Burnham announces 20% cut in business rates for pubs, clubs and live music venues in England
Downing Street says the tax cut, which will cost around £100 million a year, will be funded by a review of tax reliefs currently given to businesses which "do not make a positive contribution to local communities, such as vape shops".
It's going to be a hell of a lot of increased taxes to pay for all these promises.
Brace ....
£100m...petty cash
Will be funded by increased vigilence and collection from LESS worthy recipients like vape shops, turkish barbers, possibly betting shops you'd imagine and out of town warehouses and online distribution cheating taxes.
small steps make hard miles.
The Right Wing panic is frankly hilarious. Wanting tax commitments priced to the penny after Boris, Truss and Sunak and the Kemiquake bulshit that everythis will be paid for by utterly abolishing net zero are returning the UK to a 20th century energy State Coal / Gas / OIl add in a bit of Fracking!
Sorry but wanting the tax commitments funded is absolutely the right thing to do.
I applaud this move from Burnham. It shows some listening is going on and it helps a sector the SKS regime kicked repeatedly.
But wanting spending funded and knowing where it is coming from is the right thing to ask.
How does online distribution ‘cheat’ tax ? That’s a serious allegation.
From the Government press release, so that we are fully informed: "Today’s changes will be fully funded, including through reviewing reliefs for businesses that do not make a positive contribution to local communities, such as vape shops. The Government will also crack down on businesses that sell through online marketplaces but do not comply with their tax obligations, putting them at an unfair advantage over businesses that play by the rules. The Government is consulting on measures to make online marketplaces more responsible for preventing non-compliant sellers from avoiding their tax obligations and further detail will be set out in due course. Revenue raised from these reforms will be reinvested in improvements to the business rates system."
That seems clear enough about where the funding is intended to come from, it's not reasonable to ask for precise details when the PM is only 3 days into the job, providing that the source of funding is reasonably plausible (which in this case it seems to be). The approach is to make the headline announcements now for political impact, say in principle how they will be paid for, and flesh out the detail in the coming weeks.
I don't know the answer to this. Do "vape shops" need a licence from the council to be one? Because otherwise, how do we decide what a vape shop is? Any shop that sells vapes? What if I claim to be a cornershop supplying food, but just happen to have a rather large selection of vapes and in reality don't flog that many Mars bars?
Good point
In my local town we have a vape shop that doubles as a craft beer bar.
I don't know the answer to this. Do "vape shops" need a licence from the council to be one? Because otherwise, how do we decide what a vape shop is? Any shop that sells vapes? What if I claim to be a cornershop supplying food, but just happen to have a rather large selection of vapes and in reality don't flog that many Mars bars?
Good point
In my local town we have a vape shop that doubles as a craft beer bar.
All legit and above board. But still a vape shop.
One of our local vape shops is also the world's worst post office. We've driven past it for 6 years to go to different ones.
Going to stick to my principles though - I don’t like subsidies for particular sectors, if we’re going to cut business rate cuts they should be for all, not just hospitality, with its minimum wage gig economy jobs.
And most of this will just be absorbed by big overseas breweries - the most predatory businesses in the UK - rather than your local landlord.
30s take – looks like it is aimed at managers within large companies. If you want to use AI, just do it. A non-techie friend spends £10 a month on (probably) ChatGPT. Several PBers use AI including @ohnotnow in this very thread. Try self-hosting if you have the budget for a beefy-ish machine. Mac Minis were popular; a friend was looking to throw a few thousand HP's way:-
And as ever, there will be YouTube videos for guidance.
Health warning: I'm in the still thinking about finding time to think about it phase.
Totally Agree. I would just sign up for Claude Code or Codex (as in industry that is what everybody uses) and spend ages working with it to do all sorts of tasks. Learn about Skills and MCPs. Learn about what they do well and what they do poorly, when and how they break down, and how to guide them away from the poor responses. There is quite a few more than tricks to getting them to work effectively for you.
Just typing in here is some text, do som'it with it, won't get your very far.
I would be extremely wary of universities offering courses at the moment. I talk to a lot of academics and a lot of them are behind the curve of industry and their post-docs / PhDs and the landscape shifts fast. I don't think universities even really know how to run the traditional courses now that AI is so good.
One of Mrs Foxy's cousins did a PhD in AI in the financial services industry at Southampton Uni, about 10 years ago, then went to work in Switzerland before moving back to London. He is very well paid and seems to be very valued by his bank.
