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Reforming the economy – politicalbetting.com
Reforming the economy – politicalbetting.com
My view is that the economy is what primarily decides general elections and the first finding from More in Common shows where Reform’s economic polices that would make Liz Truss blush are seen a risk. The voters will find with a Reform government the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed.
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If they don't, then the Liberal Democrats in theory could move into this space - but that'd require them to drop much of the social democrat bit, and given the party is built on beards and sandals that might be a stretch.
Set partisan positions aside - this is far too serious an issue to talk about narrow party positions. Unless a mainstream party sees the light and starts proposing something big - think Edwardian era reforms or the post war governments building the modern welfare state - then we are getting Reform UK as our next government.
Whether they have answers or not they are asking the right questions - and for many voters that will be enough…
Now I know that includes two huge events - covid and the Ukraine inflation but Tories hung 2007 on Gordon Brown/Labour for a decade, somewhat unfairly.
I think some blend of contrition, setting out what it means to be conservative and a plan to make things better are what is required.
And a lot of patience. The public isn’t listening yet.
Interesting vid from a structural engineer of civil engineering foundations evaluating the strength of the Kerch Bridge.
TLDR: it was build several times stronger than normally seen as necessary, so will be very difficult to damage the foundations to the point it become4s unusable or maybe even requires repair.
Delightfully, the Youtuber is called Casey Jones.
https://www.youtube.com/@CaseyJones-Engineer
There isn't much of a political space for that at the expense of the Conservatives.
A single factor for safer cellular rejuvenation
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.05.657370v1
Ageing is a key driver of the major diseases afflicting the modern world. Slowing or reversing the ageing process would therefore drive significant and broad benefits to human health. Previously, the Yamanaka factors (OCT4, SOX2, KLF4, with or without c-MYC: OSK(M)) have been shown to rejuvenate cells based on accurate predictors of age known as epigenetic clocks. Unfortunately, OSK(M) induces dangerous pluripotency pathways, making it unsuitable for therapeutic use. To overcome this therapeutic barrier, we screened for novel factors by optimising directly for age reversal rather than for pluripotency. We trained a transcriptomic ageing clock, unhindered by the low throughput of bulk DNA methylation assays, to enable a screen of unprecedented scale and granularity. Our platform identified SB000, the first single gene intervention to rejuvenate cells from multiple germ layers with efficacy rivalling the Yamanaka factors. Cells rejuvenated by SB000 retain their somatic identity, without evidence of pluripotency or loss of function. These results reveal that decoupling pluripotency from cell rejuvenation does not remove the ability to rejuvenate multiple cell types. This discovery paves the way for cell rejuvenation therapeutics that can be broadly applied across age-driven diseases...
* Trusting you don't mean Edward the Confessor, when the Reform was the French coming over and burning it all down. Don't tell RefUK, or they will put that in Farage's kaleidoscope as a reason for resisting T'Evil EU.
And you don't need a welfare state that encourages idleness. Indeed, Universal Credit is pretty good at preventing that (it's the add-on benefits that cause issues). The bigger issue is pensioners feeling safe enough to retire in their mid-50s, so we lose 10 years of highly skilled and experienced work.
How is it that we tip record amounts into things like the NHS only for front-line healthcare to be starved of cash? Why is nobody willing to face the truth - the system is grossly inefficient and a significant part is the “marketised” structure installed under successive LabCon governments. Same in education.
We’re spending more. And getting less. The cut that is needed is to the money which evaporates before it gets to the actual service. Hire more teachers. Dismantle the 704 separate academy businesses.
To make the most of opportunity you have to deal with the complexity causing disruption and the disconnection in people’s lives.
My guess. You come from a privileged background.
Our class system is part of the problem. We close down opportunities for all but the connected.
That's not how politics works. The Conservatives can't simply stay mute for several years because they have history whilst the public debate continues without them.
I agree with the rest of your plan and that's exactly what they should, and I don't think, are doing at the moment - because it's all about things like the ECHR, pensioner benefits and identity politics in little snippets that don't form any cohesive narrative. They are just ignored.
To advocate fiscal responsibility requires advocating the end of the triple lock, winter fuel allowance and pension credits.
Plus an increase in the state retirement age to 70 and the ending of DB pensions in the public sector.
It also requires advocating the reform and increase of council tax, especially for the more expensive properties.
A key problem witb that, is that the last government that ran under the banner of fiscal responsibility, via
austerity, ended up doing the country more harm than good, across a range
of social and economic areas.
