This could be a reaction to what Reeves might have done in her budget or it might be a reaction to what is likely to happen in the US with Trump or it could just be a bunch of whingeing directors predicting doom as they often do
The only certainty is that if she want's to instantly turn the graph around all they need to do is announce that the UK are starting talks to fully rejoin the EU thus addiing an estimated 4-5% to our GDP.
......and also making the UK a much more cheerful place.
Ooh, yes, more constitutional wrangling about Europe - that'll cheer people up. Worked brilliantly last time. Bound to be a recipe for harmony.
(I think you might be extrapolating from "Roger" to "people" here).
No it was from Newsnight a week or so ago. There didn't seem to be much argument about the 4-5% GDP. I thought it was pretty smart to have that figure embedded in most peoples consciousness available to be pulled out when appropriate. It all feels like a softening up exercise. What advertisers call 'a teaser campaign'
I have said this to you before
We cannot rejoin the EU without either a manifesto commitment or another referendum neither of which are possible before 2029
I support rejoining the single market and even freedom of movement whilst remaining outside the EU but even that would be near impossible in the short term
The other issue you do not seem to recognise is does the EU really want to recommence negotiations to rejoin, when the next UK government could want to leave and what shape will the EU be in post German and French elections ?
You mourn for something that is frankly years away
Bit like a Tory government.
You may find it is something worse !!!!
Not what the polling is showing so far.
However "meh" Starmer's government is, however much it's got wrong, it's still mostly polling above the alternative.
Not evidenced in local elections, and of course May elections are coming along
Nor in Scotland and even UK polls are narrowing to small Labour leads, ties or even conservative leads
Farage and Reform would not be rocketing up the polls if Labour were not as unpopular
Offtopic but it’s Christmas, here’s Eddie Hearn in the US last month trying to sell the idea of darts to Americans. Interview with Patrick Bet-David, where he says that Matchroom’s darts operation is now twice as big as their boxing operation by revenue and profit.
There is a youngish chap on the YouTubes / newsletter that specializes in the business of sport. He put out a video about 3 weeks ago looking at everything Matchroom and identified that the Darts is now the big money earner...and....the current Sky tv contract comes up for renewal shortly. Now Eddie has this relationship with DAZN for the boxing and overseas rights for the darts is already with DAZN, at the very least he will be making Sky dig a lot deeper into their pockets for the rights, but perhaps he might even get a bumper deal from DAZN.
Last year’s darts final was apparently the highest audience Sky has ever had for something that wasn’t a football match, it was up there with the top Olympic events (that were on BBC) in the year’s ratings, around 9m watched it. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out with the international rights.
They have done an incredible job with the darts, it is a huge thing to go and see live (despite you literally been able to see f#'#k all), next years is basically booked up already, and the premier league are always sold out. And that atmosphere and the carefully crafted promoting of the players leads to big telly viewership, even in a very crowded market.
This could be a reaction to what Reeves might have done in her budget or it might be a reaction to what is likely to happen in the US with Trump or it could just be a bunch of whingeing directors predicting doom as they often do
The only certainty is that if she want's to instantly turn the graph around all they need to do is announce that the UK are starting talks to fully rejoin the EU thus addiing an estimated 4-5% to our GDP.
......and also making the UK a much more cheerful place.
Ooh, yes, more constitutional wrangling about Europe - that'll cheer people up. Worked brilliantly last time. Bound to be a recipe for harmony.
(I think you might be extrapolating from "Roger" to "people" here).
No it was from Newsnight a week or so ago. There didn't seem to be much argument about the 4-5% GDP. I thought it was pretty smart to have that figure embedded in most peoples consciousness available to be pulled out when appropriate. It all feels like a softening up exercise. What advertisers call 'a teaser campaign'
I have said this to you before
We cannot rejoin the EU without either a manifesto commitment or another referendum neither of which are possible before 2029
I support rejoining the single market and even freedom of movement whilst remaining outside the EU but even that would be near impossible in the short term
The other issue you do not seem to recognise is does the EU really want to recommence negotiations to rejoin, when the next UK government could want to leave and what shape will the EU be in post German and French elections ?
You mourn for something that is frankly years away
Bit like a Tory government.
You may find it is something worse !!!!
Not what the polling is showing so far.
However "meh" Starmer's government is, however much it's got wrong, it's still mostly polling above the alternative.
Not evidenced in local elections, and of course May elections are coming along
Nor in Scotland and even UK polls are narrowing to small Labour leads, ties or even conservative leads
Farage and Reform would not be rocketing up the polls if Labour were not as unpopular
Farage and Reform are no more significant than the Alliance in the early 80s, less probably.
All governments lose popularity in midterm, and those who don't take any unpopular decisions for fear of upsetting people don't deserve to be in office.
The budget and subsequent actions suggest, at least to me, it was good economics but bad politics.
There is a whole raft of structural decline to be reversed, be it roads, health, housing - just the nuts and bolts of a country. The idea that 'the market will fix it' is the mantra from a purists point of view but the Thames Water debacle shows that markets can be manipulated as politics and politicians constantly show themselves to be less able than the financial buccaneers.
Also where are economic cycles in all this? Germany looks like a classic case of on the downslope along with France so it's no surprise there would be a softening here due to the effects on our main trading partners. (42% of all exports)
... or did Gordon Brown actually achieve the demise of 'boom and bust'?
It was utterly terrible economics, hammering in taxes those who go to work, the productive part of the economy while leaving the rest of the economy untaxed.
You tax that which you wish to discourage, if you directly jack up taxes on employment/work you are discouraging work and NI is direct taxation on employment in the same way as fuel duty is direct taxation on fuel.
In a counterfactual world what Labour could have done is come in and taken the brave decision to merge National Insurance and Income Tax which would eliminate the 12% extra taxes that those who work for a living have to pay over those who don't.
That would be a 12% increase in Income Tax (without changing Income Tax rates) for those who aren't working on PAYE, while leaving PAYE workers tax rates unchanged. There's your tax rise for the nuts and bolts you want, if that's what you believe in, without hammering businesses or workers or people's pay for going to work.
And it would have been just as consistent with the manifesto as what they did.
I agree with this change and I am one of those pensioners who pay less tax than working people. However I suspect there are about 8 million votes at stake here. So good luck with that one.
So they increased 20 million people's taxes instead? The 20 million already paying more taxes than the 8 million? Besides how many of the 8 million are swing voters?
In 2024 Labour only got 20% of the votes of over-70s, with 46% going to the Tories and 15% going to Reform.
Labour won because they got the votes of working age people.
The incoming Labour government could and should have prioritised working age people who are heavily overtaxed and underfunded. Abolishing WFA was a tiny step in the right direction but then jacking up NI more than undid all the good of that, and won't win them any favour from the 80% of over-70 voters that were already not voting for them, or those that did that have already left them due to WFA.
They should have merged NI and Income Tax. Yes the pensioners would object, but that wouldn't change many votes since they were already not voting Labour anyway!
A credible program for reforming the country would tackle all the shibboleths the prior government couldn't because of the threat of the grey vote. Abolish unnecessary welfare life WFA, abolish unjustified tax breaks like not paying NI on pensions, and tackle issues like planning restrictions that prevent young people getting a home because it might affect the view of a pensioner - or their house prices.
Merging NI and income tax would just expand the dependency culture of welfare we have massively by ending the contributory element to JSA and state pensions which cannot be claimed without enough NI contributions or credits. Absolutely not and we should also be using NI to help fund social care too and ideally move to a French style use of more social insurance to fund healthcare more broadly as well
There is no contributory element already since you get NI "credits" for being unemployed and living on welfare.
There is absolutely no reason to have NI exist to have contributions. Just set contributions based on Income Tax paid if that's what you want.
As I said below, we should also scrap NI credits, income tax is a tax not an insurance so that defeats the point of contributory welfare as well as being near impossible to calculate given how much income tax funds compared to ringfenced NI
National insurance is not an insurance either, its a tax.
People have a lifetime of NI credits. Just set contributions based on income tax, problem solved.
I agree with you on ending NI for working people though it would only be possible by raising standard rate to circa 25%
Everyone tries to find a tax increase that doesn't affect them when in truth income tax rates need to go higher
The budget and subsequent actions suggest, at least to me, it was good economics but bad politics.
There is a whole raft of structural decline to be reversed, be it roads, health, housing - just the nuts and bolts of a country. The idea that 'the market will fix it' is the mantra from a purists point of view but the Thames Water debacle shows that markets can be manipulated as politics and politicians constantly show themselves to be less able than the financial buccaneers.
Also where are economic cycles in all this? Germany looks like a classic case of on the downslope along with France so it's no surprise there would be a softening here due to the effects on our main trading partners. (42% of all exports)
... or did Gordon Brown actually achieve the demise of 'boom and bust'?
It was utterly terrible economics, hammering in taxes those who go to work, the productive part of the economy while leaving the rest of the economy untaxed.
You tax that which you wish to discourage, if you directly jack up taxes on employment/work you are discouraging work and NI is direct taxation on employment in the same way as fuel duty is direct taxation on fuel.
In a counterfactual world what Labour could have done is come in and taken the brave decision to merge National Insurance and Income Tax which would eliminate the 12% extra taxes that those who work for a living have to pay over those who don't.
That would be a 12% increase in Income Tax (without changing Income Tax rates) for those who aren't working on PAYE, while leaving PAYE workers tax rates unchanged. There's your tax rise for the nuts and bolts you want, if that's what you believe in, without hammering businesses or workers or people's pay for going to work.
And it would have been just as consistent with the manifesto as what they did.
I agree with this change and I am one of those pensioners who pay less tax than working people. However I suspect there are about 8 million votes at stake here. So good luck with that one.
So they increased 20 million people's taxes instead? The 20 million already paying more taxes than the 8 million? Besides how many of the 8 million are swing voters?
In 2024 Labour only got 20% of the votes of over-70s, with 46% going to the Tories and 15% going to Reform.
Labour won because they got the votes of working age people.
The incoming Labour government could and should have prioritised working age people who are heavily overtaxed and underfunded. Abolishing WFA was a tiny step in the right direction but then jacking up NI more than undid all the good of that, and won't win them any favour from the 80% of over-70 voters that were already not voting for them, or those that did that have already left them due to WFA.
They should have merged NI and Income Tax. Yes the pensioners would object, but that wouldn't change many votes since they were already not voting Labour anyway!
A credible program for reforming the country would tackle all the shibboleths the prior government couldn't because of the threat of the grey vote. Abolish unnecessary welfare life WFA, abolish unjustified tax breaks like not paying NI on pensions, and tackle issues like planning restrictions that prevent young people getting a home because it might affect the view of a pensioner - or their house prices.
Merging NI and income tax would just expand the dependency culture of welfare we have massively by ending the contributory element to JSA and state pensions which cannot be claimed without enough NI contributions or credits. Absolutely not and we should also be using NI to help fund social care too and ideally move to a French style use of more social insurance to fund healthcare more broadly as well
There is no contributory element already since you get NI "credits" for being unemployed and living on welfare.
There is absolutely no reason to have NI exist to have contributions. Just set contributions based on Income Tax paid if that's what you want.
As I said below, we should also scrap NI credits, income tax is a tax not an insurance so that defeats the point of contributory welfare as well as being near impossible to calculate given how much income tax funds compared to ringfenced NI
National insurance is not an insurance either, its a tax.
People have a lifetime of NI credits. Just set contributions based on income tax, problem solved.
I agree with you on ending NI for working people though it would only be possible by raising standard rate to circa 25%
Everyone tries to find a tax increase that doesn't affect them when in truth income tax rates need to go higher
If it meant abolishing NI I'd be OK with standard rate going to 28% in the first instance.
But yes, it really can and should be lower than that and if done that would be a tax cut for working people not a tax rise.
This could be a reaction to what Reeves might have done in her budget or it might be a reaction to what is likely to happen in the US with Trump or it could just be a bunch of whingeing directors predicting doom as they often do
The only certainty is that if she want's to instantly turn the graph around all they need to do is announce that the UK are starting talks to fully rejoin the EU thus addiing an estimated 4-5% to our GDP.
......and also making the UK a much more cheerful place.
Ooh, yes, more constitutional wrangling about Europe - that'll cheer people up. Worked brilliantly last time. Bound to be a recipe for harmony.
(I think you might be extrapolating from "Roger" to "people" here).
No it was from Newsnight a week or so ago. There didn't seem to be much argument about the 4-5% GDP. I thought it was pretty smart to have that figure embedded in most peoples consciousness available to be pulled out when appropriate. It all feels like a softening up exercise. What advertisers call 'a teaser campaign'
I have said this to you before
We cannot rejoin the EU without either a manifesto commitment or another referendum neither of which are possible before 2029
I support rejoining the single market and even freedom of movement whilst remaining outside the EU but even that would be near impossible in the short term
The other issue you do not seem to recognise is does the EU really want to recommence negotiations to rejoin, when the next UK government could want to leave and what shape will the EU be in post German and French elections ?
You mourn for something that is frankly years away
People arguing for something that is probably years away? Isn't that how politics and humanity is supposed to work?
Part of the problem that all governments face is that society has come to expect instant improvement. You can't get a better world delivered by Amazon Prime.
You can if it delivers your granddaughters Christmas present just in time on Christmas eve, as has just happened !!!!!!
We have a relative staying over Christmas. I'm not sure I shall be able to post here tomorrow, let alone do the Christmas crossword, which I usually enjoy. If I don't appear here in the next couple of days, then I'd like to wish every one Merry Christmas.
This could be a reaction to what Reeves might have done in her budget or it might be a reaction to what is likely to happen in the US with Trump or it could just be a bunch of whingeing directors predicting doom as they often do
The only certainty is that if she want's to instantly turn the graph around all they need to do is announce that the UK are starting talks to fully rejoin the EU thus addiing an estimated 4-5% to our GDP.
......and also making the UK a much more cheerful place.
Ooh, yes, more constitutional wrangling about Europe - that'll cheer people up. Worked brilliantly last time. Bound to be a recipe for harmony.
(I think you might be extrapolating from "Roger" to "people" here).
No it was from Newsnight a week or so ago. There didn't seem to be much argument about the 4-5% GDP. I thought it was pretty smart to have that figure embedded in most peoples consciousness available to be pulled out when appropriate. It all feels like a softening up exercise. What advertisers call 'a teaser campaign'
I have said this to you before
We cannot rejoin the EU without either a manifesto commitment or another referendum neither of which are possible before 2029
I support rejoining the single market and even freedom of movement whilst remaining outside the EU but even that would be near impossible in the short term
The other issue you do not seem to recognise is does the EU really want to recommence negotiations to rejoin, when the next UK government could want to leave and what shape will the EU be in post German and French elections ?
You mourn for something that is frankly years away
Bit like a Tory government.
You may find it is something worse !!!!
Not what the polling is showing so far.
However "meh" Starmer's government is, however much it's got wrong, it's still mostly polling above the alternative.
Not evidenced in local elections, and of course May elections are coming along
Nor in Scotland and even UK polls are narrowing to small Labour leads, ties or even conservative leads
Farage and Reform would not be rocketing up the polls if Labour were not as unpopular
Nor would Reform be rocketing if the Conservatives were not so unpopular too.
Offtopic but it’s Christmas, here’s Eddie Hearn in the US last month trying to sell the idea of darts to Americans. Interview with Patrick Bet-David, where he says that Matchroom’s darts operation is now twice as big as their boxing operation by revenue and profit.
There is a youngish chap on the YouTubes / newsletter that specializes in the business of sport. He put out a video about 3 weeks ago looking at everything Matchroom and identified that the Darts is now the big money earner...and....the current Sky tv contract comes up for renewal shortly. Now Eddie has this relationship with DAZN for the boxing and overseas rights for the darts is already with DAZN, at the very least he will be making Sky dig a lot deeper into their pockets for the rights, but perhaps he might even get a bumper deal from DAZN.
Last year’s darts final was apparently the highest audience Sky has ever had for something that wasn’t a football match, it was up there with the top Olympic events (that were on BBC) in the year’s ratings, around 9m watched it. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out with the international rights.
They have done an incredible job with the darts, it is a huge thing to go and see live (despite you literally been able to see f#'#k all), next years is basically booked up already, and the premier league are always sold out. And that atmosphere and the carefully crafted promoting of the players leads to big telly viewership, even in a very crowded market.
I actually saw darts played outside a couple of years ago, out here they booked the tennis stadium and used a lot of Perspex screens to keep the wind out!
Always an electric atmosphere though, my brother used to go to Ally Pally quite a bit when he lived in London.
"COMMERCIAL nuclear fusion moved a step closer after a US company announced plans to build a plant that will deliver electricity to the grid by early next decade.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) claims to be the world’s first company to develop plans to build a grid-scale fusion plant. The generator will be built in Chesterfield County, Virginia...
CFS says their reactor, known as ARC, will generate around 400 MW of electricity for the grid... The company expects to generate at this capacity by the early 2030s."
Either a huge breakthrough, or else more power could be generated by simply burning the cash that will be invested.
Edit: "To date, it has raised over US$2bn, which includes major backing from Italian oil giant Eni."
Have done a PhD on the magnetic confinement of fusion plasma, I'd bet my house on the latter.
Feeling a Pinch?
Tokamaks in my case, but I don't think Z-pinch devices hold out any more immediate promise. The thing is, we know that magnetic confinement fusion works in theory and can be demonstrated in experimental devices, but the engineering challenges of building an actual continuously operating fusion power plant are utterly daunting. Plasma edge instabilities, refuelling and exhaust, tritium breeding and material embrittlement are just a few examples of the unsolved problems that need to be resolved for a commercial device. And then, as Stuartinromford mentions, it has to successfully compete with wind, solar and batteries.
Yup.
Looking at ITER - it’s hard to see a path from that to a practical power plant. I mean, it is a lovely giant physics experiment and we will get lots of research out of it. But high uptime net power?
The budget and subsequent actions suggest, at least to me, it was good economics but bad politics.
There is a whole raft of structural decline to be reversed, be it roads, health, housing - just the nuts and bolts of a country. The idea that 'the market will fix it' is the mantra from a purists point of view but the Thames Water debacle shows that markets can be manipulated as politics and politicians constantly show themselves to be less able than the financial buccaneers.
Also where are economic cycles in all this? Germany looks like a classic case of on the downslope along with France so it's no surprise there would be a softening here due to the effects on our main trading partners. (42% of all exports)
... or did Gordon Brown actually achieve the demise of 'boom and bust'?
It was utterly terrible economics, hammering in taxes those who go to work, the productive part of the economy while leaving the rest of the economy untaxed.
You tax that which you wish to discourage, if you directly jack up taxes on employment/work you are discouraging work and NI is direct taxation on employment in the same way as fuel duty is direct taxation on fuel.
In a counterfactual world what Labour could have done is come in and taken the brave decision to merge National Insurance and Income Tax which would eliminate the 12% extra taxes that those who work for a living have to pay over those who don't.
That would be a 12% increase in Income Tax (without changing Income Tax rates) for those who aren't working on PAYE, while leaving PAYE workers tax rates unchanged. There's your tax rise for the nuts and bolts you want, if that's what you believe in, without hammering businesses or workers or people's pay for going to work.
And it would have been just as consistent with the manifesto as what they did.
I agree with this change and I am one of those pensioners who pay less tax than working people. However I suspect there are about 8 million votes at stake here. So good luck with that one.
So they increased 20 million people's taxes instead? The 20 million already paying more taxes than the 8 million? Besides how many of the 8 million are swing voters?
In 2024 Labour only got 20% of the votes of over-70s, with 46% going to the Tories and 15% going to Reform.
Labour won because they got the votes of working age people.
The incoming Labour government could and should have prioritised working age people who are heavily overtaxed and underfunded. Abolishing WFA was a tiny step in the right direction but then jacking up NI more than undid all the good of that, and won't win them any favour from the 80% of over-70 voters that were already not voting for them, or those that did that have already left them due to WFA.
They should have merged NI and Income Tax. Yes the pensioners would object, but that wouldn't change many votes since they were already not voting Labour anyway!
A credible program for reforming the country would tackle all the shibboleths the prior government couldn't because of the threat of the grey vote. Abolish unnecessary welfare life WFA, abolish unjustified tax breaks like not paying NI on pensions, and tackle issues like planning restrictions that prevent young people getting a home because it might affect the view of a pensioner - or their house prices.
Merging NI and income tax would just expand the dependency culture of welfare we have massively by ending the contributory element to JSA and state pensions which cannot be claimed without enough NI contributions or credits. Absolutely not and we should also be using NI to help fund social care too and ideally move to a French style use of more social insurance to fund healthcare more broadly as well
There is no contributory element already since you get NI "credits" for being unemployed and living on welfare.
There is absolutely no reason to have NI exist to have contributions. Just set contributions based on Income Tax paid if that's what you want.
All the arrangements for Income Tax and NI need reviewing. As do the mechanisms for 'reclaiming' over-payments from those receiving benefits. They are all the result of piecemeal changes and someone needs to have a good look at them and rationalise the whole thing.
