My only worry is inflation. There could be a tsunami of demand and temporarily limited supply.
But while that will cause problems for some people it will do a lot to repair the public finances.
Inflation died in 2008. I am not quite sure what of but ever since governments and central banks have been struggling to meet the underside of their targets despite deficits, QE etc. Its curious but we may have to keep a weather eye on deflation every bit as much as inflation as the economy wallows with recovered capacity but limited spending power.
My wife is lobbying for a sun holiday. We've never done that before. I am wanting to go out and watch live performances, have afternoon tea at a cafe, eat someone else's cooking and buy some new clothes (without the hassle of returning some if they don't fit).
The stats for the economy as a whole show a large amount of extra saving. Given Britain's record on consumer spending I expect most of that money to be spent.
I would be surprised if there was deficient demand.
Well I have a tax bill that I can't pay, having taken advantage of Rishi's generosity last July and, like a large number of self employed people, have suffered a significant drop in income this last year. We will have a few days in October when we take my son to University but there will be no summer holiday, no major expenditure of any kind until we get ourselves out of our Covid shaped hole.
I accept that those whose income was protected may well have the capacity to increase consumption but an awful lot of people don't.
It's not a matter of having had my income protected. I have been working throughout. Your job has been restricted due to the pandemic, but there are plenty of parts of the economy that have not.
Once restrictions are lifted the spending power of the parts of the economy that haven't been shutdown will be able to be unleashed to pull up those parts that were.
This is not a normal recession. It will have been an interregnum.
There would never have been a better time to abolish the triple lock.
I would like to see the Government look at a much more radical review of tax and benefits. Set a minimum income level, sufficient to live on without needing benefits or charity. £16,200 per year would equate to a 35 hour week at the living wage. Set that as the personal allowance. Receive a rebate if your income is less. Pay tax if your income is more. Combine tax and NI for a basic rate of 32%. Same rate for self-employed. Income based on earned and unearned income (dividends and Capital Gains) at the same rate. Higher tax rates of 52% and 57%, so no upper limit on NI contributions. Don’t know what the net cost would be. A job for a think tank, maybe?
An opposition leader without a cause can sound pretty hollow. It's not rocket science. Every advertiser faced with a product to sell uses the same techniques. Look for USPs. Get yourself noticed. Be original be creative. Look what your competitors are doing......No one needs an ideology just get an identity and give people a good feeling about what you're offering. Spend £88 a quarter on 'Campaign'. Some great ideas around and get stealing.....
Difficult to use advertising to make people buy stuff that's crap. Ask Ratner
Ratner had a very successful business* even though some of his products were crap. Indeed there is a thriving trade in crap across many sectors, especially in politics.
The key though is to keep the truth veiled. Ratners error was to tell the truth.
*indeed Mrs Foxys engagement ring came from Ratners in Tooting Broadway.
Never buy retail.. go to an auction.
Yeah, but we were young, in love and fairly skint!
.. all the more reasonable to go to an auction 3 x better at least for the same money .. the dealers make a fortune on jewellery.. but you can beat them at an auction. I bought a lovely ring for my now wife.. ok I was in my late in my 50s and a widower and what I paid was about a quarter of what I would have paid in a shop..
Of course! But you neglect the opportunity cost. If in 1988 I had suggested that to Mrs Foxy, I suspect I would have remained single! That ring from Ratners has provided great value for 33 years. The value is far more than the monetary value.
Where were you when poor old Gerald needed a testimonial!
An interesting header, thank you. The 130% capital allowance in the budget still puzzles me. Given that major NEW investments are unlikely within the 2 year window of the allowance, what is it’s purpose? To encourage firms to make “shovel ready” investments that have been held back because of COVID? Or, and this is my favourite, it’s a form of state aid that is focussed on some very specific investment decisions by businesses with whom the Government has been in discussion. Said state aid being to secure the investment and thus avoid businesses moving manufacturing away from the U.K. 130% in this scenario is what those businesses demanded to underwrite Brexit Britain.
Yes, looks like a bung to the car industry to me.
Perhaps the flaw is having to make a profit to get the tax benefit, which a lot of companies will not, even normally profitable ones.
Someone put up a good explanation of this a few days ago. The key issue is that Rishi signalled rises in Corporation Tax to 24% in 2 years. That being the case, why would any business make investments in plant and machinery etc. that are allowable against CT now when you get more cash benefit if you wait 2 years? The 130% allowance for the next 2 years stops this cliff edge because it makes it almost exactly the same if you invest now or wait 2 years. It also gets good headlines because most people don't do the sums and thus think he's trying to help improve investment and efficiency.
Didn't he also change the rules so that it was easier to carry forward losses and set them against future tax? If so, then spending on investment now and getting the benefit of the 130% relief building up a taxable loss that can be set against profits that would otherwise bear tax at a higher rate makes a lot of sense.