Scenario: Badenoch has an epiphany and wakes up realising that she isn’t a political genius after all. Humility kicks in. She brings in actual conservative economists and shapes a vision for the future of Britain and how the Conservatives would lead us there.
Go talk about that. Smaller state, pro business, pro investment, a hand up not a hand out etc etc. A fair chunk of the initial conversation will be a mea culpa about how far you had strayed. And then it’s all about the new policy platform. Big. Bold. Visionary.
Then you can be heard. Nobody wants to hear Ms Snippy sneering on about how DEI is the true problem in our economy.
(1) Demographics
(2) Debt
No-one wants to talk about the latter - presumably because politicians have calculated that no-one wants to hear it - even though we're projected to spend over £100 billion a year on debt interest this year, compared to about £48 billion in 2011.
Have a think about where else that £52 billion could otherwise have gone had interest rates stayed the same.
Come to think of it, no-one wants to talk much about the former either- preferring to maintain the gerontocracy and slipping in high immigration each year to try and maintain the worker ratio - but we need to.
I'm inclined to the thought that it is really down to either taking out the decks, or sailing a boat through with several hundred tons of explosive and sinking it next to the pillars, then a big boom to take out as much as possible including the decks as well. If they can smuggle drones 3000 miles into Russia ...
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-growth-fund-opens-for-business
So, very much on topic.
And a shift to prevention / public health has been the direction for decades.
LabCon have been stuck in group think for a few generations now. Fiddling around the edges whilst the body politic sinks slowly beneath.
Spending money on things we need is a Good Thing. We don’t have that money - to pay for police officers to use a live example - because we’re spending more money mopping up the mess created by not paying for enough police officers.
If the Home Office or DfE or DHSC don’t have enough money to pay for front line provision then cut the costs of the bullshit framework which is eating all the money. We need teachers, we don’t need expensive staff running businesses which run a handful of academies.
Low taxes, low spending and light regulation on the other hand generates it. THAT'S the gap in the political market at the moment, not yet another high tax, high spending, enterprise-crushing component of the uniparty.
We can afford to pay people properly, cut regulation and have a fully functioning and stable society, but that requires rewiring the public mindset, and I am afraid little can be done in that area now without significant societal upheaval similar to the 1980s.
What you want is primary prevention - an environment where people's diets and lifestyle don't lead to it in the first place. Otherwise, NHS spending will continue to explode.
(I'm not convinced that public health has been increasing as a proportion of spending. My understanding was it's been cut significantly - I'll check later once I've sorted my emails out)
Debt interest is a problem predominantly because our economic output per worker is poor and our growth is sluggish. Invest to drive productivity and you fix 1 and 2.
But “debt” gets used as the excuse for why we can’t afford police officers and doctors and teachers and roads and so we slide further into the mire.
China in building roads globally. We can’t because everything costs £1bazillion per mile in this wretched place. We can’t - like china - invest in positive ROI things like transport. But it needs to be a long term plan and we need to scrap the high cost barriers.
A starter for 10. Create regional road building units. Competitively tendered to experienced construction companies who have to recruit and train local people as part of their contract. With a rolling 10 year program to improve and build new roads. positive ROI all the way through - so they pay for themselves - and we get an army of trained and productive construction workers which again we need.
It's probably what we tax and what we spend on that is the issue.
Yes, a massive explosion next to a pier could bring it down. But it would need to be much more than 1100kg. And we should also remember it is *two* bridges, not one. You could bring down the road bridge and still leave the rail bridge. Bringing down both is even more difficult - though the initial truck explosion did damage both.
Bridges can be very weak in certain circumstances - see the Baltimore collapse, when a bridge got a nudge from a container ship. But generally they are much stronger than people make out. And sadly in the case of the Kerch Bridge, 'quality' Russian engineering apparently caused them to have a massive safety factor in the pile design.
(There is one other thing to consider: ice. The Soviets apparently built a much smaller bridge across the strait, but that was brought down by floating ice. I can imagine the pile system has also been designed to deal with that - which might be why the dolphins alongside the pier are so massive.)
The blame.
That's separate from purchase costs and prices, which is mainly to do with tax reform and to stop shovelling free money to the wealthier parts of society, and Council Tax reform.
The one that I want to see is renewed and increased commitment to green energy, which amongst other things will vastly help with strategic autonomy - so Mr Trump, Mr Putin, and their successors will have less of a dependent Europe to exploit - and corresponding systems to support it such as SMR.