They did review the whole issue of benefits and called it Universal Credit. It was introduced at the 2010 Conservative Party conference by Ian Duncan Smith who is responsible for a lot of it. The mechanism is a form of social net and the taper effect (taking away 'overpayment') is core. Even 14 years later it is not fully implemented so a suggestion of waving a magic wand and replacing it within one or even two parliaments does not stand up to critical analysis. National Insurance, by the way, was introduced by Winston Churchill.
Your idea is to make work pay by making the poor, poorer is an interesting concept. Perhaps stand for parliament on that platform and like IDS bring in new legislation to replace Universal Credit.
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
But we're right at the start of the election cycle. The idea is to have a solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027. The last thing you want to do is peak too early. History is littered with examples of what happens when someone or something peaks too early.
Well that "solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027" was the idea...
This could be a reaction to what Reeves might have done in her budget or it might be a reaction to what is likely to happen in the US with Trump or it could just be a bunch of whingeing directors predicting doom as they often do
The only certainty is that if she want's to instantly turn the graph around all they need to do is announce that the UK are starting talks to fully rejoin the EU thus addiing an estimated 4-5% to our GDP.
......and also making the UK a much more cheerful place.
Ooh, yes, more constitutional wrangling about Europe - that'll cheer people up. Worked brilliantly last time. Bound to be a recipe for harmony.
(I think you might be extrapolating from "Roger" to "people" here).
No it was from Newsnight a week or so ago. There didn't seem to be much argument about the 4-5% GDP. I thought it was pretty smart to have that figure embedded in most peoples consciousness available to be pulled out when appropriate. It all feels like a softening up exercise. What advertisers call 'a teaser campaign'
I have said this to you before
We cannot rejoin the EU without either a manifesto commitment or another referendum neither of which are possible before 2029
I support rejoining the single market and even freedom of movement whilst remaining outside the EU but even that would be near impossible in the short term
The other issue you do not seem to recognise is does the EU really want to recommence negotiations to rejoin, when the next UK government could want to leave and what shape will the EU be in post German and French elections ?
You mourn for something that is frankly years away
Bit like a Tory government.
You may find it is something worse !!!!
Not what the polling is showing so far.
However "meh" Starmer's government is, however much it's got wrong, it's still mostly polling above the alternative.
Not evidenced in local elections, and of course May elections are coming along
Nor in Scotland and even UK polls are narrowing to small Labour leads, ties or even conservative leads
Farage and Reform would not be rocketing up the polls if Labour were not as unpopular
Nor would Reform be rocketing if the Conservatives were not so unpopular too.
I agree and as I have said they are moribund at present, though they are doing very well in the locals even here in North Wales
We were talking about CO2 emissions from cement manufacturing the other day. I've just stumbled on this snippet:
The cement industry alone accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a greater proportion than any single country in the world other than the US and China. A report by the World Economic Forum in September found that unless cement production becomes more sustainable, its emissions would more than double to 3.8bn t/y by the middle of the century.
A reminder that, despite all the global conferences CO2 emissions are rising not falling.
(And even when they fall, that just means the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is still occuring but a bit more slowly, it doesn't mean that CO2 levels get lower).
Perhaps the rest of us might take the global conferences a little more seriously when they’re sponsored by Webex and Teams, and not an excuse for flying hundreds of planes half way around the world.
Either you believe face to face meetings are more effective for reaching agreement than Teams meetings, or you don’t. Even if flying delegations to a conference got one more tiny country on board with a limited emissions target than a teams meeting, it would pay back the meeting emissions many thousands of times over.
Though I’ve no doubt the same Telegraph editorial team who run stories about face to face climate conferences being a waste of time are churning out stories about lazy skivers working from home and devastating the London commercial property market.
I think that the climate conferences specifically, should be example models of exactly how teleconferencing can be made to work effectively. Anyone who wants to reduce carbon emissions should be all in favour of encouraging remote working whenever possible.
Of course newspapers hate WFH, because people won’t be spending an hour or two on the train every day reading the newspaper. To add that half the government are WFH at a time when the service they’re providing is seen as generally crap. Incentivise WFH opportunities to the performance of yourself and your team.
I don't think people would mind how climate change conferences were run if CO2 output was falling. It isn't, it's rising. And the conferences have been around since the 1980s.
China is still building coal fired power stations, in reduced numbers.
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Eh? 2 was created by IR35 which was introduced by Gordon Brown in 2000.
It was an incompetent technocratic fix that showed no understanding of how business works, was designed to solve a largely non-existent problem and caused far more damage than it solved.
Typical fucking Labour. Typical fucking Brown.
Hmm, I think there was at least something of a problem. I was working in the City back then and you'd get these guys (typically in IT but not always) who'd be working at a bank, sat there at the same desk for years, Mon to Fri, 9 to 5, employees basically, but instead of being on the payroll they'd be "limited companies" collecting their salary as fees and paying themselves in dividends out of "profits" having knocked off a ton of expenses such as travel and lunch and clothes and pretty much anything else you could think of. Ended up with an effective tax rate of about half what it would have been if they were on the books. A bit of a scam.
Yeah - and because they didn’t have all the staff costs, their day rate was pretty high as well.
IR35 happened, not because of this , but because a similar pattern started happening in parts of government.
Stupidly, in many areas, they didn’t put in a rule about not being able to contract in the same area you’d previously worked in. Every private company did this in about 1998.
So you had people quoting their job on Friday and rolling back into the same job, Monday. On big, big money.
Local government had a plague of this, at the higher levels.
So Gordon stamped on the whole lot.
Yep, the top line rate tended to be about 50% higher than a salary equivalent. With that plus the aforementioned tax breaks you had to be slightly mad not to participate if your "employer" was ok with it. I did a bit of it myself at times to be absolutely honest with you. Don't know how remuneration usually works now in the City contracting/consulting space. Haven't kept up with it.
"In 2024, EVs must make up 22% of a carmaker's car sales, and 10% of van sales. This target is set to rise. Firms failing to meet these targets face a £15,000 fine per sale."
That is, of course, a continuation of the previous government's stupid decision.
If European governments had started of with the explicit intention of turning the whole car market into Chinese white goods, it’s different to see anything they’d have done differently than what has actually been done.
The Cult of Outsourcing - “Running a battery factory looks jolly difficult and expensive. Just buy some of those Chinese chaps. Negotiating a price for a product I don’t understand? That’s Real Work (TM) with lots of document in written in legalese, instead of that science nonsense.”
OK, I get that business is not happy right now. I get why. Though, as @algarkirk pointed out upthread, the massive gap between government income and expenditure has to be closed somehow. Hangovers aren't meant to be fun.
But for business confidence to be as low as during the pandemic, or the aftermath of the Trusstershambles... Maybe that's a bit of an overreaction?
Confidence was already low before Truss, so I think that chart is more reasonably read as showing that the effect of a Labour government (perhaps just this one, which seems particularly inept) on business confidence is on a par with a pandemic or major European war.
Starmer & Reeves, as good for business as plague and war.
"COMMERCIAL nuclear fusion moved a step closer after a US company announced plans to build a plant that will deliver electricity to the grid by early next decade.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) claims to be the world’s first company to develop plans to build a grid-scale fusion plant. The generator will be built in Chesterfield County, Virginia...
CFS says their reactor, known as ARC, will generate around 400 MW of electricity for the grid... The company expects to generate at this capacity by the early 2030s."
Either a huge breakthrough, or else more power could be generated by simply burning the cash that will be invested.
Edit: "To date, it has raised over US$2bn, which includes major backing from Italian oil giant Eni."
Have done a PhD on the magnetic confinement of fusion plasma, I'd bet my house on the latter.
Besides, it has to beat solar/wind plus batteries. No, they're not perfect but they are cheap and trending cheaper.
I wrote a scifo story where nuclear fusion has been perfected. But it is only cost-effective in marginal situations like Antarctic research stations or manned Mars missions. For everything else, renewables were more cost effective and less hassle.
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
But we're right at the start of the election cycle. The idea is to have a solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027. The last thing you want to do is peak too early. History is littered with examples of what happens when someone or something peaks too early.
Well that "solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027" was the idea...
They'll be lucky to hit it by 2029.
We'll see. And remember this, the further it goes down the stronger it will pop up when it emerges. Like the rubber duck in a bath. I guess we all have one of those?
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
If you think Labour are unpopular now, wait until the diggers and cement mixers start turning up...
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
But we're right at the start of the election cycle. The idea is to have a solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027. The last thing you want to do is peak too early. History is littered with examples of what happens when someone or something peaks too early.
Well that "solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027" was the idea...
They'll be lucky to hit it by 2029.
We'll see. And remember this, the further it goes down the stronger it will pop up when it emerges. Like the rubber duck in a bath. I guess we all have one of those?
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
The polling doesn't support that claim.
Yes it does, hence Labour's poll collapse since July
"COMMERCIAL nuclear fusion moved a step closer after a US company announced plans to build a plant that will deliver electricity to the grid by early next decade.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) claims to be the world’s first company to develop plans to build a grid-scale fusion plant. The generator will be built in Chesterfield County, Virginia...
CFS says their reactor, known as ARC, will generate around 400 MW of electricity for the grid... The company expects to generate at this capacity by the early 2030s."
Either a huge breakthrough, or else more power could be generated by simply burning the cash that will be invested.
Edit: "To date, it has raised over US$2bn, which includes major backing from Italian oil giant Eni."
Have done a PhD on the magnetic confinement of fusion plasma, I'd bet my house on the latter.
What about the approaches that use inertial confinement ?
The budget and subsequent actions suggest, at least to me, it was good economics but bad politics.
There is a whole raft of structural decline to be reversed, be it roads, health, housing - just the nuts and bolts of a country. The idea that 'the market will fix it' is the mantra from a purists point of view but the Thames Water debacle shows that markets can be manipulated as politics and politicians constantly show themselves to be less able than the financial buccaneers.
Also where are economic cycles in all this? Germany looks like a classic case of on the downslope along with France so it's no surprise there would be a softening here due to the effects on our main trading partners. (42% of all exports)
... or did Gordon Brown actually achieve the demise of 'boom and bust'?
It was utterly terrible economics, hammering in taxes those who go to work, the productive part of the economy while leaving the rest of the economy untaxed.
You tax that which you wish to discourage, if you directly jack up taxes on employment/work you are discouraging work and NI is direct taxation on employment in the same way as fuel duty is direct taxation on fuel.
In a counterfactual world what Labour could have done is come in and taken the brave decision to merge National Insurance and Income Tax which would eliminate the 12% extra taxes that those who work for a living have to pay over those who don't.
That would be a 12% increase in Income Tax (without changing Income Tax rates) for those who aren't working on PAYE, while leaving PAYE workers tax rates unchanged. There's your tax rise for the nuts and bolts you want, if that's what you believe in, without hammering businesses or workers or people's pay for going to work.
And it would have been just as consistent with the manifesto as what they did.
I agree with this change and I am one of those pensioners who pay less tax than working people. However I suspect there are about 8 million votes at stake here. So good luck with that one.
So they increased 20 million people's taxes instead? The 20 million already paying more taxes than the 8 million? Besides how many of the 8 million are swing voters?
In 2024 Labour only got 20% of the votes of over-70s, with 46% going to the Tories and 15% going to Reform.
Labour won because they got the votes of working age people.
The incoming Labour government could and should have prioritised working age people who are heavily overtaxed and underfunded. Abolishing WFA was a tiny step in the right direction but then jacking up NI more than undid all the good of that, and won't win them any favour from the 80% of over-70 voters that were already not voting for them, or those that did that have already left them due to WFA.
They should have merged NI and Income Tax. Yes the pensioners would object, but that wouldn't change many votes since they were already not voting Labour anyway!
A credible program for reforming the country would tackle all the shibboleths the prior government couldn't because of the threat of the grey vote. Abolish unnecessary welfare life WFA, abolish unjustified tax breaks like not paying NI on pensions, and tackle issues like planning restrictions that prevent young people getting a home because it might affect the view of a pensioner - or their house prices.
Merging NI and income tax would just expand the dependency culture of welfare we have massively by ending the contributory element to JSA and state pensions which cannot be claimed without enough NI contributions or credits. Absolutely not and we should also be using NI to help fund social care too and ideally move to a French style use of more social insurance to fund healthcare more broadly as well
There is no contributory element already since you get NI "credits" for being unemployed and living on welfare.
There is absolutely no reason to have NI exist to have contributions. Just set contributions based on Income Tax paid if that's what you want.
All the arrangements for Income Tax and NI need reviewing. As do the mechanisms for 'reclaiming' over-payments from those receiving benefits. They are all the result of piecemeal changes and someone needs to have a good look at them and rationalise the whole thing.
They did review the whole issue of benefits and called it Universal Credit. It was introduced at the 2010 Conservative Party conference by Ian Duncan Smith who is responsible for a lot of it. The mechanism is a form of social net and the taper effect (taking away 'overpayment') is core. Even 14 years later it is not fully implemented so a suggestion of waving a magic wand and replacing it within one or even two parliaments does not stand up to critical analysis. National Insurance, by the way, was introduced by Winston Churchill.
Your idea is to make work pay by making the poor, poorer is an interesting concept. Perhaps stand for parliament on that platform and like IDS bring in new legislation to replace Universal Credit.
Universal credit was a step in the right direction, but only a partial step and the taper is what causes the poverty trap that means people think its not worth working, because its not for them.
Universal credit was introduced in one Parliament, so its successor can be. Universal credit was announced in 2010, legislated for in 2012 and began to be rolled out in 2013 so there's absolutely no reason why it can't be replaced in one, let alone 2, Parliaments.
The solution is elegant in its simplicity, but will piss off many vested interests. Just as UC merged many benefits together, we need to do the same with the tax system. Merge UC, Income Tax and National Insurance into one system.
UC has taken us partway there. Time to finish the job. Merge UC with Income Tax and NI so that there's only one income-related tax rather than multiple taxes/tapers that trap people in poverty.
That way work pays and people will work, because its in their own interests to do so.
Offtopic but it’s Christmas, here’s Eddie Hearn in the US last month trying to sell the idea of darts to Americans. Interview with Patrick Bet-David, where he says that Matchroom’s darts operation is now twice as big as their boxing operation by revenue and profit.
There is a youngish chap on the YouTubes / newsletter that specializes in the business of sport. He put out a video about 3 weeks ago looking at everything Matchroom and identified that the Darts is now the big money earner...and....the current Sky tv contract comes up for renewal shortly. Now Eddie has this relationship with DAZN for the boxing and overseas rights for the darts is already with DAZN, at the very least he will be making Sky dig a lot deeper into their pockets for the rights, but perhaps he might even get a bumper deal from DAZN.
Last year’s darts final was apparently the highest audience Sky has ever had for something that wasn’t a football match, it was up there with the top Olympic events (that were on BBC) in the year’s ratings, around 9m watched it. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out with the international rights.
They have done an incredible job with the darts, it is a huge thing to go and see live (despite you literally been able to see f#'#k all), next years is basically booked up already, and the premier league are always sold out. And that atmosphere and the carefully crafted promoting of the players leads to big telly viewership, even in a very crowded market.
I actually saw darts played outside a couple of years ago, out here they booked the tennis stadium and used a lot of Perspex screens to keep the wind out!
Always an electric atmosphere though, my brother used to go to Ally Pally quite a bit when he lived in London.
Darts will eat itself, the same way billiards did, because it is too easy. I've joked before that if I were running a girls school, I'd put a dart board in every common room in order to identify and develop nascent talent.
As audiences grow and prizes rise, millions around the world will try the game and in time there will be a pool of a dozen or so players who can score 180 at will, and nine-darters in every leg, and then it will become mechanical and boring.
"COMMERCIAL nuclear fusion moved a step closer after a US company announced plans to build a plant that will deliver electricity to the grid by early next decade.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) claims to be the world’s first company to develop plans to build a grid-scale fusion plant. The generator will be built in Chesterfield County, Virginia...
CFS says their reactor, known as ARC, will generate around 400 MW of electricity for the grid... The company expects to generate at this capacity by the early 2030s."
Either a huge breakthrough, or else more power could be generated by simply burning the cash that will be invested.
Edit: "To date, it has raised over US$2bn, which includes major backing from Italian oil giant Eni."
Have done a PhD on the magnetic confinement of fusion plasma, I'd bet my house on the latter.
Feeling a Pinch?
Tokamaks in my case, but I don't think Z-pinch devices hold out any more immediate promise. The thing is, we know that magnetic confinement fusion works in theory and can be demonstrated in experimental devices, but the engineering challenges of building an actual continuously operating fusion power plant are utterly daunting. Plasma edge instabilities, refuelling and exhaust, tritium breeding and material embrittlement are just a few examples of the unsolved problems that need to be resolved for a commercial device. And then, as Stuartinromford mentions, it has to successfully compete with wind, solar and batteries.
Yup.
Looking at ITER - it’s hard to see a path from that to a practical power plant. I mean, it is a lovely giant physics experiment and we will get lots of research out of it. But high uptime net power?
Chances are that all these cheaper and faster commercial fusion experiments have already rendered ITER obsolete.
"In 2024, EVs must make up 22% of a carmaker's car sales, and 10% of van sales. This target is set to rise. Firms failing to meet these targets face a £15,000 fine per sale."
That is, of course, a continuation of the previous government's stupid decision.
If European governments had started of with the explicit intention of turning the whole car market into Chinese white goods, it’s different to see anything they’d have done differently than what has actually been done.
The Cult of Outsourcing - “Running a battery factory looks jolly difficult and expensive. Just buy some of those Chinese chaps. Negotiating a price for a product I don’t understand? That’s Real Work (TM) with lots of document in written in legalese, instead of that science nonsense.”
Cult of Onshoring - get those clever Chinese chaps to build a plant here, and learn from them.
That's what they did with us a quarter of a century back.
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
If you think Labour are unpopular now, wait until the diggers and cement mixers start turning up...
My concern is who's going to move to these places if the economy tanks and there is insufficient local employment to make them viable? We'll have a landscape dotted with 'Angela's ghost towns'. The imagery would be horrific.
The budget and subsequent actions suggest, at least to me, it was good economics but bad politics.
There is a whole raft of structural decline to be reversed, be it roads, health, housing - just the nuts and bolts of a country. The idea that 'the market will fix it' is the mantra from a purists point of view but the Thames Water debacle shows that markets can be manipulated as politics and politicians constantly show themselves to be less able than the financial buccaneers.
Also where are economic cycles in all this? Germany looks like a classic case of on the downslope along with France so it's no surprise there would be a softening here due to the effects on our main trading partners. (42% of all exports)
... or did Gordon Brown actually achieve the demise of 'boom and bust'?
It was utterly terrible economics, hammering in taxes those who go to work, the productive part of the economy while leaving the rest of the economy untaxed.
You tax that which you wish to discourage, if you directly jack up taxes on employment/work you are discouraging work and NI is direct taxation on employment in the same way as fuel duty is direct taxation on fuel.
In a counterfactual world what Labour could have done is come in and taken the brave decision to merge National Insurance and Income Tax which would eliminate the 12% extra taxes that those who work for a living have to pay over those who don't.
That would be a 12% increase in Income Tax (without changing Income Tax rates) for those who aren't working on PAYE, while leaving PAYE workers tax rates unchanged. There's your tax rise for the nuts and bolts you want, if that's what you believe in, without hammering businesses or workers or people's pay for going to work.
And it would have been just as consistent with the manifesto as what they did.
I agree with this change and I am one of those pensioners who pay less tax than working people. However I suspect there are about 8 million votes at stake here. So good luck with that one.
So they increased 20 million people's taxes instead? The 20 million already paying more taxes than the 8 million? Besides how many of the 8 million are swing voters?
In 2024 Labour only got 20% of the votes of over-70s, with 46% going to the Tories and 15% going to Reform.
Labour won because they got the votes of working age people.
The incoming Labour government could and should have prioritised working age people who are heavily overtaxed and underfunded. Abolishing WFA was a tiny step in the right direction but then jacking up NI more than undid all the good of that, and won't win them any favour from the 80% of over-70 voters that were already not voting for them, or those that did that have already left them due to WFA.
They should have merged NI and Income Tax. Yes the pensioners would object, but that wouldn't change many votes since they were already not voting Labour anyway!
A credible program for reforming the country would tackle all the shibboleths the prior government couldn't because of the threat of the grey vote. Abolish unnecessary welfare life WFA, abolish unjustified tax breaks like not paying NI on pensions, and tackle issues like planning restrictions that prevent young people getting a home because it might affect the view of a pensioner - or their house prices.
Merging NI and income tax would just expand the dependency culture of welfare we have massively by ending the contributory element to JSA and state pensions which cannot be claimed without enough NI contributions or credits. Absolutely not and we should also be using NI to help fund social care too and ideally move to a French style use of more social insurance to fund healthcare more broadly as well
There is no contributory element already since you get NI "credits" for being unemployed and living on welfare.
