The budget: winners and losers – politicalbetting.com
The budget: winners and losers – politicalbetting.com
Most Britons support measures such as the gambling tax, the council tax surcharge. While freezing income tax bands and changes to salary sacrifice schemes are less popular. Britons are more split on the tourist tax and the student loan threshold freeze pic.twitter.com/fHxHL0rPS2
0
Comments
https://news.sky.com/story/budget-2025-over-a-third-of-britons-think-rachel-reeves-exaggerated-bad-news-13478111
...Changing fossil fuel price projections meant the cost to consumers rose significantly between 2013, when Davey signed the deal for electricity at £92.50 per megawatt hour (MWh), and 2016, when the government formally signed off on the project...
Reform 26 (+1)
Lab 19 (nc)
Con 19 (+1)
Greens 16 (nc)
LD 14 (-1)
The budget hasn't shifted the dial much, yet.
American sack race next, who wins out of SecDef Peter Hegseth and Minnesota Gov Tim Walz, both on the front pages for separate scandals over the weekend?
https://x.com/harryjsisson/status/1995699858871910615
I guess a few hangovers will have dulled his memory.
Nearly 100 premises in Askern, which is a town and civil parish within the City of Doncaster (South Yorkshire, England), have been left without access to Openreach’s UK broadband network after rodents – those with a seemingly strong appetite for telecoms infrastructure – chewed through one of the operator’s cables in the area. Nothing like a diet high in fibre.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/12/cable-munching-rats-cause-11-day-openreach-broadband-outage-in-doncaster.html
That pun is so awesome you would think I worked for that website.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3e04pl48ldo
Hillsborough enquiry staggers to the line….
- the final report is being “trimmed” from thousands of pages to 400. In the interests of clarity
- the full report will be archived, not released
- all police officers involved are dead or retired.
So why, you ask, not release everything?
Well, *after* Hillsborough, for years, people in the system lied and covered up. Some of them are still alive. Some of them are still working in government.
Many will be The Right Sort. A Safe Pair of Hands.
#NU10K
What would make someone respond 'Absolutely' to a question about the budget?
https://x.com/lrozen/status/1995676896265146581
Leavitt’s “remarks…elicited a furious backlash within the Defense Depapt, where officials described feeling angry at the uncertainty over whether Hegseth would take responsibility for his alleged role in the operation — or leave the military & civilian staff under him to face the consequences.
“This is ‘protect Pete’ bulls---,” 1 military official said.
“1 official said of Leavitt’s statement, ‘It’s throwing us, the service members, under the bus.’ Another person said some of Hegseth’s top civilian staff appeared deeply alarmed about the revelations and were contemplating whether to leave the administration.
“A U.S. official..lamented that Bradley…was singled out by Leavitt in her statement at the White House earlier.
‘Whether he takes the blame or not,’ this official said, ‘his reputation has been marred by this forever, just by that statement.’”..
https://x.com/edballs/status/1995556994409710034?s=61
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
https://youtu.be/178DVLAKgq4?si=EEjfUS2qKhEbDWIO
The Police f*cked up, then they lied to cover this up, the Government supported them, and various members of the great and the good tried to write reports telling us all what we knew already but were hampered by concerns that they might upset too many of those who were to blame.
Need we spend more money on this?
Evan Edinger: New Jersey by public transport, including its most walkable town:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUGXgTplLok
Leavitt claims that Trump had a "preventative" MRI
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1995567329082487122
But even the ignorant idiots who defend the extrajudicial killing (aka murder) of suspected drug smugglers have no defence for the second strike.
Hard for me to see how one can support the summary killing of alleged drug couriers on unarmed boats, and only be aghast at the attack on them after a boat is hit. The killings are lawless to begin with; the follow-on strike was fruit of a poisonous tree.
https://x.com/jawillick/status/1995666769093042474
*not really
Never ask:
A woman her age
A man his salary
The White House why the president is getting a secret medical procedure that makes him unable to do public appearances for the first three days of every month since September.
https://x.com/johnbourscheid/status/1995470999635054602?s=20
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
Though I read an article yesterday which pointed out she has less headroom than previous chancellors, with the probable exception of Hunt who was crouching.
OK, it leaves the other 167 hours of the week, but it's not to be despised.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
We're getting rid of juries because just having a judge will be quicker...
Amongst people known to me are two women in this position, for both of whom the extra 4-5k will be transformative. One has three children under 10, and works as an office manager in a local business. Her husband is now on his third woman, having left two with children before he reached the age of 40. From what I hear his latest is an an alcoholic, so it may not be so much fun this time.
I'm happy to pay my share of such.
Sorry if this important article has already been posted.
That's all that matters, and it happens to be true as well.
You're in a minority.
{Lord Denning has entered the chat and declared everyone guilty - in the public interest}
Once we all agree that being out of work and gaming the system both works and is the substantial reality (courtesy of DT and Mail and Goodwin) the social contract ceases to function.
Good article, although the subject's obviously less than lovely.
Next week - “Bombed the shipwrecked survivors *twice*. But losing the head of the military, is that really a benefit to the country? At this point does it really matter?”
If no one is punished for anything, then anything goes.
“Just open the gates, Constable, it’s not like anyone does anything if a bunch of scousers get crushed.”
Young people have been screwed over, yet again, as is de rigueur.
The Student Loan threshold freeze means that people working full-time on Minimum Wage who are graduates face an extra 9% income tax. Let alone anyone who earns a salary a smidgen over minimum wage.
https://x.com/johnfingleton1/status/1995456872053166099
I’ll believe it when actions match words, but a rare compliment to the PM if he can actually succeed in avoiding a £700m salmon party at the next reactor, and get at least a couple of SMRs underway before the next election.