I think something was said about that yesterday. I keep seeing people saying it will be in Notts, which is obviously the correct place to put it, but afaics it is South Yorkshire (Doncaster) and Derby.
The status quo is no longer sustainable. People are absolutely sick of it.
There are many others, too, ofcourse.
You can't expect Unions not to advocate vociferously for the members they represent, and fight for the best deal, but that's not the only interest here.
Turns out the F1 2026 calendar has a couple of fun clashes. Canada is on the same day as the Indy 500, and Spa clashes with the World Cup Final.
We are very far from the vision of the Marmot report of 2010.
https://www.instituteofhealthequity.org/resources-reports/fair-society-healthy-lives-the-marmot-review
I see China come up a lot. Fine, if you don't want health and safety, sustainability, very lax attitudes to public safety, or any private property or democratic rights.
I agree, we could then get a lot done rather quickly. At a cost, mind - one we wouldn't like.
We have front line provision in health and education where we spend record amounts and get increasingly crisis-driven crap services. With the front line staff now being blamed for not wanting to work in this highly stressful environment on crap pay and conditions.
What would I cut? The “market”. Scrap all of the waste and duplication and cost of academies and trusts. Where we now have armies of managers and administrators and contract managers delivering so-called “choice” where the outcomes on offer are all crap.
What do the right want to cut? The actual front-line provision. Less doctors and teachers on poorer pay. Take their pensions, make their working lives even less bearable, they’ll work harder.
I am a capitalist. Competition is good. But not in public services where the competitive structure has replaced the actual service as the reason the thing exists. Why does everything cost more in education and the NHS? Because we have an army of procurement managers buying tiny amounts in competition with each other. Tesco doesn’t store managers buy beans from Heinz - it buys them centrally. Yet we have all these endless mini businesses with all that cost buying little and paying lots.
The question was whether it was possible have fiscally responsible social democratic government.
Ouch: Three tech firms bail out of the UK in a single day
...
Alphawave, a rare example of a semiconductor company listed in the UK, has moved another step closer to being taken over by US rival Qualcomm after the board recommended the deal to shareholders based on a valuation of just under £2bn.
Then came news that the UK listed precision equipment specialist Spectris received a takeover bid from US private equity outfit Advent, valuing the firm at around £3.5bn. Open for business, indeed.
Meanwhile, an Oxford university spinout, quantum computing startup Oxford Ionics, has agreed to a $1.1bn takeover by US-based rival IonQ. This trio of tech takeovers comes just days after UK fintech darling Wise announced it would shift its primary listing to the US in search of growth.
...
This isn’t a problem of Starmer’s making, but it’s getting worse on his watch and it must be confronted.
https://www.cityam.com/three-tech-firms-bail-out-of-the-uk-in-a-single-day/
So far from the tried post-Thatcherite mantras about not picking winners, they asked about 20 companies to come up with the most efficient and
cost-effective blueprint, and sprayed billions at the winners.
And even then, a military bridging system could fill 50m of gap in a few hours.
And even then, a military bridging system could fill 100m of gap in a few hours.
I want to train and hire more police and teachers and medics. that will allow us to take an axe to much of the money bleeding out the system in administrative waste. Spend a little more now invested properly to then cut spending long term.
Debt is going up right now, and if we cut the wrong things it will keep going up. We need to borrow to invest. And then the return on that vestment is slashing costs - and debt - as that investment pays out. Like a retail business borrowing to invest in new fridges which slash its energy costs.
You are Tories. Why has investment ceased to be a thing you believe in? Not you personally, your political movement. I don’t get it.
People want services that other people use to be cut, not ones that they use themselves.
The problem is that a very high proportion of spending is on a small minority of people. The 10% of elderly in institutional social care, children with major physical, behavioral and other needs, the 100 000 convicts. Most of us don't come into contact with these, so we see the money as wasted. But if we cut these, what do we expect instead? Should we leave people in the snow to die instead?
But if we're in a situation where Reform become the next government, that's quite likely.
If you want social democracy then you either have low immigration or you have incredibly strict rules - enforced - around immigration and who gets what
Britain now has the worst of all worlds. See Westminster council giving away central london council housing for life - when 2/3 of the people benefiting were born overseas
If you want to brew civil unrest - keep doing THAT
So that will simply create another Truss Event.