There is absolutely no reason to have NI exist to have contributions. Just set contributions based on Income Tax paid if that's what you want.
All the arrangements for Income Tax and NI need reviewing. As do the mechanisms for 'reclaiming' over-payments from those receiving benefits. They are all the result of piecemeal changes and someone needs to have a good look at them and rationalise the whole thing.
They did review the whole issue of benefits and called it Universal Credit. It was introduced at the 2010 Conservative Party conference by Ian Duncan Smith who is responsible for a lot of it. The mechanism is a form of social net and the taper effect (taking away 'overpayment') is core. Even 14 years later it is not fully implemented so a suggestion of waving a magic wand and replacing it within one or even two parliaments does not stand up to critical analysis. National Insurance, by the way, was introduced by Winston Churchill.
Your idea is to make work pay by making the poor, poorer is an interesting concept. Perhaps stand for parliament on that platform and like IDS bring in new legislation to replace Universal Credit.
Universal credit was a step in the right direction, but only a partial step and the taper is what causes the poverty trap that means people think its not worth working, because its not for them.
Universal credit was introduced in one Parliament, so its successor can be. Universal credit was announced in 2010, legislated for in 2012 and began to be rolled out in 2013 so there's absolutely no reason why it can't be replaced in one, let alone 2, Parliaments.
The solution is elegant in its simplicity, but will piss off many vested interests. Just as UC merged many benefits together, we need to do the same with the tax system. Merge UC, Income Tax and National Insurance into one system.
UC has taken us partway there. Time to finish the job. Merge UC with Income Tax and NI so that there's only one income-related tax rather than multiple taxes/tapers that trap people in poverty.
That way work pays and people will work, because its in their own interests to do so.
The big problem with merging tax and benefits is that tax is calculated on an individual basis, but benefits are based on household income.
"In 2024, EVs must make up 22% of a carmaker's car sales, and 10% of van sales. This target is set to rise. Firms failing to meet these targets face a £15,000 fine per sale."
That is, of course, a continuation of the previous government's stupid decision.
If European governments had started of with the explicit intention of turning the whole car market into Chinese white goods, it’s different to see anything they’d have done differently than what has actually been done.
The Cult of Outsourcing - “Running a battery factory looks jolly difficult and expensive. Just buy some of those Chinese chaps. Negotiating a price for a product I don’t understand? That’s Real Work (TM) with lots of document in written in legalese, instead of that science nonsense.”
Cult of Onshoring - get those clever Chinese chaps to build a plant here, and learn from them.
That's what they did with us a quarter of a century back.
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
If you think Labour are unpopular now, wait until the diggers and cement mixers start turning up...
My concern is who's going to move to these places if the economy tanks and there is insufficient local employment to make them viable? We'll have a landscape dotted with 'Angela's ghost towns'. The imagery would be horrific.
Rachel Reeves is the only one in the government taking action to reduce immigration.
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
If you think Labour are unpopular now, wait until the diggers and cement mixers start turning up...
My concern is who's going to move to these places if the economy tanks and there is insufficient local employment to make them viable? We'll have a landscape dotted with 'Angela's ghost towns'. The imagery would be horrific.
There is such a vast shortage of housing that there is no way that happens.
The budget and subsequent actions suggest, at least to me, it was good economics but bad politics.
There is a whole raft of structural decline to be reversed, be it roads, health, housing - just the nuts and bolts of a country. The idea that 'the market will fix it' is the mantra from a purists point of view but the Thames Water debacle shows that markets can be manipulated as politics and politicians constantly show themselves to be less able than the financial buccaneers.
Also where are economic cycles in all this? Germany looks like a classic case of on the downslope along with France so it's no surprise there would be a softening here due to the effects on our main trading partners. (42% of all exports)
... or did Gordon Brown actually achieve the demise of 'boom and bust'?
It was utterly terrible economics, hammering in taxes those who go to work, the productive part of the economy while leaving the rest of the economy untaxed.
You tax that which you wish to discourage, if you directly jack up taxes on employment/work you are discouraging work and NI is direct taxation on employment in the same way as fuel duty is direct taxation on fuel.
In a counterfactual world what Labour could have done is come in and taken the brave decision to merge National Insurance and Income Tax which would eliminate the 12% extra taxes that those who work for a living have to pay over those who don't.
That would be a 12% increase in Income Tax (without changing Income Tax rates) for those who aren't working on PAYE, while leaving PAYE workers tax rates unchanged. There's your tax rise for the nuts and bolts you want, if that's what you believe in, without hammering businesses or workers or people's pay for going to work.
And it would have been just as consistent with the manifesto as what they did.
I agree with this change and I am one of those pensioners who pay less tax than working people. However I suspect there are about 8 million votes at stake here. So good luck with that one.
So they increased 20 million people's taxes instead? The 20 million already paying more taxes than the 8 million? Besides how many of the 8 million are swing voters?
In 2024 Labour only got 20% of the votes of over-70s, with 46% going to the Tories and 15% going to Reform.
Labour won because they got the votes of working age people.
The incoming Labour government could and should have prioritised working age people who are heavily overtaxed and underfunded. Abolishing WFA was a tiny step in the right direction but then jacking up NI more than undid all the good of that, and won't win them any favour from the 80% of over-70 voters that were already not voting for them, or those that did that have already left them due to WFA.
They should have merged NI and Income Tax. Yes the pensioners would object, but that wouldn't change many votes since they were already not voting Labour anyway!
A credible program for reforming the country would tackle all the shibboleths the prior government couldn't because of the threat of the grey vote. Abolish unnecessary welfare life WFA, abolish unjustified tax breaks like not paying NI on pensions, and tackle issues like planning restrictions that prevent young people getting a home because it might affect the view of a pensioner - or their house prices.
Merging NI and income tax would just expand the dependency culture of welfare we have massively by ending the contributory element to JSA and state pensions which cannot be claimed without enough NI contributions or credits. Absolutely not and we should also be using NI to help fund social care too and ideally move to a French style use of more social insurance to fund healthcare more broadly as well
There is no contributory element already since you get NI "credits" for being unemployed and living on welfare.
There is absolutely no reason to have NI exist to have contributions. Just set contributions based on Income Tax paid if that's what you want.
All the arrangements for Income Tax and NI need reviewing. As do the mechanisms for 'reclaiming' over-payments from those receiving benefits. They are all the result of piecemeal changes and someone needs to have a good look at them and rationalise the whole thing.
They did review the whole issue of benefits and called it Universal Credit. It was introduced at the 2010 Conservative Party conference by Ian Duncan Smith who is responsible for a lot of it. The mechanism is a form of social net and the taper effect (taking away 'overpayment') is core. Even 14 years later it is not fully implemented so a suggestion of waving a magic wand and replacing it within one or even two parliaments does not stand up to critical analysis. National Insurance, by the way, was introduced by Winston Churchill.
Your idea is to make work pay by making the poor, poorer is an interesting concept. Perhaps stand for parliament on that platform and like IDS bring in new legislation to replace Universal Credit.
Universal credit was a step in the right direction, but only a partial step and the taper is what causes the poverty trap that means people think its not worth working, because its not for them.
Universal credit was introduced in one Parliament, so its successor can be. Universal credit was announced in 2010, legislated for in 2012 and began to be rolled out in 2013 so there's absolutely no reason why it can't be replaced in one, let alone 2, Parliaments.
The solution is elegant in its simplicity, but will piss off many vested interests. Just as UC merged many benefits together, we need to do the same with the tax system. Merge UC, Income Tax and National Insurance into one system.
UC has taken us partway there. Time to finish the job. Merge UC with Income Tax and NI so that there's only one income-related tax rather than multiple taxes/tapers that trap people in poverty.
That way work pays and people will work, because its in their own interests to do so.
The big problem with merging tax and benefits is that tax is calculated on an individual basis, but benefits are based on household income.
So make household income the basis for tax in the reform too, that has a lot to justify it.
Gets rid of the anomalies and cliff edges and creates a single workable system, yes its complicated but complicated stuff is exactly what newly elected governments should be tackling.
"In 2024, EVs must make up 22% of a carmaker's car sales, and 10% of van sales. This target is set to rise. Firms failing to meet these targets face a £15,000 fine per sale."
That is, of course, a continuation of the previous government's stupid decision.
If European governments had started of with the explicit intention of turning the whole car market into Chinese white goods, it’s different to see anything they’d have done differently than what has actually been done.
The Cult of Outsourcing - “Running a battery factory looks jolly difficult and expensive. Just buy some of those Chinese chaps. Negotiating a price for a product I don’t understand? That’s Real Work (TM) with lots of document in written in legalese, instead of that science nonsense.”
Cult of Onshoring - get those clever Chinese chaps to build a plant here, and learn from them.
That's what they did with us a quarter of a century back.
Are the UK government insisting on British ‘local partners’ for the Chinese companies investing in Britain, and are they intending to steal the Chinese IP and have the factory run ‘ghost’ shifts at the weekends?
The budget and subsequent actions suggest, at least to me, it was good economics but bad politics.
There is a whole raft of structural decline to be reversed, be it roads, health, housing - just the nuts and bolts of a country. The idea that 'the market will fix it' is the mantra from a purists point of view but the Thames Water debacle shows that markets can be manipulated as politics and politicians constantly show themselves to be less able than the financial buccaneers.
Also where are economic cycles in all this? Germany looks like a classic case of on the downslope along with France so it's no surprise there would be a softening here due to the effects on our main trading partners. (42% of all exports)
... or did Gordon Brown actually achieve the demise of 'boom and bust'?
It was utterly terrible economics, hammering in taxes those who go to work, the productive part of the economy while leaving the rest of the economy untaxed.
You tax that which you wish to discourage, if you directly jack up taxes on employment/work you are discouraging work and NI is direct taxation on employment in the same way as fuel duty is direct taxation on fuel.
In a counterfactual world what Labour could have done is come in and taken the brave decision to merge National Insurance and Income Tax which would eliminate the 12% extra taxes that those who work for a living have to pay over those who don't.
That would be a 12% increase in Income Tax (without changing Income Tax rates) for those who aren't working on PAYE, while leaving PAYE workers tax rates unchanged. There's your tax rise for the nuts and bolts you want, if that's what you believe in, without hammering businesses or workers or people's pay for going to work.
And it would have been just as consistent with the manifesto as what they did.
I agree with this change and I am one of those pensioners who pay less tax than working people. However I suspect there are about 8 million votes at stake here. So good luck with that one.
So they increased 20 million people's taxes instead? The 20 million already paying more taxes than the 8 million? Besides how many of the 8 million are swing voters?
In 2024 Labour only got 20% of the votes of over-70s, with 46% going to the Tories and 15% going to Reform.
Labour won because they got the votes of working age people.
The incoming Labour government could and should have prioritised working age people who are heavily overtaxed and underfunded. Abolishing WFA was a tiny step in the right direction but then jacking up NI more than undid all the good of that, and won't win them any favour from the 80% of over-70 voters that were already not voting for them, or those that did that have already left them due to WFA.
They should have merged NI and Income Tax. Yes the pensioners would object, but that wouldn't change many votes since they were already not voting Labour anyway!
A credible program for reforming the country would tackle all the shibboleths the prior government couldn't because of the threat of the grey vote. Abolish unnecessary welfare life WFA, abolish unjustified tax breaks like not paying NI on pensions, and tackle issues like planning restrictions that prevent young people getting a home because it might affect the view of a pensioner - or their house prices.
Merging NI and income tax would just expand the dependency culture of welfare we have massively by ending the contributory element to JSA and state pensions which cannot be claimed without enough NI contributions or credits. Absolutely not and we should also be using NI to help fund social care too and ideally move to a French style use of more social insurance to fund healthcare more broadly as well
There is no contributory element already since you get NI "credits" for being unemployed and living on welfare.
There is absolutely no reason to have NI exist to have contributions. Just set contributions based on Income Tax paid if that's what you want.
All the arrangements for Income Tax and NI need reviewing. As do the mechanisms for 'reclaiming' over-payments from those receiving benefits. They are all the result of piecemeal changes and someone needs to have a good look at them and rationalise the whole thing.
They did review the whole issue of benefits and called it Universal Credit. It was introduced at the 2010 Conservative Party conference by Ian Duncan Smith who is responsible for a lot of it. The mechanism is a form of social net and the taper effect (taking away 'overpayment') is core. Even 14 years later it is not fully implemented so a suggestion of waving a magic wand and replacing it within one or even two parliaments does not stand up to critical analysis. National Insurance, by the way, was introduced by Winston Churchill.
Your idea is to make work pay by making the poor, poorer is an interesting concept. Perhaps stand for parliament on that platform and like IDS bring in new legislation to replace Universal Credit.
How/where have I suggested making the poor poorer? Those in the lower levels of the financial heap are suffering more than enough already! Churchill, of course, introduced National Insurance when he was part of the Liberal Government some 110 years ago. That we still use, effectively, the system introduced then is perhaps why, in the words of a 1950's slogan, It's time we had the Liberals back'! On reflection I think it's arguable that Universal Credit could work if the arrangements for clawing back overpayments weren't, apparently anyway, so vindictive.
The budget and subsequent actions suggest, at least to me, it was good economics but bad politics.
There is a whole raft of structural decline to be reversed, be it roads, health, housing - just the nuts and bolts of a country. The idea that 'the market will fix it' is the mantra from a purists point of view but the Thames Water debacle shows that markets can be manipulated as politics and politicians constantly show themselves to be less able than the financial buccaneers.
Also where are economic cycles in all this? Germany looks like a classic case of on the downslope along with France so it's no surprise there would be a softening here due to the effects on our main trading partners. (42% of all exports)
... or did Gordon Brown actually achieve the demise of 'boom and bust'?
It was utterly terrible economics, hammering in taxes those who go to work, the productive part of the economy while leaving the rest of the economy untaxed.
You tax that which you wish to discourage, if you directly jack up taxes on employment/work you are discouraging work and NI is direct taxation on employment in the same way as fuel duty is direct taxation on fuel.
In a counterfactual world what Labour could have done is come in and taken the brave decision to merge National Insurance and Income Tax which would eliminate the 12% extra taxes that those who work for a living have to pay over those who don't.
That would be a 12% increase in Income Tax (without changing Income Tax rates) for those who aren't working on PAYE, while leaving PAYE workers tax rates unchanged. There's your tax rise for the nuts and bolts you want, if that's what you believe in, without hammering businesses or workers or people's pay for going to work.
And it would have been just as consistent with the manifesto as what they did.
I agree with this change and I am one of those pensioners who pay less tax than working people. However I suspect there are about 8 million votes at stake here. So good luck with that one.
So they increased 20 million people's taxes instead? The 20 million already paying more taxes than the 8 million? Besides how many of the 8 million are swing voters?
In 2024 Labour only got 20% of the votes of over-70s, with 46% going to the Tories and 15% going to Reform.
Labour won because they got the votes of working age people.
The incoming Labour government could and should have prioritised working age people who are heavily overtaxed and underfunded. Abolishing WFA was a tiny step in the right direction but then jacking up NI more than undid all the good of that, and won't win them any favour from the 80% of over-70 voters that were already not voting for them, or those that did that have already left them due to WFA.
They should have merged NI and Income Tax. Yes the pensioners would object, but that wouldn't change many votes since they were already not voting Labour anyway!
A credible program for reforming the country would tackle all the shibboleths the prior government couldn't because of the threat of the grey vote. Abolish unnecessary welfare life WFA, abolish unjustified tax breaks like not paying NI on pensions, and tackle issues like planning restrictions that prevent young people getting a home because it might affect the view of a pensioner - or their house prices.
Merging NI and income tax would just expand the dependency culture of welfare we have massively by ending the contributory element to JSA and state pensions which cannot be claimed without enough NI contributions or credits. Absolutely not and we should also be using NI to help fund social care too and ideally move to a French style use of more social insurance to fund healthcare more broadly as well
There is no contributory element already since you get NI "credits" for being unemployed and living on welfare.
There is absolutely no reason to have NI exist to have contributions. Just set contributions based on Income Tax paid if that's what you want.
All the arrangements for Income Tax and NI need reviewing. As do the mechanisms for 'reclaiming' over-payments from those receiving benefits. They are all the result of piecemeal changes and someone needs to have a good look at them and rationalise the whole thing.
They did review the whole issue of benefits and called it Universal Credit. It was introduced at the 2010 Conservative Party conference by Ian Duncan Smith who is responsible for a lot of it. The mechanism is a form of social net and the taper effect (taking away 'overpayment') is core. Even 14 years later it is not fully implemented so a suggestion of waving a magic wand and replacing it within one or even two parliaments does not stand up to critical analysis. National Insurance, by the way, was introduced by Winston Churchill.
Your idea is to make work pay by making the poor, poorer is an interesting concept. Perhaps stand for parliament on that platform and like IDS bring in new legislation to replace Universal Credit.
Universal credit was a step in the right direction, but only a partial step and the taper is what causes the poverty trap that means people think its not worth working, because its not for them.
Universal credit was introduced in one Parliament, so its successor can be. Universal credit was announced in 2010, legislated for in 2012 and began to be rolled out in 2013 so there's absolutely no reason why it can't be replaced in one, let alone 2, Parliaments.
The solution is elegant in its simplicity, but will piss off many vested interests. Just as UC merged many benefits together, we need to do the same with the tax system. Merge UC, Income Tax and National Insurance into one system.
UC has taken us partway there. Time to finish the job. Merge UC with Income Tax and NI so that there's only one income-related tax rather than multiple taxes/tapers that trap people in poverty.
That way work pays and people will work, because its in their own interests to do so.
Nice idea. The reason why tax/benefit systems are so complicated is because of history. You are always repairing the ship of Theseus in mid storm in mid ocean.
To pick but one out of the eight million difficulties with system integration, the tax system is more or less built on the foundation of individuals. The benefit system is built on the foundation of households.
It's like trying to integrate your sewing machine with your smartphone.
Just to add to the fun, the local tax system is based on neither, but on land/dwellings.
BTW I have reached the age where you decide that wjere a problem has been unsolved all your life, you draw the obvious conclusion. One of these is the problem of 'cliff edge'. Another is the problem of people who prefer to live without working at the expense of those who do. Since Covid and the rise of 'mental health issues' this has reached a state in which it is a form of high art and ever more deeply embedded.
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
But we're right at the start of the election cycle. The idea is to have a solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027. The last thing you want to do is peak too early. History is littered with examples of what happens when someone or something peaks too early.
Well that "solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027" was the idea...
They'll be lucky to hit it by 2029.
We'll see. And remember this, the further it goes down the stronger it will pop up when it emerges. Like the rubber duck in a bath. I guess we all have one of those?
Unless they go down the plug hole.
I don't see the uptick as inevitable.
Well to switch to serious, which I probably shouldn't on Christmas Eve, but here goes since it's a non-standard boutique view I have on this "growth" business:
It's unrealistic to expect good growth over the next few years (solid and sustainable as opposed to manufactured froth) and imo they shouldn't have promised it. It won't be their fault if the economy remains sluggish (actually a par score) but of course if that does happen they'll pay a price politically.
This is fair enough because they'd seek to take credit if things somehow surprise on the upside, again mainly because of the macro factors improving, randomness and luck being the key players when it comes to the economy over the short term, far outweighing the impact of specific domestic policies.
This is why, on the politics, the absolutely crucial thing is to make the "14 years of Tory rot" charge stick (as the Cons did with "fixing Labour's mess"). Because that, if successful, will mitigate the political price for low growth and give them a good chance of a 2nd term.
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Eh? 2 was created by IR35 which was introduced by Gordon Brown in 2000.
It was an incompetent technocratic fix that showed no understanding of how business works, was designed to solve a largely non-existent problem and caused far more damage than it solved.
Typical fucking Labour. Typical fucking Brown.
Hmm, I think there was at least something of a problem. I was working in the City back then and you'd get these guys (typically in IT but not always) who'd be working at a bank, sat there at the same desk for years, Mon to Fri, 9 to 5, employees basically, but instead of being on the payroll they'd be "limited companies" collecting their salary as fees and paying themselves in dividends out of "profits" having knocked off a ton of expenses such as travel and lunch and clothes and pretty much anything else you could think of. Ended up with an effective tax rate of about half what it would have been if they were on the books. A bit of a scam.
Yeah - and because they didn’t have all the staff costs, their day rate was pretty high as well.
IR35 happened, not because of this , but because a similar pattern started happening in parts of government.
Stupidly, in many areas, they didn’t put in a rule about not being able to contract in the same area you’d previously worked in. Every private company did this in about 1998.
So you had people quoting their job on Friday and rolling back into the same job, Monday. On big, big money.
Local government had a plague of this, at the higher levels.
So Gordon stamped on the whole lot.
Yep, the top line rate tended to be about 50% higher than a salary equivalent. With that plus the aforementioned tax breaks you had to be slightly mad not to participate if your "employer" was ok with it. I did a bit of it myself at times to be absolutely honest with you. Don't know how remuneration usually works now in the City contracting/consulting space. Haven't kept up with it.