So Southampton have a bit of a track record in the field, not just jumping on the bandwagon.
A PhD is totally different from a taught Masters. Southampton is quite a good research university so doesn't surprise me somebody getting a PhD from there ends up in a decent job. But its also worth noting, the world is very very different now. LLMs have completely disrupted academic research, even in the past 6 months, the world of doing research has completely shifted. Even in the past few weeks, the new ChatGPT model is now for the first time actually producing novel maths proofs* that academics are actually publishing and been peer reviewed as novel.
* there were claims upto a year ago of this, but were found that papers already existed but just unknown to those making the claims.
LLMs have not completely disrupted academic research. LLMs are proving interesting tools in one area of maths research and helpful tools at speeding up searching literature and writing code moe generally.
I was actually at dinner with some medical researchers in the US a couple of months ago. All they talked for over 2hrs about was how Claude Code had revolutionised their research and massively expanded their output.
If you don't think its disrupting much, and its just a bit of niche maths and some coding, I absolutely disagree. The number of submission to major conference in Computer Science also show evidence of this. There has just insane growth in the submissions, particularly the past year. They are having to cap the number of papers individuals can submit. I speak to computer scientists, mathematicans, physicist and all they tallk about this how Claude Code and Codex are integral part of their research now.
Computer science, maths and physics is not all research. There’s biology, chemistry, history, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, criminology, musicology, palaeontology, literature, economics, political science, geology, philosophy, languages, cultural studies, business studies, education studies, design studies, legal studies, linguistics, geography, etc. Claude Code has had more impact in some areas than others.
I was at lunch with some medical researchers yesterday, and we talked about Andy Burnham. I’m at lunch with medical researchers most days. It depends whether I go into the office or WFH. Yesterday I also used an LLM to help me with some Stata code, which sped up my work output slightly.
I don't know the answer to this. Do "vape shops" need a licence from the council to be one? Because otherwise, how do we decide what a vape shop is? Any shop that sells vapes? What if I claim to be a cornershop supplying food, but just happen to have a rather large selection of vapes and in reality don't flog that many Mars bars?
Good point
In my local town we have a vape shop that doubles as a craft beer bar.
All legit and above board. But still a vape shop.
One of our local vape shops is also the world's worst post office. We've driven past it for 6 years to go to different ones.
I stopped going in the craft beer place as the guy keeps going on about Bitcoin.
"Sean Thomas The author, the algorithm and the end of literary struggle AI-generated texts flooding Amazon should scare anyone who cares about the written word" (£)
This is a pretty good and interesting article imo.
Here is a gift link to bypass the paywall:-
Sean Thomas The author, the algorithm and the end of literary struggle AI-generated texts flooding Amazon should scare anyone who cares about the written word https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/9260b5afa2ab3a08
The main consequence of that article will be to increase still further the number of folk doing exactly what he describes.
It’s bizarre that he has this weird idea that travel writing will escape the oncoming Armageddon for writers. Travel is an area where there’s so much information available online that AIs would find creating travel articles easy peasy.
Hotels will still want advertorial in respected newspapers and magazines though, it costs almost nothing to comp a room and some F&B, and they can usually get a local tourist board or travel agent to cough up the biz class flights - or have them comped by the airline if it’s a new destination for them.
But yeah, there will be considerably fewer travel hacks in the future than there are now.
30s take – looks like it is aimed at managers within large companies. If you want to use AI, just do it. A non-techie friend spends £10 a month on (probably) ChatGPT. Several PBers use AI including @ohnotnow in this very thread. Try self-hosting if you have the budget for a beefy-ish machine. Mac Minis were popular; a friend was looking to throw a few thousand HP's way:-
And as ever, there will be YouTube videos for guidance.
Health warning: I'm in the still thinking about finding time to think about it phase.
Totally Agree. I would just sign up for Claude Code or Codex (as in industry that is what everybody uses) and spend ages working with it to do all sorts of tasks. Learn about Skills and MCPs. Learn about what they do well and what they do poorly, when and how they break down, and how to guide them away from the poor responses. There is quite a few more than tricks to getting them to work effectively for you.
Just typing in here is some text, do som'it with it, won't get your very far.
I would be extremely wary of universities offering courses at the moment. I talk to a lot of academics and a lot of them are behind the curve of industry and their post-docs / PhDs and the landscape shifts fast. I don't think universities even really know how to run the traditional courses now that AI is so good.
