Best Of

FPT:

A stupid version of Cnut.
Still, it should provide a similar object lesson, albeit this time unintended.

Trump: "We're doing coal. I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up half a mountain and they're ugly as hell."
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1939334557582438496

Are collieries and spoil heaps and massive open-cast scars more beautiful?

It's more the insane economics that impresses me.

But granted, Trump has zero taste, too.

The economic damage Trump is doing is of a scale that might be comparable to a war. Essentially Trump is betting everything on the industries of the past, and hobbling the industries of the future. Short term this might look okay, and will please some areas of industry. Long term the US will be far behind in renewable energy, grid energy storage, electric vehicles, and the industries that underly them; like power semiconductors, batteries, power transmission systems, magnetics, etc.

As the damage is something that is accrued rather than immediate Trump can get away with it, for now at least. Long term he is doing trillions of dollars in damage to the US economy, and handing a huge amount of control to China, who are by far the best positioned country to reap the benefit of America's follies.

Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT

There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.

“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/06/30/entry-level-jobs-in-free-fall-after-launch-of-chatgpt/

I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.

My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management.
Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.

Yes, it is ironic that a number of Micky Mouse degrees are actually more vocational than traditional subjects, where university is more of a finishing school and networking opportunity.

There are plenty of proper Micky Mouse degrees. The wide argument is that seemingly all Higher Education have been turned into a 3-4 full time degree. Golf Course Management i.e. Green's Keeping, is a real vocation and you require to know a fair bit about a lot of things around turf technology. Does that require a 3 year full time degree and racking up £50k in debt (which in reality will never be paid off) or is a better route you do 2 days a week at college and work at a golf course.

And as I have said before, the other issue is all the these HE institutions becoming universities, they then have to offer a much wider range of courses (many of which are outside their areas of specialism) and somebody somewhere has to foot the bill for all the facilities that a university requires compared to a HE college.

Did you know that Disney has its own management education center that gives out qualifications: they truly can be called Mickey Mouse degrees.

Morning all! Back after 3 days away at Tankfest.

An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.

I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.

We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/29/britain-in-2025-sick-man-of-europe-battling-untreated-illness-crisis

Morning, PB.

Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.

The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card

Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.

Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.

The problem they had was a structural deficit.

The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.

So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.

Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.

Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?

For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.

How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.

The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?

My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".

None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.

Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.

FPT

Probably one of the tax cuts that'd be the biggest drivers of growth is removing the 100k cliff edge, including the childcare voucher removal, just because it would ensure that many people who currently do 3 or 4 days a week to stay beneath it would suddenly find it worth their while to do 5 days or take a new job in the 100-125k band and we'd get a major economic boost.

I entirely agree with the principle, but only about 2% (might be higher now) earn that much. It's not going to have the transformative effect on growth you think it will.

Ultimately, sustainable growth outside the City is going to depend on median earners and medium sized businesses. The government should be focused on that part of the distribution, even if they iron out some of the weird tax blips that affect the very highest earners.

It's approaching the top 5% now but the top 2% pay 39% (and rising) of all income tax. So, yes, it's significant if a good chunk of them decide not to work more, not work much at all, or work overseas. And the message it sends to entrepreneurs both at home, and looking to invest here from overseas, is that Britain is open to and interested in rewarding success - unlocking energy & growth.

Sustainable growth depending on median earners and median businesses sounds nice and fair, but it's not especially true, even if they are the mode in number.

Fundamentally, growth is driven by wealth creators and a economic environment that rewards success. We have two quasi-socialist policies that are starting to be venerated: one, in the public sector, is the PM salary cap - meaning they can no longer pay market rates to hire the best people in major public sector bodies - and, two, the 100k cliff edge from 2009 (62k in today's prices) means your Jeff Bezos and can be taxed until the pips squeak.

Both are making us poorer.

But it's not even that 2% or 5% affected by the cliff edge, as has been shown to you. Jeff Bezos is not affected by it, as he earns rather more than it.

And I agree that the the proportion of all income tax that is paid by the top 5% is absolutely ridiculous. But given the top rate of tax is only 45%, and 40% from £50k to £125k, that's a function of enormous income inequality, not punitive tax rates.

And it's not about being "nice and fair". 90% of the UK population earn less than £70k - if you want to generate meaningful growth, you're going to have to bring along some of them as well simply by weight of numbers. We see exactly this attitude around London, which the economy is now so reliant on but also why we've generated such massive regional inequalities.

https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/02/02/a-tale-of-twelve-cities-the-perplexing-underperformance-of-britains-second-tier/

The regional mayors still don't have enough authority and tax / spending / borrowing powers.

to be blunt - until Manchester and Birmingham can raise money to build the metro / underground rail / tram systems and other things they desperately need we will remain a low growth centralised country.

(FPT)

The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.

So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?

Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?

The problem is that recessions are part of the economic cycle and should be accounted for in the cycle. The cycle should be debt rising during and immediately after the recession, then falling afterwards, before the next one hits again.

The problem is Gordon Brown claimed (falsely) to have abolished boom and bust and broke the cycle. He may have abolished booms, but busts still happen, as they inevitably always will.

When the recession hit in 2008 we should have had falling debt-to-GDP and a budget surplus, as we did in 2002. It was a political choice, not economics or a cycle, that meant we had rising debt-to-GDP even before the financial crisis hit.

That was a catastrophic mistake.

In 2020 we didn't have a budget surplus but we at least had falling debt-to-GDP in the preceding years, so the impact of a global pandemic ended up being less than the impact of a fairly routine economic crisis in 2008, as we weren't so horrifically exposed with rising debt even before the crisis hit.

We have talked before about the over medication and prescribed addictions in this country. 43% of Labour voters think this government has things under control? I want some of what they are having for a happier life.