The rule of thumb I had in engineering was that if the staff person was paid £x,000/yr, the contractor would get £x/hour. So close to double on an anualised basis.
Offtopic but it’s Christmas, here’s Eddie Hearn in the US last month trying to sell the idea of darts to Americans. Interview with Patrick Bet-David, where he says that Matchroom’s darts operation is now twice as big as their boxing operation by revenue and profit.
There is a youngish chap on the YouTubes / newsletter that specializes in the business of sport. He put out a video about 3 weeks ago looking at everything Matchroom and identified that the Darts is now the big money earner...and....the current Sky tv contract comes up for renewal shortly. Now Eddie has this relationship with DAZN for the boxing and overseas rights for the darts is already with DAZN, at the very least he will be making Sky dig a lot deeper into their pockets for the rights, but perhaps he might even get a bumper deal from DAZN.
Last year’s darts final was apparently the highest audience Sky has ever had for something that wasn’t a football match, it was up there with the top Olympic events (that were on BBC) in the year’s ratings, around 9m watched it. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out with the international rights.
They have done an incredible job with the darts, it is a huge thing to go and see live (despite you literally been able to see f#'#k all), next years is basically booked up already, and the premier league are always sold out. And that atmosphere and the carefully crafted promoting of the players leads to big telly viewership, even in a very crowded market.
I actually saw darts played outside a couple of years ago, out here they booked the tennis stadium and used a lot of Perspex screens to keep the wind out!
Always an electric atmosphere though, my brother used to go to Ally Pally quite a bit when he lived in London.
Darts will eat itself, the same way billiards did, because it is too easy. I've joked before that if I were running a girls school, I'd put a dart board in every common room in order to identify and develop nascent talent.
As audiences grow and prizes rise, millions around the world will try the game and in time there will be a pool of a dozen or so players who can score 180 at will, and nine-darters in every leg, and then it will become mechanical and boring.
a) there has been good money in darts now for 20+ years b) we are currently light years away from anything like you claim (certainly standards have improved, but its much the depth rather than the pinnacle i.e Phil Taylor could average 100+, 30% on the doubles, now its more than just one player). c) ten pin bowling is very much as you describe and yet 1 million people tune into their big events in the US.
...d) I am not sure the 4 lads dressed as Where's Wally 10 pints deep by 8pm are watching closely the double percentage of said top players...
The budget and subsequent actions suggest, at least to me, it was good economics but bad politics.
There is a whole raft of structural decline to be reversed, be it roads, health, housing - just the nuts and bolts of a country. The idea that 'the market will fix it' is the mantra from a purists point of view but the Thames Water debacle shows that markets can be manipulated as politics and politicians constantly show themselves to be less able than the financial buccaneers.
Also where are economic cycles in all this? Germany looks like a classic case of on the downslope along with France so it's no surprise there would be a softening here due to the effects on our main trading partners. (42% of all exports)
... or did Gordon Brown actually achieve the demise of 'boom and bust'?
It was utterly terrible economics, hammering in taxes those who go to work, the productive part of the economy while leaving the rest of the economy untaxed.
You tax that which you wish to discourage, if you directly jack up taxes on employment/work you are discouraging work and NI is direct taxation on employment in the same way as fuel duty is direct taxation on fuel.
In a counterfactual world what Labour could have done is come in and taken the brave decision to merge National Insurance and Income Tax which would eliminate the 12% extra taxes that those who work for a living have to pay over those who don't.
That would be a 12% increase in Income Tax (without changing Income Tax rates) for those who aren't working on PAYE, while leaving PAYE workers tax rates unchanged. There's your tax rise for the nuts and bolts you want, if that's what you believe in, without hammering businesses or workers or people's pay for going to work.
And it would have been just as consistent with the manifesto as what they did.
I agree with this change and I am one of those pensioners who pay less tax than working people. However I suspect there are about 8 million votes at stake here. So good luck with that one.
So they increased 20 million people's taxes instead? The 20 million already paying more taxes than the 8 million? Besides how many of the 8 million are swing voters?
In 2024 Labour only got 20% of the votes of over-70s, with 46% going to the Tories and 15% going to Reform.
Labour won because they got the votes of working age people.
The incoming Labour government could and should have prioritised working age people who are heavily overtaxed and underfunded. Abolishing WFA was a tiny step in the right direction but then jacking up NI more than undid all the good of that, and won't win them any favour from the 80% of over-70 voters that were already not voting for them, or those that did that have already left them due to WFA.
They should have merged NI and Income Tax. Yes the pensioners would object, but that wouldn't change many votes since they were already not voting Labour anyway!
A credible program for reforming the country would tackle all the shibboleths the prior government couldn't because of the threat of the grey vote. Abolish unnecessary welfare life WFA, abolish unjustified tax breaks like not paying NI on pensions, and tackle issues like planning restrictions that prevent young people getting a home because it might affect the view of a pensioner - or their house prices.
Merging NI and income tax would just expand the dependency culture of welfare we have massively by ending the contributory element to JSA and state pensions which cannot be claimed without enough NI contributions or credits. Absolutely not and we should also be using NI to help fund social care too and ideally move to a French style use of more social insurance to fund healthcare more broadly as well
There is no contributory element already since you get NI "credits" for being unemployed and living on welfare.
There is absolutely no reason to have NI exist to have contributions. Just set contributions based on Income Tax paid if that's what you want.
All the arrangements for Income Tax and NI need reviewing. As do the mechanisms for 'reclaiming' over-payments from those receiving benefits. They are all the result of piecemeal changes and someone needs to have a good look at them and rationalise the whole thing.
They did review the whole issue of benefits and called it Universal Credit. It was introduced at the 2010 Conservative Party conference by Ian Duncan Smith who is responsible for a lot of it. The mechanism is a form of social net and the taper effect (taking away 'overpayment') is core. Even 14 years later it is not fully implemented so a suggestion of waving a magic wand and replacing it within one or even two parliaments does not stand up to critical analysis. National Insurance, by the way, was introduced by Winston Churchill.
Your idea is to make work pay by making the poor, poorer is an interesting concept. Perhaps stand for parliament on that platform and like IDS bring in new legislation to replace Universal Credit.
Universal credit was a step in the right direction, but only a partial step and the taper is what causes the poverty trap that means people think its not worth working, because its not for them.
Universal credit was introduced in one Parliament, so its successor can be. Universal credit was announced in 2010, legislated for in 2012 and began to be rolled out in 2013 so there's absolutely no reason why it can't be replaced in one, let alone 2, Parliaments.
The solution is elegant in its simplicity, but will piss off many vested interests. Just as UC merged many benefits together, we need to do the same with the tax system. Merge UC, Income Tax and National Insurance into one system.
UC has taken us partway there. Time to finish the job. Merge UC with Income Tax and NI so that there's only one income-related tax rather than multiple taxes/tapers that trap people in poverty.
That way work pays and people will work, because its in their own interests to do so.
The big problem with merging tax and benefits is that tax is calculated on an individual basis, but benefits are based on household income.
So make household income the basis for tax in the reform too, that has a lot to justify it.
Gets rid of the anomalies and cliff edges and creates a single workable system, yes its complicated but complicated stuff is exactly what newly elected governments should be tackling.
Household income should be the basis for tax if it is for benefits, that also works out much fairer for families as that would allow four personal allowances to be combined rather than just one or two for a typical family.
It also means someone pays more tax when they don't need the income. What wasn't enough to cover everything for me with 2 children 10 years ago would now be more than plenty for me alone even without allowing for inflation, and tax should reflect that. It might help with the cliff edges too.
Premier League Summer cricket F1 Football League Darts
Sky are making a big thing of the darts this year (Merry football dartmas or something), but, I doubt they'd break the bank for it. How many people would pay an additional subscription for the darts? Not many.
Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr has had her contract “cancelled” by the Guardian following the Sunday newspaper’s controversial sale to Tortoise Media. Ms Cadwalladr, an investigative journalist who has written several high profile stories on Brexit, wrote on social media site X that the Guardian was “cancelling my contract after 19 years continuous employment with no pay-off”.
Ms Cadwalladr is among several freelancers and casual staff who have been contacted by senior management to say their current contracts will “end” once the Observer is formally sold.
To be honest, I am surprised she lasted so long, with the seemingly weekly legal bills that Guardian have been incurring for years and required corrections / apologies. But the legal bills not over yet....
"She is understood to be considering legal action alongside dozens of casual staff."
I wonder if the Guardian gave her any level of supervision, direction, or control over her articles. Obviously, she couldn't substitute someone else writing them for herself. And it sounds like she believed there to be mutuality of obligation between herself and the Guardian.
So if the first wasn't the case - if she did have some level of supervision, direction or control - then she would be under that, lack any substitution capability, and have mutuality of obligation (in practice, if not in writing) should she win her case.
I wonder if she acted as though she was within IR35 throughout or acted as a full freelancer.
Offtopic but it’s Christmas, here’s Eddie Hearn in the US last month trying to sell the idea of darts to Americans. Interview with Patrick Bet-David, where he says that Matchroom’s darts operation is now twice as big as their boxing operation by revenue and profit.
There is a youngish chap on the YouTubes / newsletter that specializes in the business of sport. He put out a video about 3 weeks ago looking at everything Matchroom and identified that the Darts is now the big money earner...and....the current Sky tv contract comes up for renewal shortly. Now Eddie has this relationship with DAZN for the boxing and overseas rights for the darts is already with DAZN, at the very least he will be making Sky dig a lot deeper into their pockets for the rights, but perhaps he might even get a bumper deal from DAZN.
Last year’s darts final was apparently the highest audience Sky has ever had for something that wasn’t a football match, it was up there with the top Olympic events (that were on BBC) in the year’s ratings, around 9m watched it. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out with the international rights.
They have done an incredible job with the darts, it is a huge thing to go and see live (despite you literally been able to see f#'#k all), next years is basically booked up already, and the premier league are always sold out. And that atmosphere and the carefully crafted promoting of the players leads to big telly viewership, even in a very crowded market.
I actually saw darts played outside a couple of years ago, out here they booked the tennis stadium and used a lot of Perspex screens to keep the wind out!
Always an electric atmosphere though, my brother used to go to Ally Pally quite a bit when he lived in London.
Darts will eat itself, the same way billiards did, because it is too easy. I've joked before that if I were running a girls school, I'd put a dart board in every common room in order to identify and develop nascent talent.
As audiences grow and prizes rise, millions around the world will try the game and in time there will be a pool of a dozen or so players who can score 180 at will, and nine-darters in every leg, and then it will become mechanical and boring.
a) there has been good money in darts now for 20+ years b) we are currently light years away from anything like you claim (certainly standards have improved, but its much the depth rather than the pinnacle i.e Phil Taylor could average 100+, 30% on the doubles, now its more than just one player). c) ten pin bowling is very much as you describe and yet 1 million people tune into their big events in the US.
...d) I am not sure the 4 lads dressed as Where's Wally 10 pints deep by 8pm are watching closely the double percentage of said top players...
I must say that when I happened on darts matches in Sunderland pubs back in the day I was always impressed by the silence while people were actually throwing.
We were talking about CO2 emissions from cement manufacturing the other day. I've just stumbled on this snippet:
The cement industry alone accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a greater proportion than any single country in the world other than the US and China. A report by the World Economic Forum in September found that unless cement production becomes more sustainable, its emissions would more than double to 3.8bn t/y by the middle of the century.
Well under 2% of UK emissions, though.
And no one is going to relocate their cement production here just for our carbon capture boondoggle.
English counties have reduced their carbon footprint since 2006 by an average of 46%. Derbyshire, due to minerals extraction and cement manufacturing has managed a 26% reduction. The worst nationally.
IIRC, I’ll not be more than a percent wrong.
That 2% footprint is in one place. The business involved is currently under maintained, schedules paired to the bone. Likely to need large investment soon.
IMO Labour have been mugged to support a multi billion CCS plan. With nothing obvious to spend the money on I suspect they will fall into a cement manufacturing quagmire of missed targets, failed ventures, and wasted billions.
It’s horrible to watch.
Good for Derbyshire. Thank God one county is continuing to make things a bit more.
Premier League Summer cricket F1 Football League Darts
Sky are making a big thing of the darts this year (Merry football dartmas or something), but, I doubt they'd break the bank for it. How many people would pay an additional subscription for the darts? Not many.
Darts has the highest viewership after EPL for Sky Sports, it really is that big. Also Christmas is peak advertising spend for most companies, they want the eyeballs and the darts gives them that. The test cricket or Barrow vs Crewe in the football league doesn't get close.
We have a relative staying over Christmas. I'm not sure I shall be able to post here tomorrow, let alone do the Christmas crossword, which I usually enjoy. If I don't appear here in the next couple of days, then I'd like to wish every one Merry Christmas.
Offtopic but it’s Christmas, here’s Eddie Hearn in the US last month trying to sell the idea of darts to Americans. Interview with Patrick Bet-David, where he says that Matchroom’s darts operation is now twice as big as their boxing operation by revenue and profit.
There is a youngish chap on the YouTubes / newsletter that specializes in the business of sport. He put out a video about 3 weeks ago looking at everything Matchroom and identified that the Darts is now the big money earner...and....the current Sky tv contract comes up for renewal shortly. Now Eddie has this relationship with DAZN for the boxing and overseas rights for the darts is already with DAZN, at the very least he will be making Sky dig a lot deeper into their pockets for the rights, but perhaps he might even get a bumper deal from DAZN.
Last year’s darts final was apparently the highest audience Sky has ever had for something that wasn’t a football match, it was up there with the top Olympic events (that were on BBC) in the year’s ratings, around 9m watched it. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out with the international rights.
The problem for the Darts / DAZN idea is that it would kill darts. Lets assume DAZN come in with a bonkers offer and the PDC accept it. Their audience will collapse, and take down the current surge in interest for the sport. So they take the money now and watch the sport collapse back to late 80s levels of disinterest.
We saw something similar (on a tinier scale) with Formula-E. They sold UK rights to TNT, who added an extra £crackers subscription to watch. Having built an audience from idiots like me who had watched every race from the start, they killed it stone dead. Nobody watching, nobody taking up the TNT package, little interest in the season finale at Excel. Result? Back on terrestrial TV in 2025.
Premier League Summer cricket F1 Football League Darts
Sky are making a big thing of the darts this year (Merry football dartmas or something), but, I doubt they'd break the bank for it. How many people would pay an additional subscription for the darts? Not many.
Darts has the highest rated viewership after EPL for Sky Sports.
Yes and no.
Yes it is highly rated but for a fortnight or so a year.
Premier League Summer cricket F1 Football League Darts
Sky are making a big thing of the darts this year (Merry football dartmas or something), but, I doubt they'd break the bank for it. How many people would pay an additional subscription for the darts? Not many.
Darts has the highest rated viewership after EPL for Sky Sports.
Yes and no.
Yes it is highly rated but for a fortnight or so a year.
The others bring months worth of action.
Premier League of Darts as well. But also, its the ad spend at Christmas is massive.
"In 2024, EVs must make up 22% of a carmaker's car sales, and 10% of van sales. This target is set to rise. Firms failing to meet these targets face a £15,000 fine per sale."
That is, of course, a continuation of the previous government's stupid decision.
If European governments had started of with the explicit intention of turning the whole car market into Chinese white goods, it’s different to see anything they’d have done differently than what has actually been done.
The Cult of Outsourcing - “Running a battery factory looks jolly difficult and expensive. Just buy some of those Chinese chaps. Negotiating a price for a product I don’t understand? That’s Real Work (TM) with lots of document in written in legalese, instead of that science nonsense.”
Cult of Onshoring - get those clever Chinese chaps to build a plant here, and learn from them.
That's what they did with us a quarter of a century back.
Better yet, hire Panasonic.
Possibly - though CATL's manufacturing is now more advanced.
"COMMERCIAL nuclear fusion moved a step closer after a US company announced plans to build a plant that will deliver electricity to the grid by early next decade.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) claims to be the world’s first company to develop plans to build a grid-scale fusion plant. The generator will be built in Chesterfield County, Virginia...
CFS says their reactor, known as ARC, will generate around 400 MW of electricity for the grid... The company expects to generate at this capacity by the early 2030s."
Either a huge breakthrough, or else more power could be generated by simply burning the cash that will be invested.
Edit: "To date, it has raised over US$2bn, which includes major backing from Italian oil giant Eni."
Have done a PhD on the magnetic confinement of fusion plasma, I'd bet my house on the latter.
What about the approaches that use inertial confinement ?
IC wasn't my thing, but I don't see that being any more promising. If we compare it to the development of the internal combustion engine, they've reached the point of being able to successfully ignite a puddle of petrol. In some respects, that's the easy bit. The tough part is to build something that will successfuly generate a continuous series of bangs and extract sufficient energy from them to power the process and have some left over to sell, and to do that profitably.
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
But we're right at the start of the election cycle. The idea is to have a solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027. The last thing you want to do is peak too early. History is littered with examples of what happens when someone or something peaks too early.
Well that "solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027" was the idea...
They'll be lucky to hit it by 2029.
We'll see. And remember this, the further it goes down the stronger it will pop up when it emerges. Like the rubber duck in a bath. I guess we all have one of those?
Unless they go down the plug hole.
I don't see the uptick as inevitable.
Well to switch to serious, which I probably shouldn't on Christmas Eve, but here goes since it's a non-standard boutique view I have on this "growth" business:
It's unrealistic to expect good growth over the next few years (solid and sustainable as opposed to manufactured froth) and imo they shouldn't have promised it. It won't be their fault if the economy remains sluggish (actually a par score) but of course if that does happen they'll pay a price politically.
This is fair enough because they'd seek to take credit if things somehow surprise on the upside, again mainly because of the macro factors improving, randomness and luck being the key players when it comes to the economy over the short term, far outweighing the impact of specific domestic policies.
This is why, on the politics, the absolutely crucial thing is to make the "14 years of Tory rot" charge stick (as the Cons did with "fixing Labour's mess"). Because that, if successful, will mitigate the political price for low growth and give them a good chance of a 2nd term.
You can't actually believe this garbage. If the Tories managed to rot the economy, clearly they had agency, so how is it the case that Sir Zero Plan has no agency now?
In sum, the Committee found substantial evidence of the following: • From at least 2017 to 2020, Representative Gaetz regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him. • In 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl. • During the period 2017 to 2019, Representative Gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions. • Representative Gaetz accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in connection with a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, in excess of permissible amounts. • In 2018, Representative Gaetz arranged for his Chief of Staff to assist a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the U.S. Department of State that she was a constituent. • Representative Gaetz knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct the Committee’s investigation of his conduct. • Representative Gaetz has acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon the House.
And this guy, Trump wanted to be his Attorney General.
The wider Republican group in Congress wanted to sit on the report, unpublished.
The Committee that published it is 50:50 and theoretically nonpartisan & in camera, even though there has been plenty of argy-bargy - eg the Republican group leader making the statement to the press that the Committee 'had agreed' not to publish it, whilst they had in fact not come to agreement and were holding back since they did not have a consensus decision.
Gaetz procured his teenagers via a Sugar Daddy dating site, using the account details of a colleague, and did not ask them their age. It was a little astonishing that having decided to do that, his smarts were suspended to the extent that he attended quite large parties where older men and the young girls were present, and pairing off. So it was all quite well known in his social networks, which overlapped his professional networks.
This stuff is in their attitudinal and behavioural culture.
Mr Biden needs to publish (I believe the closest equivalent word for us is "gazette") teh Equal Rights Amendment if he thinks it will stand.
Offtopic but it’s Christmas, here’s Eddie Hearn in the US last month trying to sell the idea of darts to Americans. Interview with Patrick Bet-David, where he says that Matchroom’s darts operation is now twice as big as their boxing operation by revenue and profit.
There is a youngish chap on the YouTubes / newsletter that specializes in the business of sport. He put out a video about 3 weeks ago looking at everything Matchroom and identified that the Darts is now the big money earner...and....the current Sky tv contract comes up for renewal shortly. Now Eddie has this relationship with DAZN for the boxing and overseas rights for the darts is already with DAZN, at the very least he will be making Sky dig a lot deeper into their pockets for the rights, but perhaps he might even get a bumper deal from DAZN.
Last year’s darts final was apparently the highest audience Sky has ever had for something that wasn’t a football match, it was up there with the top Olympic events (that were on BBC) in the year’s ratings, around 9m watched it. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out with the international rights.
The problem for the Darts / DAZN idea is that it would kill darts. Lets assume DAZN come in with a bonkers offer and the PDC accept it. Their audience will collapse, and take down the current surge in interest for the sport. So they take the money now and watch the sport collapse back to late 80s levels of disinterest.
We saw something similar (on a tinier scale) with Formula-E. They sold UK rights to TNT, who added an extra £crackers subscription to watch. Having built an audience from idiots like me who had watched every race from the start, they killed it stone dead. Nobody watching, nobody taking up the TNT package, little interest in the season finale at Excel. Result? Back on terrestrial TV in 2025.
If DAZN were smart, you give a load of the Christmas darts away for free and use it as a loss leader to get subs.
