. The first quarter of PM yesterday was about our new "pragmatic" relationship with China that Starmer is promoting. And then we get headlines like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2l4eynl4zo the very next day.

So the slightly remote possibility of further exports and modest growth seems to outweigh such considerations. Can't say I am impressed.

Starmer is clearly pushing closer ties with Beijing, especially after the tougher line Boris and Truss in particular took with China as PM. Xi also in turn had some positive words about the UK Labour government's new economic policies after his meeting with Sir Keir yesterday.

Starmer is also notably less fervently supportive of Zelensky than Boris and Truss and even Rishi were. While Biden has now allowed US missiles to be sent into Russian territory by the Ukrainians Starmer has still refused to follow suit for UK missiles

Good morning

In response to @NickPalmer questioning if the conservatives will cancel the farmers IHT, Kemi is to join Jeremy Clarkson on stage to address and support the farmer's demonstration outside no 10

Also Scottish Labour are announcing they will reinstate the WFP

She may well be appearing but I bet decent money that unless Labour backs down (and it won't) the policy won't be changed by 2032...

If the policy is implemented we will see the actual effects.

If those are negative then the policy will be changed by someone at some point.

Are you sure......governments have a habit of sticking to their guns for both ideological and political reasons. They aren't run like a business...the cliff edge at £50-60k and £100-120k make no sense on a number of fronts if you want to maximise growth / productivity and not clear they maximise tax take either, yet here we are still with them 15 years later. We also have cliff edges in how many hours people can work per week.

If we see the whole farming sector steadily shutting down then that will lead to higher prices and outbreaks of panic buying.

Not a good image for governments.

It ill behoves the Tories to whine about farmers (as opposed to landowners, which is what IHT actually applies to) given how little they've done to promote fiid security and stop the supermarkets grinding the farmers down, as opposed to demanding more cheap food imports from Australia etc.

Putting farmers on a sounder economic footing would have been a better way toi approach the whole issue, including a rebalancing of agricultural land from its currently bloated values. But I have yet to read about Labour dealing with things like supermarket milk wholesale prices.

Imagine if, instead of raising employers' NI, Reeves had done as many are suggesting and broken their manifesto promise by raising income tax and/or employees' NI. What would businesses and other government critics now be saying?

At a guess: reducing people's disposable income will be hugely damaging to the economy - even lower growth due to less spending, and this will lead to redundancies and businesses having to close. The Chancellor must go!

To govern is to chose.

Starmer and Reeves chose to raise taxes on workers and business.

And then exempted the public sector.

They would have been better off spreading the tax increase and saying "we're all in this together".

The fuel duty increase should have been implemented as well.

Imagine if, instead of raising employers' NI, Reeves had done as many are suggesting and broken their manifesto promise by raising income tax and/or employees' NI. What would businesses and other government critics now be saying?

At a guess: reducing people's disposable income will be hugely damaging to the economy - even lower growth due to less spending, increased pressure on higher wages to compensate, and this will lead to redundancies and businesses having to close. The Chancellor must go!