More alarmingly, 18% of the population, 1 in 5, think things are under control. That means that on my next jury of 15 there are probably 3 members who are utterly delusional.

Let me guess, do you read the daily mail or the telegraph?

When you have to fire pointless little barbs in the direction of DavidL, you are shilling for a government that is in deep, deep trouble.

We know who you shill for though...

I really don't think you do. My inclinations are still largely to the Right, but not of Reform.

I'm enjoying having no responsibility for the current governmen shit show. You?

Probably one of the tax cuts that'd be the biggest drivers of growth is removing the 100k cliff edge, including the childcare voucher removal, just because it would ensure that many people who currently do 3 or 4 days a week to stay beneath it would suddenly find it worth their while to do 5 days or take a new job in the 100-125k band and we'd get a major economic boost.

Having been over the cliff edge myself, I don't buy that.

I agree it should be removed, as should all cliff edges*, but the people I know in that position generally work hard because they want to achieve something, they don't calculate how much each extra hour earns them. That was certainly true for me when I was in that position.

(*The cliff edge' whose removal would benefit the country most is the one that costs low-paid families 83p on every extra £ they earn - but it's not an easy one to address.)

Rubbish:

https://x.com/duncanrobinson/status/1905145519397044570

That is a graph of £1,000 income bands. The blip represents about 10-15,000 people. Given the curve of the graph resumes to trend after £100k, it's probable that there are c.15k people forgoing an additional gross income of a few £k at most.

As I said, any tax cliff-edge is wrong but removing this one would make eff-all difference to the economy as a whole.

'Wounded PM gone in a year say allies of Angela Rayner'

'Allies of Angela Rayner expect Sir Keir Starmer to be ousted within 12 months – with the Deputy Prime Minister most likely to succeed him in No 10.

Last week's humiliating Government U-turn over planned £5 billion cuts to welfare has left the Prime Minister 'gravely wounded' and unlikely to lead the party into the next election, the allies said.

After rebel MPs forced Sir Keir to row back on the reforms, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been left with a further £3 billion black hole in her finances, raising the prospect of more tax rises in the autumn...

The turmoil – ahead of Sir Keir's first anniversary as Prime Minister on Saturday – comes as a poll for today's Mail on Sunday found that 61 per cent of voters think Sir Keir should quit as Prime Minister.

According to the survey by Find Out Now, only 25 per cent think Sir Keir will still be in Downing Street by the next election, with even Labour supporters split 50/50 on the question. Futhermore, a total of 64 per cent think that Ms Reeves should be fired by Sir Keir.

Ms Rayner tops the list of ministerial candidates to succeed Sir Keir among all voters – and boasts commanding support from the party and union members who would vote in a leadership contest.

The Rayner ally told The Mail on Sunday: 'I think Angela will be the leader. "

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14857273/Wounded-PM-gone-year-say-allies-Angela-Rayner.html

I'm not sure quite how Labour would 'oust' a sitting leader in the next few months. Unless he reads out his own resignation having not read it first, of course.

On reading the header, my first thought was rather than lawyers, we should look at sons and daughters of the manse, but other than May, Thatcher and Brown, I could not find any.

One advantage lawyers do have as MPs is understanding the legalese in which bills are written. The drawback might be they are too keen to ban things of which they disapprove; to legislate rather than persuade.

It is voters who tend to want to ban things.

I'm a litigator & investigator. Most of the time I tried to persuade clients not to litigate as it's rarely the best way to resolve problems. Similarly with investigations: if I had a £ for every time I told people it was best to behave in a way which avoided the need for investigations I'd be as rich as Croesus by now.

Good lawyers do try and persuade and, frankly, that's the difference between a lawyer who knows the law and has all sorts of tactical games up their sleeve and one who has good judgment. Examples of the former can be seen advising the Post Office. The latter are worth their weight in gold.

MPs job is to persuade and explain and, often, to speak unpleasant truths to the voters. Leaders who do not do this are leaders in name only and it really is not good enough to blame voters for not wanting to listen as a reason not to do this. Cowardice is not what you want in a leader.

Of course it's hard to spell out uncomfortable truths. I've been doing it most of my professional life. But eventually if you are trustworthy and honest people will listen. But you have to earn that trust and that takes hard work. Too many in our political class simply do not understand why integrity matters nor are they willing to do the hard work. So here we are. With a society where a significant part of it seems to have lost its moral compass and another part of it is too afraid to say so.

As for me, I'm fine today. But I have had a tough few weeks.

Since February I have had so many X-rays, ultrasounds, MRiS, CT scans, biopsies, ECGs, oxygen masks, blood tests, intravenous antibiotics, BP tests and temperatures taken I've lost count. I've been treated by specialists in A&E, chest, breast cancer, haematology, oncology and now I'll be seeing a gastroenterologist for a cyst on my pancreas. It's by telephone so I'm hoping this means it's not serious. Either that or it's so bad it's not even worth a hospital visit. On Friday I had a load of radiation injected so that a gamma camera could take a photo of my entire skeleton. My white blood cell count is low. My mood was even lower at the end of the day. I have a small tower of pill boxes on my bedside table: I resemble nothing so much as my hypochondriac grandparents who lived until their late 80's.

Fat chance.

I'm told to listen to my body & it is exhausted. And a bit fucking fed up frankly. I went to all the screenings, was told there was no problem despite 3 previous operations on the now cancerous breast & so being at risk, ate healthily, rarely drank, cycled for decades, avoided Covid and did not have even a bloody cold for years. So how the absolute fuck did I end up with Stage 4 fucking cancer? And now the government gives every impression of thinking that people like me are a waste of space and money, though it has been more than happy to take my higher rate tax for the last few decades.

Still, I get free parking at the hospital. So there is that.