Also Formula-E isn't even Formula 1, its not getting 5 million people tuning in on New Years day to watch it like the darts.
We were talking about CO2 emissions from cement manufacturing the other day. I've just stumbled on this snippet:
The cement industry alone accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a greater proportion than any single country in the world other than the US and China. A report by the World Economic Forum in September found that unless cement production becomes more sustainable, its emissions would more than double to 3.8bn t/y by the middle of the century.
Well under 2% of UK emissions, though.
And no one is going to relocate their cement production here just for our carbon capture boondoggle.
English counties have reduced their carbon footprint since 2006 by an average of 46%. Derbyshire, due to minerals extraction and cement manufacturing has managed a 26% reduction. The worst nationally.
IIRC, I’ll not be more than a percent wrong.
That 2% footprint is in one place. The business involved is currently under maintained, schedules paired to the bone. Likely to need large investment soon.
IMO Labour have been mugged to support a multi billion CCS plan. With nothing obvious to spend the money on I suspect they will fall into a cement manufacturing quagmire of missed targets, failed ventures, and wasted billions.
It’s horrible to watch.
Good for Derbyshire. Thank God one county is continuing to make things a bit more.
Interesting (for me, at least), this is an example of carbon offshoring at a more local scale. In the same way we export much of our carbon emissions to China, India, and other manufacturing nations, the limestone and cement produced in Derbyshire will mostly not be used in Derbyshire, but 'exported' to those counties with fewer headline emissions.
Offtopic but it’s Christmas, here’s Eddie Hearn in the US last month trying to sell the idea of darts to Americans. Interview with Patrick Bet-David, where he says that Matchroom’s darts operation is now twice as big as their boxing operation by revenue and profit.
There is a youngish chap on the YouTubes / newsletter that specializes in the business of sport. He put out a video about 3 weeks ago looking at everything Matchroom and identified that the Darts is now the big money earner...and....the current Sky tv contract comes up for renewal shortly. Now Eddie has this relationship with DAZN for the boxing and overseas rights for the darts is already with DAZN, at the very least he will be making Sky dig a lot deeper into their pockets for the rights, but perhaps he might even get a bumper deal from DAZN.
Last year’s darts final was apparently the highest audience Sky has ever had for something that wasn’t a football match, it was up there with the top Olympic events (that were on BBC) in the year’s ratings, around 9m watched it. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out with the international rights.
They have done an incredible job with the darts, it is a huge thing to go and see live (despite you literally been able to see f#'#k all), next years is basically booked up already, and the premier league are always sold out. And that atmosphere and the carefully crafted promoting of the players leads to big telly viewership, even in a very crowded market.
I actually saw darts played outside a couple of years ago, out here they booked the tennis stadium and used a lot of Perspex screens to keep the wind out!
Always an electric atmosphere though, my brother used to go to Ally Pally quite a bit when he lived in London.
Darts will eat itself, the same way billiards did, because it is too easy. I've joked before that if I were running a girls school, I'd put a dart board in every common room in order to identify and develop nascent talent.
As audiences grow and prizes rise, millions around the world will try the game and in time there will be a pool of a dozen or so players who can score 180 at will, and nine-darters in every leg, and then it will become mechanical and boring.
a) there has been good money in darts now for 20+ years b) we are currently light years away from anything like you claim (certainly standards have improved, but its much the depth rather than the pinnacle i.e Phil Taylor could average 100+, 30% on the doubles, now its more than just one player). c) ten pin bowling is very much as you describe and yet 1 million people tune into their big events in the US.
...d) I am not sure the 4 lads dressed as Where's Wally 10 pints deep by 8pm are watching closely the double percentage of said top players...
I must say that when I happened on darts matches in Sunderland pubs back in the day I was always impressed by the silence while people were actually throwing.
It is a great spectacle at Ally Pally and it's an absorbing passtime too. If I had a board I could easily spend hours every day throwing darts at it and honing my skills. This is why I don't have a board. Ditto a snooker table.
The budget and subsequent actions suggest, at least to me, it was good economics but bad politics.
There is a whole raft of structural decline to be reversed, be it roads, health, housing - just the nuts and bolts of a country. The idea that 'the market will fix it' is the mantra from a purists point of view but the Thames Water debacle shows that markets can be manipulated as politics and politicians constantly show themselves to be less able than the financial buccaneers.
Also where are economic cycles in all this? Germany looks like a classic case of on the downslope along with France so it's no surprise there would be a softening here due to the effects on our main trading partners. (42% of all exports)
... or did Gordon Brown actually achieve the demise of 'boom and bust'?
It was utterly terrible economics, hammering in taxes those who go to work, the productive part of the economy while leaving the rest of the economy untaxed.
You tax that which you wish to discourage, if you directly jack up taxes on employment/work you are discouraging work and NI is direct taxation on employment in the same way as fuel duty is direct taxation on fuel.
In a counterfactual world what Labour could have done is come in and taken the brave decision to merge National Insurance and Income Tax which would eliminate the 12% extra taxes that those who work for a living have to pay over those who don't.
That would be a 12% increase in Income Tax (without changing Income Tax rates) for those who aren't working on PAYE, while leaving PAYE workers tax rates unchanged. There's your tax rise for the nuts and bolts you want, if that's what you believe in, without hammering businesses or workers or people's pay for going to work.
And it would have been just as consistent with the manifesto as what they did.
I agree with this change and I am one of those pensioners who pay less tax than working people. However I suspect there are about 8 million votes at stake here. So good luck with that one.
So they increased 20 million people's taxes instead? The 20 million already paying more taxes than the 8 million? Besides how many of the 8 million are swing voters?
In 2024 Labour only got 20% of the votes of over-70s, with 46% going to the Tories and 15% going to Reform.
Labour won because they got the votes of working age people.
The incoming Labour government could and should have prioritised working age people who are heavily overtaxed and underfunded. Abolishing WFA was a tiny step in the right direction but then jacking up NI more than undid all the good of that, and won't win them any favour from the 80% of over-70 voters that were already not voting for them, or those that did that have already left them due to WFA.
They should have merged NI and Income Tax. Yes the pensioners would object, but that wouldn't change many votes since they were already not voting Labour anyway!
A credible program for reforming the country would tackle all the shibboleths the prior government couldn't because of the threat of the grey vote. Abolish unnecessary welfare life WFA, abolish unjustified tax breaks like not paying NI on pensions, and tackle issues like planning restrictions that prevent young people getting a home because it might affect the view of a pensioner - or their house prices.
Merging NI and income tax would just expand the dependency culture of welfare we have massively by ending the contributory element to JSA and state pensions which cannot be claimed without enough NI contributions or credits. Absolutely not and we should also be using NI to help fund social care too and ideally move to a French style use of more social insurance to fund healthcare more broadly as well
There is no contributory element already since you get NI "credits" for being unemployed and living on welfare.
There is absolutely no reason to have NI exist to have contributions. Just set contributions based on Income Tax paid if that's what you want.
All the arrangements for Income Tax and NI need reviewing. As do the mechanisms for 'reclaiming' over-payments from those receiving benefits. They are all the result of piecemeal changes and someone needs to have a good look at them and rationalise the whole thing.
They did review the whole issue of benefits and called it Universal Credit. It was introduced at the 2010 Conservative Party conference by Ian Duncan Smith who is responsible for a lot of it. The mechanism is a form of social net and the taper effect (taking away 'overpayment') is core. Even 14 years later it is not fully implemented so a suggestion of waving a magic wand and replacing it within one or even two parliaments does not stand up to critical analysis. National Insurance, by the way, was introduced by Winston Churchill.
Your idea is to make work pay by making the poor, poorer is an interesting concept. Perhaps stand for parliament on that platform and like IDS bring in new legislation to replace Universal Credit.
Universal credit was a step in the right direction, but only a partial step and the taper is what causes the poverty trap that means people think its not worth working, because its not for them.
Universal credit was introduced in one Parliament, so its successor can be. Universal credit was announced in 2010, legislated for in 2012 and began to be rolled out in 2013 so there's absolutely no reason why it can't be replaced in one, let alone 2, Parliaments.
The solution is elegant in its simplicity, but will piss off many vested interests. Just as UC merged many benefits together, we need to do the same with the tax system. Merge UC, Income Tax and National Insurance into one system.
UC has taken us partway there. Time to finish the job. Merge UC with Income Tax and NI so that there's only one income-related tax rather than multiple taxes/tapers that trap people in poverty.
That way work pays and people will work, because its in their own interests to do so.
No, merge income tax with UC and you will just encourage dependence on the latter from payers of the former for life.
NI should be ringfenced for JSA and the state pension and NI credits scrapped so we finally start to shift towards a more contributory welfare system. We can then start funding more healthcare from social insurance as most OECD nations do too
We were talking about CO2 emissions from cement manufacturing the other day. I've just stumbled on this snippet:
The cement industry alone accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a greater proportion than any single country in the world other than the US and China. A report by the World Economic Forum in September found that unless cement production becomes more sustainable, its emissions would more than double to 3.8bn t/y by the middle of the century.
Well under 2% of UK emissions, though.
And no one is going to relocate their cement production here just for our carbon capture boondoggle.
English counties have reduced their carbon footprint since 2006 by an average of 46%. Derbyshire, due to minerals extraction and cement manufacturing has managed a 26% reduction. The worst nationally.
IIRC, I’ll not be more than a percent wrong.
That 2% footprint is in one place. The business involved is currently under maintained, schedules paired to the bone. Likely to need large investment soon.
IMO Labour have been mugged to support a multi billion CCS plan. With nothing obvious to spend the money on I suspect they will fall into a cement manufacturing quagmire of missed targets, failed ventures, and wasted billions.
It’s horrible to watch.
Good for Derbyshire. Thank God one county is continuing to make things a bit more.
Interesting (for me, at least), this is an example of carbon offshoring at a more local scale. In the same way we export much of our carbon emissions to China, India, and other manufacturing nations, the limestone and cement produced in Derbyshire will mostly not be used in Derbyshire, but 'exported' to those counties with fewer headline emissions.
Speaking of which do those bringing attention to this emissions scandal want us to shut down all construction, or are they in favour of importing manufactured cement?
"In 2024, EVs must make up 22% of a carmaker's car sales, and 10% of van sales. This target is set to rise. Firms failing to meet these targets face a £15,000 fine per sale."
That is, of course, a continuation of the previous government's stupid decision.
If European governments had started of with the explicit intention of turning the whole car market into Chinese white goods, it’s different to see anything they’d have done differently than what has actually been done.
The Cult of Outsourcing - “Running a battery factory looks jolly difficult and expensive. Just buy some of those Chinese chaps. Negotiating a price for a product I don’t understand? That’s Real Work (TM) with lots of document in written in legalese, instead of that science nonsense.”
Cult of Onshoring - get those clever Chinese chaps to build a plant here, and learn from them.
That's what they did with us a quarter of a century back.
Are the UK government insisting on British ‘local partners’ for the Chinese companies investing in Britain, and are they intending to steal the Chinese IP and have the factory run ‘ghost’ shifts at the weekends?
There's no reason we shouldn't insist on local partners. That seems to be the approach Europe is starting to take.
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
The polling doesn't support that claim.
Yes it does, hence Labour's poll collapse since July
Someone said Labour had a 6% lead. Really?
On just 29% ie Brown 2010 levels and only because the Tories were on 23% and 22% for Reform ie 45% for the right combined, even bigger than the 43% for Boris in 2019.
That was the BEST poll for Labour this month, others had them tied with the Tories
The chart don’t surprise me, because Labour have played the politics of this terribly since taking office. A change of government is usually met with a little boost of confidence, a fresh start, brighter days ahead etc.
People didn’t feel that things were good under the Tories. It was incumbent on Labour to sell the change they promised as a road to a better tomorrow. Instead we got worst inheritance since the war, black holes, ruined economy, brace yourselves for our awful budget, etc etc for months, interspersed with a bit of statist policy float nonsense in the silly season.
They have talked themselves into this mess, at least in part. The NI issue is the icing on the cake.
Can they turn it around - yes, of course, but let’s be very clear here. This isn’t just the usual new government unpopularity/teething problems after the first budget. This is a very serious and very bad start for Labour. They have to hope it’s not the start of a death spiral.
We have a relative staying over Christmas. I'm not sure I shall be able to post here tomorrow, let alone do the Christmas crossword, which I usually enjoy. If I don't appear here in the next couple of days, then I'd like to wish every one Merry Christmas.
And a very Happy Christmas to you, too.
(I shall probably be able to sneak away from goose prep long enough to drop in tomorrow. First time I've cooked it, so any tips appreciated.)
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
But we're right at the start of the election cycle. The idea is to have a solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027. The last thing you want to do is peak too early. History is littered with examples of what happens when someone or something peaks too early.
Well that "solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027" was the idea...
They'll be lucky to hit it by 2029.
We'll see. And remember this, the further it goes down the stronger it will pop up when it emerges. Like the rubber duck in a bath. I guess we all have one of those?
Unless they go down the plug hole.
I don't see the uptick as inevitable.
Well to switch to serious, which I probably shouldn't on Christmas Eve, but here goes since it's a non-standard boutique view I have on this "growth" business:
It's unrealistic to expect good growth over the next few years (solid and sustainable as opposed to manufactured froth) and imo they shouldn't have promised it. It won't be their fault if the economy remains sluggish (actually a par score) but of course if that does happen they'll pay a price politically.
This is fair enough because they'd seek to take credit if things somehow surprise on the upside, again mainly because of the macro factors improving, randomness and luck being the key players when it comes to the economy over the short term, far outweighing the impact of specific domestic policies.
This is why, on the politics, the absolutely crucial thing is to make the "14 years of Tory rot" charge stick (as the Cons did with "fixing Labour's mess"). Because that, if successful, will mitigate the political price for low growth and give them a good chance of a 2nd term.
You can't actually believe this garbage. If the Tories managed to rot the economy, clearly they had agency, so how is it the case that Sir Zero Plan has no agency now?
I'm not trying to have it both ways. I don't think the Tories did 'rot' the economy. They did badly on growth (and Brexit is especially worth a mention here as an anti-growth policy) but as always global factors dominated. If you look at UK economic performance over time the biggest contributory factor is world economic performance. UK governments do have an important impact on UK growth but it's on the margins compared to global factors and it doesn't happen within electoral cycles (unless it's of the frothy unsustainable variety).
In sum, the Committee found substantial evidence of the following: • From at least 2017 to 2020, Representative Gaetz regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him. • In 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl. • During the period 2017 to 2019, Representative Gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions. • Representative Gaetz accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in connection with a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, in excess of permissible amounts. • In 2018, Representative Gaetz arranged for his Chief of Staff to assist a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the U.S. Department of State that she was a constituent. • Representative Gaetz knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct the Committee’s investigation of his conduct. • Representative Gaetz has acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon the House.
And this guy, Trump wanted to be his Attorney General.
The wider Republican group in Congress wanted to sit on the report, unpublished.
The Committee that published it is 50:50 and theoretically nonpartisan & in camera, even though there has been plenty of argy-bargy - eg the Republican group leader making the statement to the press that the Committee 'had agreed' not to publish it, whilst they had in fact not come to agreement and were holding back since they did not have a consensus decision.
Gaetz procured his teenagers via a Sugar Daddy dating site, using the account details of a colleague, and did not ask them their age. It was a little astonishing that having decided to do that, his smarts were suspended to the extent that he attended quite large parties where older men and the young girls were present, and pairing off. So it was all quite well known in his social networks, which overlapped his professional networks.
This stuff is in their attitudinal and behavioural culture.
Mr Biden needs to publish (I believe the closest equivalent word for us is "gazette") teh Equal Rights Amendment if he thinks it will stand.
The Republicans, and other Trump supporters around the world, have sold their souls, and for what? Do any of them actually think that threatening to invade Panama is masterful stroke of international diplomacy?
We were talking about CO2 emissions from cement manufacturing the other day. I've just stumbled on this snippet:
The cement industry alone accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a greater proportion than any single country in the world other than the US and China. A report by the World Economic Forum in September found that unless cement production becomes more sustainable, its emissions would more than double to 3.8bn t/y by the middle of the century.
Well under 2% of UK emissions, though.
And no one is going to relocate their cement production here just for our carbon capture boondoggle.
English counties have reduced their carbon footprint since 2006 by an average of 46%. Derbyshire, due to minerals extraction and cement manufacturing has managed a 26% reduction. The worst nationally.
IIRC, I’ll not be more than a percent wrong.
That 2% footprint is in one place. The business involved is currently under maintained, schedules paired to the bone. Likely to need large investment soon.
IMO Labour have been mugged to support a multi billion CCS plan. With nothing obvious to spend the money on I suspect they will fall into a cement manufacturing quagmire of missed targets, failed ventures, and wasted billions.
It’s horrible to watch.
Good for Derbyshire. Thank God one county is continuing to make things a bit more.
Interesting (for me, at least), this is an example of carbon offshoring at a more local scale. In the same way we export much of our carbon emissions to China, India, and other manufacturing nations, the limestone and cement produced in Derbyshire will mostly not be used in Derbyshire, but 'exported' to those counties with fewer headline emissions.
Speaking of which do those bringing attention to this emissions scandal want us to shut down all construction, or are they in favour of importing manufactured cement?
One of the madnesses of Blair's government was the idea of knocking down loads of 'old' houses to build new ones, when many could be refitted for less cost and *far* less CO2 emissions.
We were talking about CO2 emissions from cement manufacturing the other day. I've just stumbled on this snippet:
The cement industry alone accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a greater proportion than any single country in the world other than the US and China. A report by the World Economic Forum in September found that unless cement production becomes more sustainable, its emissions would more than double to 3.8bn t/y by the middle of the century.
Well under 2% of UK emissions, though.
And no one is going to relocate their cement production here just for our carbon capture boondoggle.
English counties have reduced their carbon footprint since 2006 by an average of 46%. Derbyshire, due to minerals extraction and cement manufacturing has managed a 26% reduction. The worst nationally.
IIRC, I’ll not be more than a percent wrong.
That 2% footprint is in one place. The business involved is currently under maintained, schedules paired to the bone. Likely to need large investment soon.
IMO Labour have been mugged to support a multi billion CCS plan. With nothing obvious to spend the money on I suspect they will fall into a cement manufacturing quagmire of missed targets, failed ventures, and wasted billions.
It’s horrible to watch.
Good for Derbyshire. Thank God one county is continuing to make things a bit more.
Interesting (for me, at least), this is an example of carbon offshoring at a more local scale. In the same way we export much of our carbon emissions to China, India, and other manufacturing nations, the limestone and cement produced in Derbyshire will mostly not be used in Derbyshire, but 'exported' to those counties with fewer headline emissions.
Speaking of which do those bringing attention to this emissions scandal want us to shut down all construction, or are they in favour of importing manufactured cement?
We were talking about carbon emissions from cement production precisely because we were talking about carbon capture schemes. Your supposed choice is false.
"In 2024, EVs must make up 22% of a carmaker's car sales, and 10% of van sales. This target is set to rise. Firms failing to meet these targets face a £15,000 fine per sale."
That is, of course, a continuation of the previous government's stupid decision.
If European governments had started of with the explicit intention of turning the whole car market into Chinese white goods, it’s different to see anything they’d have done differently than what has actually been done.
The Cult of Outsourcing - “Running a battery factory looks jolly difficult and expensive. Just buy some of those Chinese chaps. Negotiating a price for a product I don’t understand? That’s Real Work (TM) with lots of document in written in legalese, instead of that science nonsense.”
Cult of Onshoring - get those clever Chinese chaps to build a plant here, and learn from them.
That's what they did with us a quarter of a century back.
Are the UK government insisting on British ‘local partners’ for the Chinese companies investing in Britain, and are they intending to steal the Chinese IP and have the factory run ‘ghost’ shifts at the weekends?
There's no reason we shouldn't insist on local partners. That seems to be the approach Europe is starting to take.
Without that, then no deal.
Steady on, this is Sir Britain-hater we're talking about.
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
But we're right at the start of the election cycle. The idea is to have a solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027. The last thing you want to do is peak too early. History is littered with examples of what happens when someone or something peaks too early.
Well that "solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027" was the idea...
They'll be lucky to hit it by 2029.
We'll see. And remember this, the further it goes down the stronger it will pop up when it emerges. Like the rubber duck in a bath. I guess we all have one of those?
Unless they go down the plug hole.
I don't see the uptick as inevitable.
Well to switch to serious, which I probably shouldn't on Christmas Eve, but here goes since it's a non-standard boutique view I have on this "growth" business:
It's unrealistic to expect good growth over the next few years (solid and sustainable as opposed to manufactured froth) and imo they shouldn't have promised it. It won't be their fault if the economy remains sluggish (actually a par score) but of course if that does happen they'll pay a price politically.
This is fair enough because they'd seek to take credit if things somehow surprise on the upside, again mainly because of the macro factors improving, randomness and luck being the key players when it comes to the economy over the short term, far outweighing the impact of specific domestic policies.