I don't think there is a remote account for Codex - you have to install it - but you can have an OpenAI account.
So I'll start there
Once I've sorted that out, then I can do the download-install-run thing.
(narrator: Viewcode is trying to analyse tens of thousands of documents (hundreds of thousands of documents). Since AI is the only thing that can realistically do that now that PERL is with nana and the angles, I have to work it out)
Good luck with that. But on your statistical R work you must know about running Posix (=Claude Sonnet 4.6) in R. I just want to say that my experience of it has been v. good but it is pricey (£24 pm) and I'm not keen on it writing and running code directly on my Mac. Yesterday I tried the new Chinese AI Moonshot Kimi K3 on one of the same problems and it was at least as good and honed in on the solution quicker and sharper than Posix, for free. Guess whether my Posix sub will be renewed! The Chinese provenance might be an issue but the Californian techbros are in the crosshairs of a real competitor.
Kimi K3 is distilled Claude weights. Claude Sonnet is also significantly inferior to Opus let alone Fable. Fable is the bonkers, here is some random shitty data, can you do something with that, and off it goes and does some quite amazing things with little to no guidance.
"Kimi K3 is distilled Claude weights."Is that via industrial espionage ?
Yes. Claude weights have leaked to China in the past, but this particular model it appears they did some mass distillation which you can't really do via simple just firing up the web interface and asking questions.
Of the Chinese labs, DeepSeek seem to be the ones who are making genuine algorithmic advances, doing some very clever innovations. Their backstory is still bullshit, it isn't a handful of quant guys who decided they would give LLMs a bit of a spin. It a huge team of very smart people with access to the banned Nvidia cards. But some of these other Chinese labs are much more dodgy.
You can quibble about the details, but the fact remains that China is the only country other than the US with anything approaching a competitive sovereign AI program.
And while they are a few years behind in technology, they also have a formidable and growing chip industry.
Trump is helping them by making it much more difficult for Chinese who have trained in the US to stay in the US. It's perhaps unlikely that Yang Zhilin would have remained in the US under a different president, but there are many more Chinese researchers and entrepreneurs who would.
China are following their now standard playbook. They decide they want to get good at something, they throw huge resources at it and are willing to steal IP and break whatever rules are stopping them. But, that only works because they also have extremely smart, dedicated and motivated people, and the government sets them up in vicious competition. And they go from copying to innovating. Deepseek have introduced several very important ideas that are not just nicked from somebody else.
R&D labs at likes ByteDance, Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Deepseek all doing loads of really good research along with some very good (and massive) university labs.
The EU total competitor is Mistral is just not in the game. UK does have top tier labs in DeepMind and some new labs that are getting funded from people who worked at DeepMind. To the credit of the government they are also putting some decent money aside for Gen AI.
The problem with AI is that so much of the original content was stolen (or if you want to be polite and ignore how it was sourced just used without permission) that I think most people agree that stealing from OpenAI / Anthropic is totally fair...
The other way to look at it is that AI does (should) provide a link to the source material so you can DYOR. You don't need to accept the AI summaries but it's really good at finding that obscure bit of research that might just add to your understanding and pivot your lines of enquiry. Or at least that's how I use it.
Going to stick to my principles though - I don’t like subsidies for particular sectors, if we’re going to cut business rate cuts they should be for all, not just hospitality, with its minimum wage gig economy jobs.
And most of this will just be absorbed by big overseas breweries - the most predatory businesses in the UK - rather than your local landlord.
Great retail politics though.
I think the global experience is that subsidies like this end up with the building owner at the next rent review.
In the medium term, it's why private renters are hard to help economically; anything that increases their income or reduces their other costs of living just increases the pile of cash they have available to hand over to their landlord. Unless the market rent can be reduced below "every spare penny you have", that won't change.
(See also the way that stamp duty reductions and help to buy schemes help sellers, not buyers.)
But yes, excellent retail politics. But sometimes, excellent retail politics is bad government. At the moment, we have the uncle who is fun because he doesn't say no. That might be a strategy to buy goodwill for the trickier things to come... or it might be what the PM sees as his role.
Burnham announces 20% cut in business rates for pubs, clubs and live music venues in England
Downing Street says the tax cut, which will cost around £100 million a year, will be funded by a review of tax reliefs currently given to businesses which "do not make a positive contribution to local communities, such as vape shops".