An interesting header, thank you. The 130% capital allowance in the budget still puzzles me. Given that major NEW investments are unlikely within the 2 year window of the allowance, what is it’s purpose? To encourage firms to make “shovel ready” investments that have been held back because of COVID? Or, and this is my favourite, it’s a form of state aid that is focussed on some very specific investment decisions by businesses with whom the Government has been in discussion. Said state aid being to secure the investment and thus avoid businesses moving manufacturing away from the U.K. 130% in this scenario is what those businesses demanded to underwrite Brexit Britain.
Yes, looks like a bung to the car industry to me.
Perhaps the flaw is having to make a profit to get the tax benefit, which a lot of companies will not, even normally profitable ones.
I hope it will get a lot more units created.
In my area there is desperation for 2nd stage growth units - that is when a company needs to grow from founders to say 10-20 people.
An interesting header, thank you. The 130% capital allowance in the budget still puzzles me. Given that major NEW investments are unlikely within the 2 year window of the allowance, what is it’s purpose? To encourage firms to make “shovel ready” investments that have been held back because of COVID? Or, and this is my favourite, it’s a form of state aid that is focussed on some very specific investment decisions by businesses with whom the Government has been in discussion. Said state aid being to secure the investment and thus avoid businesses moving manufacturing away from the U.K. 130% in this scenario is what those businesses demanded to underwrite Brexit Britain.
Yes, looks like a bung to the car industry to me.
Perhaps the flaw is having to make a profit to get the tax benefit, which a lot of companies will not, even normally profitable ones.
Someone put up a good explanation of this a few days ago. The key issue is that Rishi signalled rises in Corporation Tax to 24% in 2 years. That being the case, why would any business make investments in plant and machinery etc. that are allowable against CT now when you get more cash benefit if you wait 2 years? The 130% allowance for the next 2 years stops this cliff edge because it makes it almost exactly the same if you invest now or wait 2 years. It also gets good headlines because most people don't do the sums and thus think he's trying to help improve investment and efficiency.
The trouble with NI is it means we end up taxing earned income more than unearned income. Dividend income is taxed at 7.5% (after your £2000 tax free) rental income at 20% but work is taxed at 32%. More income tax and less NI would be a good thing. Pensioners in work should be paying NI.
Someone mentioned that after housing costs pensioners were actually better off than younger folk. The most obvious answer would be to do something about housing costs. Increase income tax gradually to say 24% and reduce NI to 10% - but slowly enough so pensioners don't go beserk. 25% corporation tax seems perfectly reasonable and might actually encourage investment instead of sitting on cash.
Dividend income for one has already been taxed by Corporation Tax.
So how many people have we got who can’t actually have a jab, people with weak immune system, advanced MS perhaps, HIV? What’s the plan for freeing them from captivity?
The same as with all other vaccines - that plan is for everyone else to have had it.
I got it wrong then. I had the sense they were going to treat it like annual flu, not eradicate it. Like something a degree worse than annual flu this group can’t be vaccinated for?
As I understand it, people with HIV are eligible in group 4 or 6 so are being vaccinated. Many people who are immunosuppressed can have MRNA or dead-virus vaccines as there is no live or attenuated virus in there. The idea with herd immunity is you vaccinate enough people so the virus can't propagate, so it protects those who can't have a vaccine.
My only worry is inflation. There could be a tsunami of demand and temporarily limited supply.
But while that will cause problems for some people it will do a lot to repair the public finances.
Inflation died in 2008. I am not quite sure what of but ever since governments and central banks have been struggling to meet the underside of their targets despite deficits, QE etc. Its curious but we may have to keep a weather eye on deflation every bit as much as inflation as the economy wallows with recovered capacity but limited spending power.
My wife is lobbying for a sun holiday. We've never done that before. I am wanting to go out and watch live performances, have afternoon tea at a cafe, eat someone else's cooking and buy some new clothes (without the hassle of returning some if they don't fit).
The stats for the economy as a whole show a large amount of extra saving. Given Britain's record on consumer spending I expect most of that money to be spent.
I would be surprised if there was deficient demand.
Well I have a tax bill that I can't pay, having taken advantage of Rishi's generosity last July and, like a large number of self employed people, have suffered a significant drop in income this last year. We will have a few days in October when we take my son to University but there will be no summer holiday, no major expenditure of any kind until we get ourselves out of our Covid shaped hole.
I accept that those whose income was protected may well have the capacity to increase consumption but an awful lot of people don't.
We put 1/3 of Rishi’s bounteousness aside to avoid tax issues and reduced our standard of living accordingly. No sum holiday for us either unless my premium bonds or the lottery provide... more to the point we had not planned to alter our routine until we know how things are viz a vis the R number.
An interesting header, thank you. The 130% capital allowance in the budget still puzzles me. Given that major NEW investments are unlikely within the 2 year window of the allowance, what is it’s purpose? To encourage firms to make “shovel ready” investments that have been held back because of COVID? Or, and this is my favourite, it’s a form of state aid that is focussed on some very specific investment decisions by businesses with whom the Government has been in discussion. Said state aid being to secure the investment and thus avoid businesses moving manufacturing away from the U.K. 130% in this scenario is what those businesses demanded to underwrite Brexit Britain.