This is why, on the politics, the absolutely crucial thing is to make the "14 years of Tory rot" charge stick (as the Cons did with "fixing Labour's mess"). Because that, if successful, will mitigate the political price for low growth and give them a good chance of a 2nd term.
You can't actually believe this garbage. If the Tories managed to rot the economy, clearly they had agency, so how is it the case that Sir Zero Plan has no agency now?
I'm not trying to have it both ways. I don't think the Tories did 'rot' the economy. They did badly on growth (and Brexit is especially worth a mention here as an anti-growth policy) but as always global factors dominated. If you look at UK economic performance over time the biggest contributory factor is world economic performance. UK governments do have an important impact on UK growth but it's on the margins compared to global factors and it doesn't happen within electoral cycles (unless it's of the frothy unsustainable variety).
So why has Dubai managed to sustain growth despite these global factors? Or rainier and closer to home, Ireland?
We were talking about CO2 emissions from cement manufacturing the other day. I've just stumbled on this snippet:
The cement industry alone accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a greater proportion than any single country in the world other than the US and China. A report by the World Economic Forum in September found that unless cement production becomes more sustainable, its emissions would more than double to 3.8bn t/y by the middle of the century.
Well under 2% of UK emissions, though.
And no one is going to relocate their cement production here just for our carbon capture boondoggle.
English counties have reduced their carbon footprint since 2006 by an average of 46%. Derbyshire, due to minerals extraction and cement manufacturing has managed a 26% reduction. The worst nationally.
IIRC, I’ll not be more than a percent wrong.
That 2% footprint is in one place. The business involved is currently under maintained, schedules paired to the bone. Likely to need large investment soon.
IMO Labour have been mugged to support a multi billion CCS plan. With nothing obvious to spend the money on I suspect they will fall into a cement manufacturing quagmire of missed targets, failed ventures, and wasted billions.
It’s horrible to watch.
Good for Derbyshire. Thank God one county is continuing to make things a bit more.
Interesting (for me, at least), this is an example of carbon offshoring at a more local scale. In the same way we export much of our carbon emissions to China, India, and other manufacturing nations, the limestone and cement produced in Derbyshire will mostly not be used in Derbyshire, but 'exported' to those counties with fewer headline emissions.
Speaking of which do those bringing attention to this emissions scandal want us to shut down all construction, or are they in favour of importing manufactured cement?
One of the madnesses of Blair's government was the idea of knocking down loads of 'old' houses to build new ones, when many could be refitted for less cost and *far* less CO2 emissions.
The £1 schemes in places like Stoke seemed like a sensible idea. Somebody gets a cheap house, but they have to put in the hard yards themselves and promise to renovate the property to certain standards and not able to just flip it. They end up not being £1 houses, more like £50k houses, but it turns around empty homes without the craziness of just flattening them and building from scratch.
The budget and subsequent actions suggest, at least to me, it was good economics but bad politics.
There is a whole raft of structural decline to be reversed, be it roads, health, housing - just the nuts and bolts of a country. The idea that 'the market will fix it' is the mantra from a purists point of view but the Thames Water debacle shows that markets can be manipulated as politics and politicians constantly show themselves to be less able than the financial buccaneers.
Also where are economic cycles in all this? Germany looks like a classic case of on the downslope along with France so it's no surprise there would be a softening here due to the effects on our main trading partners. (42% of all exports)
... or did Gordon Brown actually achieve the demise of 'boom and bust'?
It was utterly terrible economics, hammering in taxes those who go to work, the productive part of the economy while leaving the rest of the economy untaxed.
You tax that which you wish to discourage, if you directly jack up taxes on employment/work you are discouraging work and NI is direct taxation on employment in the same way as fuel duty is direct taxation on fuel.
In a counterfactual world what Labour could have done is come in and taken the brave decision to merge National Insurance and Income Tax which would eliminate the 12% extra taxes that those who work for a living have to pay over those who don't.
That would be a 12% increase in Income Tax (without changing Income Tax rates) for those who aren't working on PAYE, while leaving PAYE workers tax rates unchanged. There's your tax rise for the nuts and bolts you want, if that's what you believe in, without hammering businesses or workers or people's pay for going to work.
And it would have been just as consistent with the manifesto as what they did.
I agree with this change and I am one of those pensioners who pay less tax than working people. However I suspect there are about 8 million votes at stake here. So good luck with that one.
So they increased 20 million people's taxes instead? The 20 million already paying more taxes than the 8 million? Besides how many of the 8 million are swing voters?
In 2024 Labour only got 20% of the votes of over-70s, with 46% going to the Tories and 15% going to Reform.
Labour won because they got the votes of working age people.
The incoming Labour government could and should have prioritised working age people who are heavily overtaxed and underfunded. Abolishing WFA was a tiny step in the right direction but then jacking up NI more than undid all the good of that, and won't win them any favour from the 80% of over-70 voters that were already not voting for them, or those that did that have already left them due to WFA.
They should have merged NI and Income Tax. Yes the pensioners would object, but that wouldn't change many votes since they were already not voting Labour anyway!
A credible program for reforming the country would tackle all the shibboleths the prior government couldn't because of the threat of the grey vote. Abolish unnecessary welfare life WFA, abolish unjustified tax breaks like not paying NI on pensions, and tackle issues like planning restrictions that prevent young people getting a home because it might affect the view of a pensioner - or their house prices.
Merging NI and income tax would just expand the dependency culture of welfare we have massively by ending the contributory element to JSA and state pensions which cannot be claimed without enough NI contributions or credits. Absolutely not and we should also be using NI to help fund social care too and ideally move to a French style use of more social insurance to fund healthcare more broadly as well
There is no contributory element already since you get NI "credits" for being unemployed and living on welfare.
There is absolutely no reason to have NI exist to have contributions. Just set contributions based on Income Tax paid if that's what you want.
All the arrangements for Income Tax and NI need reviewing. As do the mechanisms for 'reclaiming' over-payments from those receiving benefits. They are all the result of piecemeal changes and someone needs to have a good look at them and rationalise the whole thing.
They did review the whole issue of benefits and called it Universal Credit. It was introduced at the 2010 Conservative Party conference by Ian Duncan Smith who is responsible for a lot of it. The mechanism is a form of social net and the taper effect (taking away 'overpayment') is core. Even 14 years later it is not fully implemented so a suggestion of waving a magic wand and replacing it within one or even two parliaments does not stand up to critical analysis. National Insurance, by the way, was introduced by Winston Churchill.
Your idea is to make work pay by making the poor, poorer is an interesting concept. Perhaps stand for parliament on that platform and like IDS bring in new legislation to replace Universal Credit.
Universal credit was a step in the right direction, but only a partial step and the taper is what causes the poverty trap that means people think its not worth working, because its not for them.
Universal credit was introduced in one Parliament, so its successor can be. Universal credit was announced in 2010, legislated for in 2012 and began to be rolled out in 2013 so there's absolutely no reason why it can't be replaced in one, let alone 2, Parliaments.
The solution is elegant in its simplicity, but will piss off many vested interests. Just as UC merged many benefits together, we need to do the same with the tax system. Merge UC, Income Tax and National Insurance into one system.
UC has taken us partway there. Time to finish the job. Merge UC with Income Tax and NI so that there's only one income-related tax rather than multiple taxes/tapers that trap people in poverty.
That way work pays and people will work, because its in their own interests to do so.
Nice idea. The reason why tax/benefit systems are so complicated is because of history. You are always repairing the ship of Theseus in mid storm in mid ocean.
To pick but one out of the eight million difficulties with system integration, the tax system is more or less built on the foundation of individuals. The benefit system is built on the foundation of households.
It's like trying to integrate your sewing machine with your smartphone.
Just to add to the fun, the local tax system is based on neither, but on land/dwellings.
BTW I have reached the age where you decide that wjere a problem has been unsolved all your life, you draw the obvious conclusion. One of these is the problem of 'cliff edge'. Another is the problem of people who prefer to live without working at the expense of those who do. Since Covid and the rise of 'mental health issues' this has reached a state in which it is a form of high art and ever more deeply embedded.
Well indeed, which is why the solution is not to repair the ship but tear it all down and rebuild it. Build a new ship and transfer onto it when its built, rather than trying to patch up the existing one.
A merged Income Tax, UC, NI system provides the opportunity.
And the problem of people who prefer not to work, or less spoken of but is equally a problem those who prefer to work only 16 hours but not a damned hour more, is that those people are acting rationally. They're better off by doing that, because of the system we have.
If you tell people that if they don't work, or only work minimal hours, then they'll be better off, then don't be surprised or disappointed when people take you up on that.
Tear it all down and rebuild it so that everyone who works is better off than those who don't. No tapers, just one tax rate that applies to all equally.
In sum, the Committee found substantial evidence of the following: • From at least 2017 to 2020, Representative Gaetz regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him. • In 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl. • During the period 2017 to 2019, Representative Gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions. • Representative Gaetz accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in connection with a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, in excess of permissible amounts. • In 2018, Representative Gaetz arranged for his Chief of Staff to assist a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the U.S. Department of State that she was a constituent. • Representative Gaetz knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct the Committee’s investigation of his conduct. • Representative Gaetz has acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon the House.
And this guy, Trump wanted to be his Attorney General.
The wider Republican group in Congress wanted to sit on the report, unpublished.
The Committee that published it is 50:50 and theoretically nonpartisan & in camera, even though there has been plenty of argy-bargy - eg the Republican group leader making the statement to the press that the Committee 'had agreed' not to publish it, whilst they had in fact not come to agreement and were holding back since they did not have a consensus decision.
Gaetz procured his teenagers via a Sugar Daddy dating site, using the account details of a colleague, and did not ask them their age. It was a little astonishing that having decided to do that, his smarts were suspended to the extent that he attended quite large parties where older men and the young girls were present, and pairing off. So it was all quite well known in his social networks, which overlapped his professional networks.
This stuff is in their attitudinal and behavioural culture.
Mr Biden needs to publish (I believe the closest equivalent word for us is "gazette") teh Equal Rights Amendment if he thinks it will stand.
The Republicans, and other Trump supporters around the world, have sold their souls, and for what? Do any of them actually think that threatening to invade Panama is masterful stroke of international diplomacy?
That's quite apocalyptic !
I'd go more for amoral, nihilistic or debased utilitarian as a description.
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
But we're right at the start of the election cycle. The idea is to have a solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027. The last thing you want to do is peak too early. History is littered with examples of what happens when someone or something peaks too early.
Well that "solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027" was the idea...
They'll be lucky to hit it by 2029.
We'll see. And remember this, the further it goes down the stronger it will pop up when it emerges. Like the rubber duck in a bath. I guess we all have one of those?
Unless they go down the plug hole.
I don't see the uptick as inevitable.
Well to switch to serious, which I probably shouldn't on Christmas Eve, but here goes since it's a non-standard boutique view I have on this "growth" business:
It's unrealistic to expect good growth over the next few years (solid and sustainable as opposed to manufactured froth) and imo they shouldn't have promised it. It won't be their fault if the economy remains sluggish (actually a par score) but of course if that does happen they'll pay a price politically.
This is fair enough because they'd seek to take credit if things somehow surprise on the upside, again mainly because of the macro factors improving, randomness and luck being the key players when it comes to the economy over the short term, far outweighing the impact of specific domestic policies.
This is why, on the politics, the absolutely crucial thing is to make the "14 years of Tory rot" charge stick (as the Cons did with "fixing Labour's mess"). Because that, if successful, will mitigate the political price for low growth and give them a good chance of a 2nd term.
You can't actually believe this garbage. If the Tories managed to rot the economy, clearly they had agency, so how is it the case that Sir Zero Plan has no agency now?
I'm not trying to have it both ways. I don't think the Tories did 'rot' the economy. They did badly on growth (and Brexit is especially worth a mention here as an anti-growth policy) but as always global factors dominated. If you look at UK economic performance over time the biggest contributory factor is world economic performance. UK governments do have an important impact on UK growth but it's on the margins compared to global factors and it doesn't happen within electoral cycles (unless it's of the frothy unsustainable variety).
So why has Dubai managed to sustain growth despite these global factors? Or rainier and closer to home, Ireland?
Well, I don't know if it's the explanation, but I note both have higher immigration rates than the UK.
The budget and subsequent actions suggest, at least to me, it was good economics but bad politics.
There is a whole raft of structural decline to be reversed, be it roads, health, housing - just the nuts and bolts of a country. The idea that 'the market will fix it' is the mantra from a purists point of view but the Thames Water debacle shows that markets can be manipulated as politics and politicians constantly show themselves to be less able than the financial buccaneers.
Also where are economic cycles in all this? Germany looks like a classic case of on the downslope along with France so it's no surprise there would be a softening here due to the effects on our main trading partners. (42% of all exports)
... or did Gordon Brown actually achieve the demise of 'boom and bust'?
It was utterly terrible economics, hammering in taxes those who go to work, the productive part of the economy while leaving the rest of the economy untaxed.
You tax that which you wish to discourage, if you directly jack up taxes on employment/work you are discouraging work and NI is direct taxation on employment in the same way as fuel duty is direct taxation on fuel.
In a counterfactual world what Labour could have done is come in and taken the brave decision to merge National Insurance and Income Tax which would eliminate the 12% extra taxes that those who work for a living have to pay over those who don't.
That would be a 12% increase in Income Tax (without changing Income Tax rates) for those who aren't working on PAYE, while leaving PAYE workers tax rates unchanged. There's your tax rise for the nuts and bolts you want, if that's what you believe in, without hammering businesses or workers or people's pay for going to work.
And it would have been just as consistent with the manifesto as what they did.
I agree with this change and I am one of those pensioners who pay less tax than working people. However I suspect there are about 8 million votes at stake here. So good luck with that one.
So they increased 20 million people's taxes instead? The 20 million already paying more taxes than the 8 million? Besides how many of the 8 million are swing voters?
In 2024 Labour only got 20% of the votes of over-70s, with 46% going to the Tories and 15% going to Reform.
Labour won because they got the votes of working age people.
The incoming Labour government could and should have prioritised working age people who are heavily overtaxed and underfunded. Abolishing WFA was a tiny step in the right direction but then jacking up NI more than undid all the good of that, and won't win them any favour from the 80% of over-70 voters that were already not voting for them, or those that did that have already left them due to WFA.
They should have merged NI and Income Tax. Yes the pensioners would object, but that wouldn't change many votes since they were already not voting Labour anyway!
A credible program for reforming the country would tackle all the shibboleths the prior government couldn't because of the threat of the grey vote. Abolish unnecessary welfare life WFA, abolish unjustified tax breaks like not paying NI on pensions, and tackle issues like planning restrictions that prevent young people getting a home because it might affect the view of a pensioner - or their house prices.
Merging NI and income tax would just expand the dependency culture of welfare we have massively by ending the contributory element to JSA and state pensions which cannot be claimed without enough NI contributions or credits. Absolutely not and we should also be using NI to help fund social care too and ideally move to a French style use of more social insurance to fund healthcare more broadly as well
There is no contributory element already since you get NI "credits" for being unemployed and living on welfare.
There is absolutely no reason to have NI exist to have contributions. Just set contributions based on Income Tax paid if that's what you want.
All the arrangements for Income Tax and NI need reviewing. As do the mechanisms for 'reclaiming' over-payments from those receiving benefits. They are all the result of piecemeal changes and someone needs to have a good look at them and rationalise the whole thing.
They did review the whole issue of benefits and called it Universal Credit. It was introduced at the 2010 Conservative Party conference by Ian Duncan Smith who is responsible for a lot of it. The mechanism is a form of social net and the taper effect (taking away 'overpayment') is core. Even 14 years later it is not fully implemented so a suggestion of waving a magic wand and replacing it within one or even two parliaments does not stand up to critical analysis. National Insurance, by the way, was introduced by Winston Churchill.
Your idea is to make work pay by making the poor, poorer is an interesting concept. Perhaps stand for parliament on that platform and like IDS bring in new legislation to replace Universal Credit.
Universal credit was a step in the right direction, but only a partial step and the taper is what causes the poverty trap that means people think its not worth working, because its not for them.
Universal credit was introduced in one Parliament, so its successor can be. Universal credit was announced in 2010, legislated for in 2012 and began to be rolled out in 2013 so there's absolutely no reason why it can't be replaced in one, let alone 2, Parliaments.
The solution is elegant in its simplicity, but will piss off many vested interests. Just as UC merged many benefits together, we need to do the same with the tax system. Merge UC, Income Tax and National Insurance into one system.
UC has taken us partway there. Time to finish the job. Merge UC with Income Tax and NI so that there's only one income-related tax rather than multiple taxes/tapers that trap people in poverty.
That way work pays and people will work, because its in their own interests to do so.
No, merge income tax with UC and you will just encourage dependence on the latter from payers of the former for life.
NI should be ringfenced for JSA and the state pension and NI credits scrapped so we finally start to shift towards a more contributory welfare system. We can then start funding more healthcare from social insurance as most OECD nations do too
You are pigheaded and completely wrong.
Listen to anyone who doesn't work or only works minimal hours and ask them truthfully why that is and they'll tell you - its not worth them working more.
That's because they have to pay taper and Income Tax and National Insurance and ... if they work.
Have only one flat tax rate, no tapers, and people will look at extra employment and think that they get to keep what they work if they work . . . so they will do so, because its in their own best interest to do so.
People do what suits them best. If you make it worthwhile not to work, don't complain when people don't work.
"COMMERCIAL nuclear fusion moved a step closer after a US company announced plans to build a plant that will deliver electricity to the grid by early next decade.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) claims to be the world’s first company to develop plans to build a grid-scale fusion plant. The generator will be built in Chesterfield County, Virginia...
CFS says their reactor, known as ARC, will generate around 400 MW of electricity for the grid... The company expects to generate at this capacity by the early 2030s."
Either a huge breakthrough, or else more power could be generated by simply burning the cash that will be invested.
Edit: "To date, it has raised over US$2bn, which includes major backing from Italian oil giant Eni."
Have done a PhD on the magnetic confinement of fusion plasma, I'd bet my house on the latter.
What about the approaches that use inertial confinement ?
IC wasn't my thing, but I don't see that being any more promising. If we compare it to the development of the internal combustion engine, they've reached the point of being able to successfully ignite a puddle of petrol. In some respects, that's the easy bit. The tough part is to build something that will successfuly generate a continuous series of bangs and extract sufficient energy from them to power the process and have some left over to sell, and to do that profitably.
Whether it reaches practicality, and whether the economics stack up, are still questionable. But the approach was at least modelled from the outset on producing electricity at competitive rates within a realistic timeframe.
We were talking about CO2 emissions from cement manufacturing the other day. I've just stumbled on this snippet:
The cement industry alone accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a greater proportion than any single country in the world other than the US and China. A report by the World Economic Forum in September found that unless cement production becomes more sustainable, its emissions would more than double to 3.8bn t/y by the middle of the century.
Well under 2% of UK emissions, though.
And no one is going to relocate their cement production here just for our carbon capture boondoggle.
English counties have reduced their carbon footprint since 2006 by an average of 46%. Derbyshire, due to minerals extraction and cement manufacturing has managed a 26% reduction. The worst nationally.
IIRC, I’ll not be more than a percent wrong.
That 2% footprint is in one place. The business involved is currently under maintained, schedules paired to the bone. Likely to need large investment soon.
IMO Labour have been mugged to support a multi billion CCS plan. With nothing obvious to spend the money on I suspect they will fall into a cement manufacturing quagmire of missed targets, failed ventures, and wasted billions.
It’s horrible to watch.
Good for Derbyshire. Thank God one county is continuing to make things a bit more.
Interesting (for me, at least), this is an example of carbon offshoring at a more local scale. In the same way we export much of our carbon emissions to China, India, and other manufacturing nations, the limestone and cement produced in Derbyshire will mostly not be used in Derbyshire, but 'exported' to those counties with fewer headline emissions.
Speaking of which do those bringing attention to this emissions scandal want us to shut down all construction, or are they in favour of importing manufactured cement?
One of the madnesses of Blair's government was the idea of knocking down loads of 'old' houses to build new ones, when many could be refitted for less cost and *far* less CO2 emissions.
Wasn't that one of Prezza's poorer ideas?
(He did some things OK, too.)
I'd go for the techno-gimmick obsessions of the Code for Sustainable Homes as something equally stupid.
"In 2024, EVs must make up 22% of a carmaker's car sales, and 10% of van sales. This target is set to rise. Firms failing to meet these targets face a £15,000 fine per sale."
That is, of course, a continuation of the previous government's stupid decision.
If European governments had started of with the explicit intention of turning the whole car market into Chinese white goods, it’s different to see anything they’d have done differently than what has actually been done.
The Cult of Outsourcing - “Running a battery factory looks jolly difficult and expensive. Just buy some of those Chinese chaps. Negotiating a price for a product I don’t understand? That’s Real Work (TM) with lots of document in written in legalese, instead of that science nonsense.”