Why did BoJo turn the immigration dial up to eleven? Largely because the economy would have been in an even bigger mess if he hadn't.
You want a society that you find agreeable? Fine. You have to be rich enough to earn it, and Britain hasn't done that for ages.
At least for anyone under 40 without inherited wealth.
And I can think of absolutely loads of places on the outskirts of London that have tonnes of space to build out or build up. We've already seen it in areas like Battersea that must have added many thousands of homes in recent years.
Build, build, and then build some more.
But we're heading for a world in which precious few people learn how to create amazing paintings and sketches because a soulless machine can spew out something in moments.
But from a political perspective something that restrictive is essential to ensure the markets have confidence in the definition. Will you be able to literally touch that investment in 10 years time?
MUSK: I REGRET SOME OF MY POSTS ABOUT PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP LAST WEEK. THEY WENT TOO FAR
Granted, it's been a terrible change, but still. Determined people, with an agenda, can create change if they know what they're doing. Where's the leader who can use such potential for change for good?
I don't like it much.
At least we’re talking about the substantive issues this morning.
Like many others, I’d prefer a much reduced deficit and reduced borrowing but the impact of reducing public services is disproportionately felt by those with less and generally not those demanding either overt tax cuts or the euphemism of “supply side reforms”.
Yet the Lafferites have a valid point - how do we get long term sustainable growth? Anyone can buy a boom and bust but long term growth? It’s often come from innovation and ingenuity which often means new jobs create those which no longer exist.
We remain a wealthy country and many, though by no means all, live a comfortable existence. Land Value Taxation has to be on the horizon as must a recognition we must do more to get groups such as carers and those with physical disabilities into work and that requires all sectors to look at how they operate.
We also need to redouble our efforts to mitigate long term sickness impact - there is ill health which is a barrier to work and ill health which isn’t.
There’s also another term not used much these days - education. Training and improving the skills of existing workers seems an obvious step.
If we are determined to wean ourselves off using cheap imported labour (as distinct from skilled imported labour), we need to rethink on getting our economically inactive back into some form of productive employment and that requires much more carrot than stick.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/apple-says-generative-ai-cannot-think-like-a-human-research-paper-pours-cold-water-on-reasoning-models
There's so much more that could be done that isn't about tax or spending.
The reason you can borrow to invest, entirely legitimately, is that you can put the depreciation into your accounts rather than the entire expenditure.
Salaries for ongoing staff are not depreciated.
The grocers daughter speech was derided for years by those who claimed it was so much more complicated than that, the sort of people who got us into this current mess. The truth is, it really isn’t. Pretending that there is some infinite source of other people’s money, that is the menace. And I don’t see any acknowledgement of that from any of our parties, mainstream or Reform.
The Government actions on WFA has been a masterclass in politically screwing up while at the same time achieving almost no useful policy outcomes (saving cash in this cash).
That's one reason why many British governments have ended up being pro-immigration - the economic models show that it makes handling the debt burden easier.
The whole issue of debt in a global economy when the global population starts to shrink is going to cause all sorts of difficulties later in the century. Somehow we need to get ahead of those problems.
1) It is not at all clear to me that the economy is broken. As a GDP we remain 6th in the world. There are imbalances and problems but we remain as a country OK. GDP per capita is comparable with France and Germany. We are talking ourselves down. There are political and redistributist solutions to many of the messes.
The starting point for serious discussion should not be: 'We are a broken third world disaster zone'. We aren't.
2) I don't support Reform, on competence grounds and on then grounds of the company they keep. And some other reasons. But it is delusional to think that they plan to enter 2029 with a Trussplus manifesto. We have to wait and see but a certainty is that they will produce a centrist, socially conservative, gimmick filled, as costed as any other party, social democrat, high tax, high spend programme, reflecting very precisely the socially conservative welfarist opinions of the people of Clacton.
Don't tax poor people close to 100% if they work more than 18-20 hours per week.
Get people to work full time rather than part time, and able to keep more of their money they earn.
The state gets more in taxes and pays less in benefits, even if it doesn't get 100% of the effort people put in.
Laffer Curve in action. And the right thing to do.
Bit of pre cash in Rachels Attic polling from MiC, little change (6 to 9 Jun)
Ref 28 (=)
Lab 24 (+1)
Con 20 (-1)
LD 14 (=)
Green 7 (-1)
SNP 3 (+1)
All very stable lately
I’m not rich enough to care but buying non inflation linked gilts is only for the courageous and the generous.