It's going to be a hell of a lot of increased taxes to pay for all these promises.
Brace ....
£100m...petty cash
Will be funded by increased vigilence and collection from LESS worthy recipients like vape shops, turkish barbers, possibly betting shops you'd imagine and out of town warehouses and online distribution cheating taxes.
small steps make hard miles.
The Right Wing panic is frankly hilarious. Wanting tax commitments priced to the penny after Boris, Truss and Sunak and the Kemiquake bulshit that everythis will be paid for by utterly abolishing net zero are returning the UK to a 20th century energy State Coal / Gas / OIl add in a bit of Fracking!
Sorry but wanting the tax commitments funded is absolutely the right thing to do.
I applaud this move from Burnham. It shows some listening is going on and it helps a sector the SKS regime kicked repeatedly.
But wanting spending funded and knowing where it is coming from is the right thing to ask.
How does online distribution ‘cheat’ tax ? That’s a serious allegation.
From the Government press release, so that we are fully informed: "Today’s changes will be fully funded, including through reviewing reliefs for businesses that do not make a positive contribution to local communities, such as vape shops. The Government will also crack down on businesses that sell through online marketplaces but do not comply with their tax obligations, putting them at an unfair advantage over businesses that play by the rules. The Government is consulting on measures to make online marketplaces more responsible for preventing non-compliant sellers from avoiding their tax obligations and further detail will be set out in due course. Revenue raised from these reforms will be reinvested in improvements to the business rates system."
That seems clear enough about where the funding is intended to come from, it's not reasonable to ask for precise details when the PM is only 3 days into the job, providing that the source of funding is reasonably plausible (which in this case it seems to be). The approach is to make the headline announcements now for political impact, say in principle how they will be paid for, and flesh out the detail in the coming weeks.
I don't see our media (right of left or floating in space) being concerned with whether it is reasonable or not.
But I'm still enjoying watching the right side of the media fishing around for an attack line that sticks.
The last few titles of the Daily T podcast have been fun:
(The Meghan stuff is I think the weekend.)
- Burnham's first 48 hours as PM implode: hot mic prison release joke sparks fury - Same faces, same failures: Burnham’s reshuffle solves nothing - Why Queen Camilla is the key to reuniting William and Harry - Is Meghan a trad wife? - Vacuous and vague: Inside Andy Burnham’s speech of empty promises - ‘A desperately sentimental last PMQs’: Why Starmer won’t make the history books
Comments
She thinks this is strange, I'm thinking it's a swedish national event and a local company is providing for free something that's been asked for.
NEW THREAD
In my local town we have a vape shop that doubles as a craft beer bar.
All legit and above board. But still a vape shop.
Going to stick to my principles though - I don’t like subsidies for particular sectors, if we’re going to cut business rate cuts they should be for all, not just hospitality, with its minimum wage gig economy jobs.
And most of this will just be absorbed by big overseas breweries - the most predatory businesses in the UK - rather than your local landlord.
Great retail politics though.
I was at lunch with some medical researchers yesterday, and we talked about Andy Burnham. I’m at lunch with medical researchers most days. It depends whether I go into the office or WFH. Yesterday I also used an LLM to help me with some Stata code, which sped up my work output slightly.
But yeah, there will be considerably fewer travel hacks in the future than there are now.
In the medium term, it's why private renters are hard to help economically; anything that increases their income or reduces their other costs of living just increases the pile of cash they have available to hand over to their landlord. Unless the market rent can be reduced below "every spare penny you have", that won't change.
(See also the way that stamp duty reductions and help to buy schemes help sellers, not buyers.)
But yes, excellent retail politics. But sometimes, excellent retail politics is bad government. At the moment, we have the uncle who is fun because he doesn't say no. That might be a strategy to buy goodwill for the trickier things to come... or it might be what the PM sees as his role.
But I'm still enjoying watching the right side of the media fishing around for an attack line that sticks.
The last few titles of the Daily T podcast have been fun:
(The Meghan stuff is I think the weekend.)
- Burnham's first 48 hours as PM implode: hot mic prison release joke sparks fury
- Same faces, same failures: Burnham’s reshuffle solves nothing
- Why Queen Camilla is the key to reuniting William and Harry
- Is Meghan a trad wife?
- Vacuous and vague: Inside Andy Burnham’s speech of empty promises
- ‘A desperately sentimental last PMQs’: Why Starmer won’t make the history books