Cult of Onshoring - get those clever Chinese chaps to build a plant here, and learn from them.
That's what they did with us a quarter of a century back.
Are the UK government insisting on British ‘local partners’ for the Chinese companies investing in Britain, and are they intending to steal the Chinese IP and have the factory run ‘ghost’ shifts at the weekends?
There's no reason we shouldn't insist on local partners. That seems to be the approach Europe is starting to take.
Without that, then no deal.
Steady on, this is Sir Britain-hater we're talking about.
I've no great confidence that this government will pursue such deals, but they certainly should.
For the last forty years our being "open to investment" has largely meant selling off assets to overseas buyers, who often simply extract what they can and jettison the detritus.
It's not a party political issue - rather how do we best ensure our economic interests. Our governments have not done a great job of that for decades.
We have a relative staying over Christmas. I'm not sure I shall be able to post here tomorrow, let alone do the Christmas crossword, which I usually enjoy. If I don't appear here in the next couple of days, then I'd like to wish every one Merry Christmas.
And a very Happy Christmas to you, too.
(I shall probably be able to sneak away from goose prep long enough to drop in tomorrow. First time I've cooked it, so any tips appreciated.)
Goose is very fatty so be very careful getting it out of the oven or you may spill fat everywhere.
We have a relative staying over Christmas. I'm not sure I shall be able to post here tomorrow, let alone do the Christmas crossword, which I usually enjoy. If I don't appear here in the next couple of days, then I'd like to wish every one Merry Christmas.
And a very Happy Christmas to you, too.
(I shall probably be able to sneak away from goose prep long enough to drop in tomorrow. First time I've cooked it, so any tips appreciated.)
There is still time to nip down to Sainsbury's and buy a turkey crown or roll. Or M&S for some posh beef. You can cook them in your new air fryer waiting wrapped under the tree.
@TimS has opted for goose and is an hour ahead of us, so he will probably post here tomorrow about where it all went wrong, and the relative merits of French and British firefighters.
Goose is about 95 per cent fat. You will need to drain off that fat during cooking, otherwise it will spill into your oven or you risk being burned if it splashes onto your skin.
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
But we're right at the start of the election cycle. The idea is to have a solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027. The last thing you want to do is peak too early. History is littered with examples of what happens when someone or something peaks too early.
Well that "solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027" was the idea...
They'll be lucky to hit it by 2029.
We'll see. And remember this, the further it goes down the stronger it will pop up when it emerges. Like the rubber duck in a bath. I guess we all have one of those?
Unless they go down the plug hole.
I don't see the uptick as inevitable.
Well to switch to serious, which I probably shouldn't on Christmas Eve, but here goes since it's a non-standard boutique view I have on this "growth" business:
It's unrealistic to expect good growth over the next few years (solid and sustainable as opposed to manufactured froth) and imo they shouldn't have promised it. It won't be their fault if the economy remains sluggish (actually a par score) but of course if that does happen they'll pay a price politically.
This is fair enough because they'd seek to take credit if things somehow surprise on the upside, again mainly because of the macro factors improving, randomness and luck being the key players when it comes to the economy over the short term, far outweighing the impact of specific domestic policies.
This is why, on the politics, the absolutely crucial thing is to make the "14 years of Tory rot" charge stick (as the Cons did with "fixing Labour's mess"). Because that, if successful, will mitigate the political price for low growth and give them a good chance of a 2nd term.
You can't actually believe this garbage. If the Tories managed to rot the economy, clearly they had agency, so how is it the case that Sir Zero Plan has no agency now?
I'm not trying to have it both ways. I don't think the Tories did 'rot' the economy. They did badly on growth (and Brexit is especially worth a mention here as an anti-growth policy) but as always global factors dominated. If you look at UK economic performance over time the biggest contributory factor is world economic performance. UK governments do have an important impact on UK growth but it's on the margins compared to global factors and it doesn't happen within electoral cycles (unless it's of the frothy unsustainable variety).
So why has Dubai managed to sustain growth despite these global factors? Or rainier and closer to home, Ireland?
Mid East oil state and EU tax haven respectively. Both much smaller than us. Our realistic target is to perform in line with (and preferably a little better than) most of our peers. I'd like to see that in party rhetoric and manifestos.
Then for me (with Labour) the focus to be on a more equal distribution of income, wealth and opportunity. There's too much banging on about the size of the pie (where government impact is important but very limited) and too little about how it's sliced (where they can do loads).
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
But we're right at the start of the election cycle. The idea is to have a solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027. The last thing you want to do is peak too early. History is littered with examples of what happens when someone or something peaks too early.
Well that "solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027" was the idea...
They'll be lucky to hit it by 2029.
We'll see. And remember this, the further it goes down the stronger it will pop up when it emerges. Like the rubber duck in a bath. I guess we all have one of those?
Unless they go down the plug hole.
I don't see the uptick as inevitable.
Well to switch to serious, which I probably shouldn't on Christmas Eve, but here goes since it's a non-standard boutique view I have on this "growth" business:
It's unrealistic to expect good growth over the next few years (solid and sustainable as opposed to manufactured froth) and imo they shouldn't have promised it. It won't be their fault if the economy remains sluggish (actually a par score) but of course if that does happen they'll pay a price politically.
This is fair enough because they'd seek to take credit if things somehow surprise on the upside, again mainly because of the macro factors improving, randomness and luck being the key players when it comes to the economy over the short term, far outweighing the impact of specific domestic policies.
This is why, on the politics, the absolutely crucial thing is to make the "14 years of Tory rot" charge stick (as the Cons did with "fixing Labour's mess"). Because that, if successful, will mitigate the political price for low growth and give them a good chance of a 2nd term.
You can't actually believe this garbage. If the Tories managed to rot the economy, clearly they had agency, so how is it the case that Sir Zero Plan has no agency now?
I'm not trying to have it both ways. I don't think the Tories did 'rot' the economy. They did badly on growth (and Brexit is especially worth a mention here as an anti-growth policy) but as always global factors dominated. If you look at UK economic performance over time the biggest contributory factor is world economic performance. UK governments do have an important impact on UK growth but it's on the margins compared to global factors and it doesn't happen within electoral cycles (unless it's of the frothy unsustainable variety).
So why has Dubai managed to sustain growth despite these global factors? Or rainier and closer to home, Ireland?
Mid East oil state and EU tax haven respectively. Both much smaller than us. Our realistic target is to perform in line with (and preferably a little better than) most of our peers. I'd like to see that in party manifestos.
Then for me (with Labour) the focus to be on a more equal distribution of income, wealth and opportunity. There's too much banging on about the size of the pie (where government impact is important but very limited) and too little about how it's sliced (where they can actually do loads).
If you look at our English speaking peers in America, Canada, Australia or New Zealand we've not kept up with them for the past 30 years.
If it had the pie would be considerably bigger and that is where governments can act, if they have the will to do so.
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
But we're right at the start of the election cycle. The idea is to have a solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027. The last thing you want to do is peak too early. History is littered with examples of what happens when someone or something peaks too early.
Well that "solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027" was the idea...
They'll be lucky to hit it by 2029.
We'll see. And remember this, the further it goes down the stronger it will pop up when it emerges. Like the rubber duck in a bath. I guess we all have one of those?
Unless they go down the plug hole.
I don't see the uptick as inevitable.
Well to switch to serious, which I probably shouldn't on Christmas Eve, but here goes since it's a non-standard boutique view I have on this "growth" business:
It's unrealistic to expect good growth over the next few years (solid and sustainable as opposed to manufactured froth) and imo they shouldn't have promised it. It won't be their fault if the economy remains sluggish (actually a par score) but of course if that does happen they'll pay a price politically.
This is fair enough because they'd seek to take credit if things somehow surprise on the upside, again mainly because of the macro factors improving, randomness and luck being the key players when it comes to the economy over the short term, far outweighing the impact of specific domestic policies.
This is why, on the politics, the absolutely crucial thing is to make the "14 years of Tory rot" charge stick (as the Cons did with "fixing Labour's mess"). Because that, if successful, will mitigate the political price for low growth and give them a good chance of a 2nd term.
You can't actually believe this garbage. If the Tories managed to rot the economy, clearly they had agency, so how is it the case that Sir Zero Plan has no agency now?
I'm not trying to have it both ways. I don't think the Tories did 'rot' the economy. They did badly on growth (and Brexit is especially worth a mention here as an anti-growth policy) but as always global factors dominated. If you look at UK economic performance over time the biggest contributory factor is world economic performance. UK governments do have an important impact on UK growth but it's on the margins compared to global factors and it doesn't happen within electoral cycles (unless it's of the frothy unsustainable variety).
So why has Dubai managed to sustain growth despite these global factors? Or rainier and closer to home, Ireland?
Mid East oil state and EU tax haven respectively. Both much smaller than us. Our realistic target is to perform in line with (and preferably a little better than) most of our peers. I'd like to see that in party manifestos.
Then for me (with Labour) the focus to be on a more equal distribution of income, wealth and opportunity. There's too much banging on about the size of the pie (where government impact is important but very limited) and too little about how it's sliced (where they can actually do loads).
If you look at our English speaking peers in America, Canada, Australia or New Zealand we've not kept up with them for the past 30 years.
If it had the pie would be considerably bigger and that is where governments can act, if they have the will to do so.
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
But we're right at the start of the election cycle. The idea is to have a solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027. The last thing you want to do is peak too early. History is littered with examples of what happens when someone or something peaks too early.
Well that "solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027" was the idea...
They'll be lucky to hit it by 2029.
We'll see. And remember this, the further it goes down the stronger it will pop up when it emerges. Like the rubber duck in a bath. I guess we all have one of those?
Unless they go down the plug hole.
I don't see the uptick as inevitable.
Well to switch to serious, which I probably shouldn't on Christmas Eve, but here goes since it's a non-standard boutique view I have on this "growth" business:
It's unrealistic to expect good growth over the next few years (solid and sustainable as opposed to manufactured froth) and imo they shouldn't have promised it. It won't be their fault if the economy remains sluggish (actually a par score) but of course if that does happen they'll pay a price politically.
This is fair enough because they'd seek to take credit if things somehow surprise on the upside, again mainly because of the macro factors improving, randomness and luck being the key players when it comes to the economy over the short term, far outweighing the impact of specific domestic policies.
This is why, on the politics, the absolutely crucial thing is to make the "14 years of Tory rot" charge stick (as the Cons did with "fixing Labour's mess"). Because that, if successful, will mitigate the political price for low growth and give them a good chance of a 2nd term.
You can't actually believe this garbage. If the Tories managed to rot the economy, clearly they had agency, so how is it the case that Sir Zero Plan has no agency now?
I'm not trying to have it both ways. I don't think the Tories did 'rot' the economy. They did badly on growth (and Brexit is especially worth a mention here as an anti-growth policy) but as always global factors dominated. If you look at UK economic performance over time the biggest contributory factor is world economic performance. UK governments do have an important impact on UK growth but it's on the margins compared to global factors and it doesn't happen within electoral cycles (unless it's of the frothy unsustainable variety).
So why has Dubai managed to sustain growth despite these global factors? Or rainier and closer to home, Ireland?
Mid East oil state and EU tax haven respectively. Both much smaller than us. Our realistic target is to perform in line with (and preferably a little better than) most of our peers. I'd like to see that in party rhetoric and manifestos.
Then for me (with Labour) the focus to be on a more equal distribution of income, wealth and opportunity. There's too much banging on about the size of the pie (where government impact is important but very limited) and too little about how it's sliced (where they can do loads).
We have a relative staying over Christmas. I'm not sure I shall be able to post here tomorrow, let alone do the Christmas crossword, which I usually enjoy. If I don't appear here in the next couple of days, then I'd like to wish every one Merry Christmas.
And a very Happy Christmas to you, too.
(I shall probably be able to sneak away from goose prep long enough to drop in tomorrow. First time I've cooked it, so any tips appreciated.)
As others have noted, cooking goose is mainly about managing the copious quantities of fat that result.
The only cooking tip is the legs and breast cook at different rates so some recipes recommend removing the legs and cooking them separately
The budget and subsequent actions suggest, at least to me, it was good economics but bad politics.
There is a whole raft of structural decline to be reversed, be it roads, health, housing - just the nuts and bolts of a country. The idea that 'the market will fix it' is the mantra from a purists point of view but the Thames Water debacle shows that markets can be manipulated as politics and politicians constantly show themselves to be less able than the financial buccaneers.
Also where are economic cycles in all this? Germany looks like a classic case of on the downslope along with France so it's no surprise there would be a softening here due to the effects on our main trading partners. (42% of all exports)
... or did Gordon Brown actually achieve the demise of 'boom and bust'?
It was utterly terrible economics, hammering in taxes those who go to work, the productive part of the economy while leaving the rest of the economy untaxed.
You tax that which you wish to discourage, if you directly jack up taxes on employment/work you are discouraging work and NI is direct taxation on employment in the same way as fuel duty is direct taxation on fuel.
In a counterfactual world what Labour could have done is come in and taken the brave decision to merge National Insurance and Income Tax which would eliminate the 12% extra taxes that those who work for a living have to pay over those who don't.
That would be a 12% increase in Income Tax (without changing Income Tax rates) for those who aren't working on PAYE, while leaving PAYE workers tax rates unchanged. There's your tax rise for the nuts and bolts you want, if that's what you believe in, without hammering businesses or workers or people's pay for going to work.
And it would have been just as consistent with the manifesto as what they did.
I agree with this change and I am one of those pensioners who pay less tax than working people. However I suspect there are about 8 million votes at stake here. So good luck with that one.
So they increased 20 million people's taxes instead? The 20 million already paying more taxes than the 8 million? Besides how many of the 8 million are swing voters?
In 2024 Labour only got 20% of the votes of over-70s, with 46% going to the Tories and 15% going to Reform.
Labour won because they got the votes of working age people.
The incoming Labour government could and should have prioritised working age people who are heavily overtaxed and underfunded. Abolishing WFA was a tiny step in the right direction but then jacking up NI more than undid all the good of that, and won't win them any favour from the 80% of over-70 voters that were already not voting for them, or those that did that have already left them due to WFA.
They should have merged NI and Income Tax. Yes the pensioners would object, but that wouldn't change many votes since they were already not voting Labour anyway!
A credible program for reforming the country would tackle all the shibboleths the prior government couldn't because of the threat of the grey vote. Abolish unnecessary welfare life WFA, abolish unjustified tax breaks like not paying NI on pensions, and tackle issues like planning restrictions that prevent young people getting a home because it might affect the view of a pensioner - or their house prices.
Merging NI and income tax would just expand the dependency culture of welfare we have massively by ending the contributory element to JSA and state pensions which cannot be claimed without enough NI contributions or credits. Absolutely not and we should also be using NI to help fund social care too and ideally move to a French style use of more social insurance to fund healthcare more broadly as well
There is no contributory element already since you get NI "credits" for being unemployed and living on welfare.
There is absolutely no reason to have NI exist to have contributions. Just set contributions based on Income Tax paid if that's what you want.
All the arrangements for Income Tax and NI need reviewing. As do the mechanisms for 'reclaiming' over-payments from those receiving benefits. They are all the result of piecemeal changes and someone needs to have a good look at them and rationalise the whole thing.
They did review the whole issue of benefits and called it Universal Credit. It was introduced at the 2010 Conservative Party conference by Ian Duncan Smith who is responsible for a lot of it. The mechanism is a form of social net and the taper effect (taking away 'overpayment') is core. Even 14 years later it is not fully implemented so a suggestion of waving a magic wand and replacing it within one or even two parliaments does not stand up to critical analysis. National Insurance, by the way, was introduced by Winston Churchill.
Your idea is to make work pay by making the poor, poorer is an interesting concept. Perhaps stand for parliament on that platform and like IDS bring in new legislation to replace Universal Credit.
Universal credit was a step in the right direction, but only a partial step and the taper is what causes the poverty trap that means people think its not worth working, because its not for them.
Universal credit was introduced in one Parliament, so its successor can be. Universal credit was announced in 2010, legislated for in 2012 and began to be rolled out in 2013 so there's absolutely no reason why it can't be replaced in one, let alone 2, Parliaments.
The solution is elegant in its simplicity, but will piss off many vested interests. Just as UC merged many benefits together, we need to do the same with the tax system. Merge UC, Income Tax and National Insurance into one system.
UC has taken us partway there. Time to finish the job. Merge UC with Income Tax and NI so that there's only one income-related tax rather than multiple taxes/tapers that trap people in poverty.
That way work pays and people will work, because its in their own interests to do so.
No, merge income tax with UC and you will just encourage dependence on the latter from payers of the former for life.
NI should be ringfenced for JSA and the state pension and NI credits scrapped so we finally start to shift towards a more contributory welfare system. We can then start funding more healthcare from social insurance as most OECD nations do too
You are pigheaded and completely wrong.
Listen to anyone who doesn't work or only works minimal hours and ask them truthfully why that is and they'll tell you - its not worth them working more.
That's because they have to pay taper and Income Tax and National Insurance and ... if they work.
Have only one flat tax rate, no tapers, and people will look at extra employment and think that they get to keep what they work if they work . . . so they will do so, because its in their own best interest to do so.
People do what suits them best. If you make it worthwhile not to work, don't complain when people don't work.
No, universal credit was supposed to ensure that as you earnt more you didn't lose all your benefits at the same time.
A flat tax will of course benefit the highest earners the most as it effectively ends higher rate and additional rate income tax and higher rate NI, so you will get less income from them and therefore will have to look at which cuts to public services and welfare you will have to make as a result.
It would make next to no difference to lower earners as they would never reach the higher rate threshold most likely anyway and if they are earning more a tax rate of 20% would not make much difference either if benefits were also withdrawn gradually do rather than ended all at once as their income rose.
End JSA and the state pension which are based on NI contributions and just have UC and state pension credit and you make it more likely some will largely be dependent on the state for life and often by choice
If contractors want the same employment rights as staff, they could try paying the same taxes as staff.
And not claiming their commute as a business expense.
Not sure what prompted that rant...but UK contractor scene Outside IR35 - ltd company. no employment rights,, can only claim travel to temporary, not main, work site. Control over pay, dividends and pension payments. Inside ir35 - no employment rights, money has to go through unregulated umbrella company (best situation just incompetent not actively defrauding you) no control over pay or pension but full liability for any tax nonpayment issues. This is quite literally having your money paid to someone like Doug Barrowman to take his cut, relying on them to make tax deductions and pay them to HMRC, then pay you. Fixed term contract - basically staff, some employee benefits but not full employment rights. Probably staff rate.
1 and 3 are OK. 2 is a totally fucked up situation that just created a bigger space for a redundant middle-party to take a cut. Typical Fucking Tories.
Abolish NI the IR35 issue goes away.
Considering NI is a tax paid to the state it should have absolutely nothing to do with "employment rights" which are paid by the employer, not the state.
Don't disagree but politically impossible I'd say. The wealthy with mainly investment income would whip up the pensioner vote in outrage, JSP would have to be taken out by a sniper to save the nation's hearing.
80% of pensioners didn't vote Labour at the last election. If it were up to pensioners alone we'd have a landslide Tory government.
Labour shouldn't be kowtowing to the grey vote. If they do, they deserve to lose the next election.
Labour have already infuriated pensioners by the WFA cut, hence most of those pensioners who did vote Labour in July have now gone Tory, Reform or LD
Precisely, so what do they have to lose?
Double down and tackle all the grey shibboleths at once. Merge Income Tax and NI so pensioners aren't on a lower rate of tax than working people. Deal with planning and the green belt so young people can get houses.
Just deal with everything that long should have been done but couldn't be done by the last government that was reliant on the grey vote in a way that Labour is not.
Rayner has already announced plans to concrete over much of the greenbelt.
Labour is now polling 25-29% and is the most unpopular new government since records began, hitting farmers, pensioners, small businesses etc.
But we're right at the start of the election cycle. The idea is to have a solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027. The last thing you want to do is peak too early. History is littered with examples of what happens when someone or something peaks too early.
Well that "solid and rapidly improving economy by around spring 2027" was the idea...
They'll be lucky to hit it by 2029.
We'll see. And remember this, the further it goes down the stronger it will pop up when it emerges. Like the rubber duck in a bath. I guess we all have one of those?
Unless they go down the plug hole.
I don't see the uptick as inevitable.
Well to switch to serious, which I probably shouldn't on Christmas Eve, but here goes since it's a non-standard boutique view I have on this "growth" business:
It's unrealistic to expect good growth over the next few years (solid and sustainable as opposed to manufactured froth) and imo they shouldn't have promised it. It won't be their fault if the economy remains sluggish (actually a par score) but of course if that does happen they'll pay a price politically.
This is fair enough because they'd seek to take credit if things somehow surprise on the upside, again mainly because of the macro factors improving, randomness and luck being the key players when it comes to the economy over the short term, far outweighing the impact of specific domestic policies.