We've for instance seen very basic errors, such as the equation of UC = dole scrounger, in particular, when UC is in large part an in-work Speenhamland style allowance, and repeated whining about the increase in the former when this is simply the shift of existing claimants to the new UC system.
The irony is that, in the immediate future at least, the main reason we will all be paying more arises from simply continuing what the Tories have already been doing for some time.
There's plenty of things that can be positive messages if there was a dedication to writing the agenda rather than letting others do so. But they don't tell them again 298 times.
I see that the Purchasing Managers Index gas gone positive for the first time in over a year:
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-manufacturing-pmi-shows-first-growth-over-year-november-2025-12-01/
On topic, three of the major groups the Government should be pointing to as beneficiaries of their budgets are 1 - Pensioners (above inflation increases), 2 - Low wage workers (minimum wage, workers' rights), 3 - Mortgage holders.
But they won't. Or at least they won't firmly enough. They will point it out to the media (Starmer speech for example), who will then cherry pick a couple of factoids to be a negative narrative.
If that's Modern Tory policy, heaven help the party.
Than which there is no better entertainment rn.
It would be a fantastic Tory pro middle income families policy
Excellent news for those who have a major fuck up on their watch, every three months or so.
I was in a meeting in a bank, where they explained Sarbanes-Oxley. When it was bought in.
A manger put his hand up - “So if someone working for me fucks up, I could go to prison? in America?”
Answer - “Yes. If you can’t prove they acted against policy and systems weren’t there to stop them.”
Within hours, shit was being tightened up. No more developers with access to production, traders “fixing” trades using the “admin” login.
Edit: but we could do with better stats for discussion, as @algarkirk remarks.
OK, I admit it. I'm on Team "It's probably more complicated than that", because of my brain function, skills and background. But many of the problems we have aren't just 'yay' or 'boo'. They are how do you trade-off two things that are both desirable but where you can only have one. Or two options which are both a bit bad, but you have to choose one.
To use Victorian language, how do you balance the needs of the 'deserving' poor with the reasonable wish of the taxpayer to not fund the 'undeserving' out of scarce resources? After all, a lot of the families benefiting from the change have got working parents, or didn't expect to be in the circumstances they were in when baby 3 was born.
Besides, the papers don't need to find people on high benefits. They can just recylce a think tank report that notes that if you are getting maxed-out disability benefits, you can get the equivalent of £71k a household. Except you don't want to explain the bit in italics. Because if you are explaining, you're losing.
Tebbit was on Radio 4. He started by asking why BR hadn’t asked him about the unemployment figures, just out {when unemployment was going up, BR had led with it, devoted half his interviews to it etc etc}. BR stalled. Tebbit persisted. Went on for at least 5 minutes.
Finally, BR asked about unemployment through gritted teeth. Tebbit sunnily replied that it had gone down again, just as it had for the last year.
The senior managers were all eagerly waiting for privatisation because they were expecting huge pay rises.
Junior doctors second only to the WASPI women when it comes to a lack of public sympathy, we all know they’ll quickly be on close to six figure salaries.
Oh, and an early release like this is a sacking offence in many contexts.
The fact that a junior employee hasn’t been binned strongly suggests that they don’t have a proper system in place. Probably because a senior manager decided not to fund it.
The two most unpopular decisions in the Budget according to YouGov were freezing thresholds and the 2 child benefit cap as the public draw the line on more taxes and benefits
Badenoch is correct to say she will reinstate the 2 child cap but needs to go further with abolishing the triple lock and means testing the state pension as part of a reduction in welfare spending and not adding to benefits other than by inflation
Also, we do know that they had a system in place -- the pdf report they published yesterday says so. It just wasn't working the way they thought it did (because of some shonky wordpress plugin).
Better planning and communication would obviously be a good thing. But I doubt it would change much of the coverage or shift many opinions.
(He had participated in a successful local exercise to reduce backlog, but it ended when they lost a couple of judges.)
On Sunday I met one very aged lady who is going to be paying Income Tax on her pension for the first time, but whether that was due to the Budget or some other change I don't know.
Good morning, everyone.
That by itself, is gross incompetence. Wordpress is known to have many, many flaws. Especially with security.
The latest fuckup is the most public and obvious. But the OBR has a track record of being wrong. Why is that changing the subject? Organisations rot from the head.
Meanwhile the nuclear plant in Anglesey is held up by arctic terns.
One of our problems now (and for the next twenty years or so, I reckon) is that the future from 2010 has now arrived. To be followed by the one from 2011, 2012...
For example, the screens/no-screens for witnesses. What about the following -
- screens attached/built into the witness stand. Slide up and down. Manual - think sash window. 2 seconds to pull up or down.
- The giving-evidence-by-video-from-a-room thing. Each court provided with one (some courtrooms don’t have them, so they have to switch courts etc). Redundant systems, tested and maintained before sittings start.
However it might have come about, the majority of people have lost that trust that welfare recipients are honest and aren't taking the piss. The same with asylum seekers. The same also with landlords and the wealthy. The targets might be different, but the underlying political logic is the same. These people are taking the piss and I'm not putting up with it anymore.
So, with the two-child limit we have earnest arguments being made in support of getting rid of it, but the majority view is that those people are taking the piss. When it comes to higher-income taxpayers we have different people making earnest arguments about why it is self-defeating to increase taxation on the wealthy, but the majority view is that those people are taking the piss, and so there's no sympathy for them.
I don't think there was ever a time when most people made decisions on the basis of rational argument rooted in facts, but there was a time when people had more societal trust, and didn't think that everyone else was taking the piss quite so much. If we could get back there then a lot of the negative emotion could be taken out of politics and there would be room for more rational decision-making to come to the fore.
https://bsky.app/profile/harrywallop.co.uk/post/3m6ykow3vvs2o