This is why, on the politics, the absolutely crucial thing is to make the "14 years of Tory rot" charge stick (as the Cons did with "fixing Labour's mess"). Because that, if successful, will mitigate the political price for low growth and give them a good chance of a 2nd term.
You can't actually believe this garbage. If the Tories managed to rot the economy, clearly they had agency, so how is it the case that Sir Zero Plan has no agency now?
I'm not trying to have it both ways. I don't think the Tories did 'rot' the economy. They did badly on growth (and Brexit is especially worth a mention here as an anti-growth policy) but as always global factors dominated. If you look at UK economic performance over time the biggest contributory factor is world economic performance. UK governments do have an important impact on UK growth but it's on the margins compared to global factors and it doesn't happen within electoral cycles (unless it's of the frothy unsustainable variety).
So why has Dubai managed to sustain growth despite these global factors? Or rainier and closer to home, Ireland?
Mid East oil state and EU tax haven respectively. Both much smaller than us. Our realistic target is to perform in line with (and preferably a little better than) most of our peers. I'd like to see that in party manifestos.
Then for me (with Labour) the focus to be on a more equal distribution of income, wealth and opportunity. There's too much banging on about the size of the pie (where government impact is important but very limited) and too little about how it's sliced (where they can actually do loads).
If you look at our English speaking peers in America, Canada, Australia or New Zealand we've not kept up with them for the past 30 years.
If it had the pie would be considerably bigger and that is where governments can act, if they have the will to do so.
Again, I note, much higher immigration.
Nothing wrong with skilled immigration, especially if there's few restrictions on construction so migrants and young people can get a house.
The problem in this country is we have the worst of both worlds. Draconian planning restrictions mean that housing can't keep up with demand, and much of the migration that has come has been so firms can have minimum wage people to work with rather than skilled migrants.
We have a relative staying over Christmas. I'm not sure I shall be able to post here tomorrow, let alone do the Christmas crossword, which I usually enjoy. If I don't appear here in the next couple of days, then I'd like to wish every one Merry Christmas.
And a very Happy Christmas to you, too.
(I shall probably be able to sneak away from goose prep long enough to drop in tomorrow. First time I've cooked it, so any tips appreciated.)
As others have noted, cooking goose is mainly about managing the copious quantities of fat that result.
The only cooking tip is the legs and breast cook at different rates so some recipes recommend removing the legs and cooking them separately
Ha ! Already gut the butcher to do that. And have acquired a second smaller roasting tin to transfer surplus fat into ( & possibly roast veg in it). Anything else I need to watch out for ?
The budget and subsequent actions suggest, at least to me, it was good economics but bad politics.
There is a whole raft of structural decline to be reversed, be it roads, health, housing - just the nuts and bolts of a country. The idea that 'the market will fix it' is the mantra from a purists point of view but the Thames Water debacle shows that markets can be manipulated as politics and politicians constantly show themselves to be less able than the financial buccaneers.
Also where are economic cycles in all this? Germany looks like a classic case of on the downslope along with France so it's no surprise there would be a softening here due to the effects on our main trading partners. (42% of all exports)
... or did Gordon Brown actually achieve the demise of 'boom and bust'?
It was utterly terrible economics, hammering in taxes those who go to work, the productive part of the economy while leaving the rest of the economy untaxed.
You tax that which you wish to discourage, if you directly jack up taxes on employment/work you are discouraging work and NI is direct taxation on employment in the same way as fuel duty is direct taxation on fuel.
In a counterfactual world what Labour could have done is come in and taken the brave decision to merge National Insurance and Income Tax which would eliminate the 12% extra taxes that those who work for a living have to pay over those who don't.
That would be a 12% increase in Income Tax (without changing Income Tax rates) for those who aren't working on PAYE, while leaving PAYE workers tax rates unchanged. There's your tax rise for the nuts and bolts you want, if that's what you believe in, without hammering businesses or workers or people's pay for going to work.
And it would have been just as consistent with the manifesto as what they did.
I agree with this change and I am one of those pensioners who pay less tax than working people. However I suspect there are about 8 million votes at stake here. So good luck with that one.
So they increased 20 million people's taxes instead? The 20 million already paying more taxes than the 8 million? Besides how many of the 8 million are swing voters?
In 2024 Labour only got 20% of the votes of over-70s, with 46% going to the Tories and 15% going to Reform.
Labour won because they got the votes of working age people.
The incoming Labour government could and should have prioritised working age people who are heavily overtaxed and underfunded. Abolishing WFA was a tiny step in the right direction but then jacking up NI more than undid all the good of that, and won't win them any favour from the 80% of over-70 voters that were already not voting for them, or those that did that have already left them due to WFA.
They should have merged NI and Income Tax. Yes the pensioners would object, but that wouldn't change many votes since they were already not voting Labour anyway!
A credible program for reforming the country would tackle all the shibboleths the prior government couldn't because of the threat of the grey vote. Abolish unnecessary welfare life WFA, abolish unjustified tax breaks like not paying NI on pensions, and tackle issues like planning restrictions that prevent young people getting a home because it might affect the view of a pensioner - or their house prices.
Merging NI and income tax would just expand the dependency culture of welfare we have massively by ending the contributory element to JSA and state pensions which cannot be claimed without enough NI contributions or credits. Absolutely not and we should also be using NI to help fund social care too and ideally move to a French style use of more social insurance to fund healthcare more broadly as well
There is no contributory element already since you get NI "credits" for being unemployed and living on welfare.
There is absolutely no reason to have NI exist to have contributions. Just set contributions based on Income Tax paid if that's what you want.
All the arrangements for Income Tax and NI need reviewing. As do the mechanisms for 'reclaiming' over-payments from those receiving benefits. They are all the result of piecemeal changes and someone needs to have a good look at them and rationalise the whole thing.
They did review the whole issue of benefits and called it Universal Credit. It was introduced at the 2010 Conservative Party conference by Ian Duncan Smith who is responsible for a lot of it. The mechanism is a form of social net and the taper effect (taking away 'overpayment') is core. Even 14 years later it is not fully implemented so a suggestion of waving a magic wand and replacing it within one or even two parliaments does not stand up to critical analysis. National Insurance, by the way, was introduced by Winston Churchill.
Your idea is to make work pay by making the poor, poorer is an interesting concept. Perhaps stand for parliament on that platform and like IDS bring in new legislation to replace Universal Credit.
Universal credit was a step in the right direction, but only a partial step and the taper is what causes the poverty trap that means people think its not worth working, because its not for them.
Universal credit was introduced in one Parliament, so its successor can be. Universal credit was announced in 2010, legislated for in 2012 and began to be rolled out in 2013 so there's absolutely no reason why it can't be replaced in one, let alone 2, Parliaments.
The solution is elegant in its simplicity, but will piss off many vested interests. Just as UC merged many benefits together, we need to do the same with the tax system. Merge UC, Income Tax and National Insurance into one system.
UC has taken us partway there. Time to finish the job. Merge UC with Income Tax and NI so that there's only one income-related tax rather than multiple taxes/tapers that trap people in poverty.
That way work pays and people will work, because its in their own interests to do so.
No, merge income tax with UC and you will just encourage dependence on the latter from payers of the former for life.
NI should be ringfenced for JSA and the state pension and NI credits scrapped so we finally start to shift towards a more contributory welfare system. We can then start funding more healthcare from social insurance as most OECD nations do too
You are pigheaded and completely wrong.
Listen to anyone who doesn't work or only works minimal hours and ask them truthfully why that is and they'll tell you - its not worth them working more.
That's because they have to pay taper and Income Tax and National Insurance and ... if they work.
Have only one flat tax rate, no tapers, and people will look at extra employment and think that they get to keep what they work if they work . . . so they will do so, because its in their own best interest to do so.
People do what suits them best. If you make it worthwhile not to work, don't complain when people don't work.
No, universal credit was supposed to ensure that as you earnt more you didn't lose all your benefits at the same time.
A flat tax will of course benefit the highest earners the most as it effectively ends higher rate and additional rate income tax and higher rate NI, so you will get less income from them and therefore will have to look at which cuts to public services and welfare you will have to make as a result.
It would make next to no difference to lower earners as they would never reach the higher rate threshold most likely anyway and if they are earning more a tax rate of 20% would not make much difference either if benefits were also withdrawn gradually do rather than ended all at once as their income rose.
End JSA and the state pension which are based on NI contributions and just have UC and state pension credit and you make it more likely some will largely be dependent on the state for life and often by choice
Don't be farcical.
Low earners are on a combined tax rate of 55% taper, plus 20% income tax, plus 8% National Insurance.
The unification of North America from the arctic to the canal makes a lot of sense.
Manifest destiny!
I'd suggest that residual implicit belief in Manifest Destiny is a reason why the USA is so screwed-up. Even amongst intelligent and experienced commentators on the anti-Trump side (eg Popok), I constantly hear guff about "the greatest country in the world", the most glorious democratic system, and all the rest.
A quite funny one I heard recently was a suggestion that problems with Presidential Pardon were something to do with King Ine of Wessex (688–725), because he first is the first known monarch who to come up with the idea of clemency. That I think was Popok. Nothing to do with Usonia having failed to reform the practice * as has happened elsewhere, and so instutionalising corruption in the Presidency.
* I confess I'm not sure how Pardons work in eg Canada, or Oz, or South Africa, or India, or Ireland, or other countries influenced by British legal norms.
Labour to restore deadline to ban sale of new petrol and diesel cars in the UK to 2030 after the last Conservative government had increased it to 2035 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y7x3jgw7no
Woah, that's stupid! They can't fully convert in that time!
The geographically-challenged Oxbridge interns running BBC News by robotically copying US news channels are currently leading on American Airlines having briefly grounded all flights, leading to delays in internal flights in a faraway land of which we know little and that has precisely sod all to do with the country paying their wages.
Labour to restore deadline to ban sale of new petrol and diesel cars in the UK to 2030 after the last Conservative government had increased it to 2035 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y7x3jgw7no
Woah, that's stupid! They can't fully convert in that time!
Comments
Nor in Scotland and even UK polls are narrowing to small Labour leads, ties or even conservative leads
Farage and Reform would not be rocketing up the polls if Labour were not as unpopular
All governments lose popularity in midterm, and those who don't take any unpopular decisions for fear of upsetting people don't deserve to be in office.
Everyone tries to find a tax increase that doesn't affect them when in truth income tax rates need to go higher
But yes, it really can and should be lower than that and if done that would be a tax cut for working people not a tax rise.
Always an electric atmosphere though, my brother used to go to Ally Pally quite a bit when he lived in London.
Looking at ITER - it’s hard to see a path from that to a practical power plant. I mean, it is a lovely giant physics experiment and we will get lots of research out of it. But high uptime net power?
Your idea is to make work pay by making the poor, poorer is an interesting concept. Perhaps stand for parliament on that platform and like IDS bring in new legislation to replace Universal Credit.
They'll be lucky to hit it by 2029.
China is still building coal fired power stations, in reduced numbers.
Starmer & Reeves, as good for business as plague and war.
I don't see the uptick as inevitable.
Universal credit was introduced in one Parliament, so its successor can be. Universal credit was announced in 2010, legislated for in 2012 and began to be rolled out in 2013 so there's absolutely no reason why it can't be replaced in one, let alone 2, Parliaments.
The solution is elegant in its simplicity, but will piss off many vested interests. Just as UC merged many benefits together, we need to do the same with the tax system. Merge UC, Income Tax and National Insurance into one system.
UC has taken us partway there. Time to finish the job. Merge UC with Income Tax and NI so that there's only one income-related tax rather than multiple taxes/tapers that trap people in poverty.
That way work pays and people will work, because its in their own interests to do so.
As audiences grow and prizes rise, millions around the world will try the game and in time there will be a pool of a dozen or so players who can score 180 at will, and nine-darters in every leg, and then it will become mechanical and boring.
That's what they did with us a quarter of a century back.
Gets rid of the anomalies and cliff edges and creates a single workable system, yes its complicated but complicated stuff is exactly what newly elected governments should be tackling.
Have a good one, everyone 👍
Churchill, of course, introduced National Insurance when he was part of the Liberal Government some 110 years ago. That we still use, effectively, the system introduced then is perhaps why, in the words of a 1950's slogan, It's time we had the Liberals back'!
On reflection I think it's arguable that Universal Credit could work if the arrangements for clawing back overpayments weren't, apparently anyway, so vindictive.
To pick but one out of the eight million difficulties with system integration, the tax system is more or less built on the foundation of individuals. The benefit system is built on the foundation of households.
It's like trying to integrate your sewing machine with your smartphone.
Just to add to the fun, the local tax system is based on neither, but on land/dwellings.
BTW I have reached the age where you decide that wjere a problem has been unsolved all your life, you draw the obvious conclusion. One of these is the problem of 'cliff edge'. Another is the problem of people who prefer to live without working at the expense of those who do. Since Covid and the rise of 'mental health issues' this has reached a state in which it is a form of high art and ever more deeply embedded.
It's unrealistic to expect good growth over the next few years (solid and sustainable as opposed to manufactured froth) and imo they shouldn't have promised it. It won't be their fault if the economy remains sluggish (actually a par score) but of course if that does happen they'll pay a price politically.
This is fair enough because they'd seek to take credit if things somehow surprise on the upside, again mainly because of the macro factors improving, randomness and luck being the key players when it comes to the economy over the short term, far outweighing the impact of specific domestic policies.
This is why, on the politics, the absolutely crucial thing is to make the "14 years of Tory rot" charge stick (as the Cons did with "fixing Labour's mess"). Because that, if successful, will mitigate the political price for low growth and give them a good chance of a 2nd term.
b) we are currently light years away from anything like you claim (certainly standards have improved, but its much the depth rather than the pinnacle i.e Phil Taylor could average 100+, 30% on the doubles, now its more than just one player).
c) ten pin bowling is very much as you describe and yet 1 million people tune into their big events in the US.
...d) I am not sure the 4 lads dressed as Where's Wally 10 pints deep by 8pm are watching closely the double percentage of said top players...
It also means someone pays more tax when they don't need the income. What wasn't enough to cover everything for me with 2 children 10 years ago would now be more than plenty for me alone even without allowing for inflation, and tax should reflect that. It might help with the cliff edges too.
Premier League
Summer cricket
F1
Football League
Darts
Sky are making a big thing of the darts this year (Merry football dartmas or something), but, I doubt they'd break the bank for it. How many people would pay an additional subscription for the darts? Not many.
Obviously, she couldn't substitute someone else writing them for herself.
And it sounds like she believed there to be mutuality of obligation between herself and the Guardian.
So if the first wasn't the case - if she did have some level of supervision, direction or control - then she would be under that, lack any substitution capability, and have mutuality of obligation (in practice, if not in writing) should she win her case.
I wonder if she acted as though she was within IR35 throughout or acted as a full freelancer.
We saw something similar (on a tinier scale) with Formula-E. They sold UK rights to TNT, who added an extra £crackers subscription to watch. Having built an audience from idiots like me who had watched every race from the start, they killed it stone dead. Nobody watching, nobody taking up the TNT package, little interest in the season finale at Excel. Result? Back on terrestrial TV in 2025.
Yes it is highly rated but for a fortnight or so a year.
The others bring months worth of action.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-greenland-norway-panama-canal-canada-a52858e3075f9b5ad95e78753293fc1f
The Committee that published it is 50:50 and theoretically nonpartisan & in camera, even though there has been plenty of argy-bargy - eg the Republican group leader making the statement to the press that the Committee 'had agreed' not to publish it, whilst they had in fact not come to agreement and were holding back since they did not have a consensus decision.
Gaetz procured his teenagers via a Sugar Daddy dating site, using the account details of a colleague, and did not ask them their age. It was a little astonishing that having decided to do that, his smarts were suspended to the extent that he attended quite large parties where older men and the young girls were present, and pairing off. So it was all quite well known in his social networks, which overlapped his professional networks.
This stuff is in their attitudinal and behavioural culture.
Mr Biden needs to publish (I believe the closest equivalent word for us is "gazette") teh Equal Rights Amendment if he thinks it will stand.
Also Formula-E isn't even Formula 1, its not getting 5 million people tuning in on New Years day to watch it like the darts.
NI should be ringfenced for JSA and the state pension and NI credits scrapped so we finally start to shift towards a more contributory welfare system. We can then start funding more healthcare from social insurance as most OECD nations do too
Without that, then no deal.
That was the BEST poll for Labour this month, others had them tied with the Tories
People didn’t feel that things were good under the Tories. It was incumbent on Labour to sell the change they promised as a road to a better tomorrow. Instead we got worst inheritance since the war, black holes, ruined economy, brace yourselves for our awful budget, etc etc for months, interspersed with a bit of statist policy float nonsense in the silly season.
They have talked themselves into this mess, at least in part. The NI issue is the icing on the cake.
Can they turn it around - yes, of course, but let’s be very clear here. This isn’t just the usual new government unpopularity/teething problems after the first budget. This is a very serious and very bad start for Labour. They have to hope it’s not the start of a death spiral.
(I shall probably be able to sneak away from goose prep long enough to drop in tomorrow.
First time I've cooked it, so any tips appreciated.)
It’s the start of a busy Christmas Eve travel day in the United States - and American Airlines has just grounded all its flights.
The disruption is due to a technical issue, according to the airline, which they say they are trying to fix as soon as possible.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cy7knk1e212t
A merged Income Tax, UC, NI system provides the opportunity.
And the problem of people who prefer not to work, or less spoken of but is equally a problem those who prefer to work only 16 hours but not a damned hour more, is that those people are acting rationally. They're better off by doing that, because of the system we have.
If you tell people that if they don't work, or only work minimal hours, then they'll be better off, then don't be surprised or disappointed when people take you up on that.
Tear it all down and rebuild it so that everyone who works is better off than those who don't. No tapers, just one tax rate that applies to all equally.
I'd go more for amoral, nihilistic or debased utilitarian as a description.
Listen to anyone who doesn't work or only works minimal hours and ask them truthfully why that is and they'll tell you - its not worth them working more.
That's because they have to pay taper and Income Tax and National Insurance and ... if they work.
Have only one flat tax rate, no tapers, and people will look at extra employment and think that they get to keep what they work if they work . . . so they will do so, because its in their own best interest to do so.
People do what suits them best. If you make it worthwhile not to work, don't complain when people don't work.
(This may continue - I had to click several times then start from scratch.)
https://firstlightfusion.com/technology/power-plant
Whether it reaches practicality, and whether the economics stack up, are still questionable. But the approach was at least modelled from the outset on producing electricity at competitive rates within a realistic timeframe.
(He did some things OK, too.)
I'd go for the techno-gimmick obsessions of the Code for Sustainable Homes as something equally stupid.
It sounds a very similar argument to that advanced by a Mr Putin.
For the last forty years our being "open to investment" has largely meant selling off assets to overseas buyers, who often simply extract what they can and jettison the detritus.
It's not a party political issue - rather how do we best ensure our economic interests. Our governments have not done a great job of that for decades.
@TimS has opted for goose and is an hour ahead of us, so he will probably post here tomorrow about where it all went wrong, and the relative merits of French and British firefighters.
Goose is about 95 per cent fat. You will need to drain off that fat during cooking, otherwise it will spill into your oven or you risk being burned if it splashes onto your skin.
Then for me (with Labour) the focus to be on a more equal distribution of income, wealth and opportunity. There's too much banging on about the size of the pie (where government impact is important but very limited) and too little about how it's sliced (where they can do loads).
If it had the pie would be considerably bigger and that is where governments can act, if they have the will to do so.
The only cooking tip is the legs and breast cook at different rates so some recipes recommend removing the legs and cooking them separately
A flat tax will of course benefit the highest earners the most as it effectively ends higher rate and additional rate income tax and higher rate NI, so you will get less income from them and therefore will have to look at which cuts to public services and welfare you will have to make as a result.
It would make next to no difference to lower earners as they would never reach the higher rate threshold most likely anyway and if they are earning more a tax rate of 20% would not make much difference either if benefits were also withdrawn gradually do rather than ended all at once as their income rose.
End JSA and the state pension which are based on NI contributions and just have UC and state pension credit and you make it more likely some will largely be dependent on the state for life and often by choice
The problem in this country is we have the worst of both worlds. Draconian planning restrictions mean that housing can't keep up with demand, and much of the migration that has come has been so firms can have minimum wage people to work with rather than skilled migrants.
And have acquired a second smaller roasting tin to transfer surplus fat into ( & possibly roast veg in it).
Anything else I need to watch out for ?
Low earners are on a combined tax rate of 55% taper, plus 20% income tax, plus 8% National Insurance.
What rate are higher earners on?
A quite funny one I heard recently was a suggestion that problems with Presidential Pardon were something to do with King Ine of Wessex (688–725), because he first is the first known monarch who to come up with the idea of clemency. That I think was Popok. Nothing to do with Usonia having failed to reform the practice * as has happened elsewhere, and so instutionalising corruption in the Presidency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_pardons_in_the_United_States
* I confess I'm not sure how Pardons work in eg Canada, or Oz, or South Africa, or India, or Ireland, or other countries influenced by British legal norms.