Yes, looks like a bung to the car industry to me.
Perhaps the flaw is having to make a profit to get the tax benefit, which a lot of companies will not, even normally profitable ones.
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
Two more points:
1. Sorry if everyone's already aware of this, but if you don't know your NHS number then you can find it virtually instantaneously through a search facility on their website - very helpful 2. I've also been to the vaccination booking page, and it has indeed been updated to state that it's available to people aged 56 and over. It only went down to 60 earlier in the week, IIRC - so progress on first jabs has slowed but they're evidently still not doing at all badly
A rough rule of thumb - 800K people in a year cohort. So 4 years on the population is something like 3.2 million first vaccinations...
So, at the moment, we are doing about 3 years of population per week....
Gets us to the start of the fortysomethings in about a fortnight, assuming that the first dose rate doesn't get any worse. A fair improvement on April 15th!
An interesting header, thank you. The 130% capital allowance in the budget still puzzles me. Given that major NEW investments are unlikely within the 2 year window of the allowance, what is it’s purpose? To encourage firms to make “shovel ready” investments that have been held back because of COVID? Or, and this is my favourite, it’s a form of state aid that is focussed on some very specific investment decisions by businesses with whom the Government has been in discussion. Said state aid being to secure the investment and thus avoid businesses moving manufacturing away from the U.K. 130% in this scenario is what those businesses demanded to underwrite Brexit Britain.
Yes, looks like a bung to the car industry to me.
Perhaps the flaw is having to make a profit to get the tax benefit, which a lot of companies will not, even normally profitable ones.
Isn't Amazon likely to benefit as well?
That would require Amazon to redesign their business structure and keep profits in the UK
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
My only worry is inflation. There could be a tsunami of demand and temporarily limited supply.
But while that will cause problems for some people it will do a lot to repair the public finances.
Inflation died in 2008. I am not quite sure what of but ever since governments and central banks have been struggling to meet the underside of their targets despite deficits, QE etc. Its curious but we may have to keep a weather eye on deflation every bit as much as inflation as the economy wallows with recovered capacity but limited spending power.
My wife is lobbying for a sun holiday. We've never done that before. I am wanting to go out and watch live performances, have afternoon tea at a cafe, eat someone else's cooking and buy some new clothes (without the hassle of returning some if they don't fit).
The stats for the economy as a whole show a large amount of extra saving. Given Britain's record on consumer spending I expect most of that money to be spent.
I would be surprised if there was deficient demand.
Well I have a tax bill that I can't pay, having taken advantage of Rishi's generosity last July and, like a large number of self employed people, have suffered a significant drop in income this last year. We will have a few days in October when we take my son to University but there will be no summer holiday, no major expenditure of any kind until we get ourselves out of our Covid shaped hole.
I accept that those whose income was protected may well have the capacity to increase consumption but an awful lot of people don't.
We put 1/3 of Rishi’s bounteousness aside to avoid tax issues and reduced our standard of living accordingly. No sum holiday for us either unless my premium bonds or the lottery provide... more to the point we had not planned to alter our routine until we know how things are viz a vis the R number.
We call the lottery pension planning. As a plan, to date, it has certain flaws....
There would never have been a better time to abolish the triple lock.
I would like to see the Government look at a much more radical review of tax and benefits. Set a minimum income level, sufficient to live on without needing benefits or charity. £16,200 per year would equate to a 35 hour week at the living wage. Set that as the personal allowance. Receive a rebate if your income is less. Pay tax if your income is more. Combine tax and NI for a basic rate of 32%. Same rate for self-employed. Income based on earned and unearned income (dividends and Capital Gains) at the same rate. Higher tax rates of 52% and 57%, so no upper limit on NI contributions. Don’t know what the net cost would be. A job for a think tank, maybe?
Why should the taxpayer subsidise low paying companies? If you want to improve people's standards of living in that way then increase the minimum wage to a level where someone working a standard week is earning whatever you consider to be the living wage level. If companies cannot afford to operate whilst paying their employees a basic living wage and paying their taxes under normal operating circumstances then they do not deserve to be in business.
UBI or anything like it is merely the taxpayer subsidising the profits of companies.
"The EU will urge the US to allow the export of millions of doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine to Europe, it has emerged.
The European Union also wants Washington to allow the free flow of vaccine ingredients for production, according to the Financial Times.
"We trust that we can work together with the U.S. to ensure that vaccines produced or bottled in the U.S. for the fulfilment of vaccine producers' contractual obligations with the EU will be fully honoured,” the European Commission told the newspaper.
This came after the commission and Italy blocked the shipment of AstraZeneca jabs to Australia as it tried to boost its vaccine rollout which has been behind that of nations like the UK.
This follows months of issues around the EU and the Oxford vaccine, which saw the jab limited to under-65s by several European countries such as Germany, a move which it reversed this month."
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
Two more points:
1. Sorry if everyone's already aware of this, but if you don't know your NHS number then you can find it virtually instantaneously through a search facility on their website - very helpful 2. I've also been to the vaccination booking page, and it has indeed been updated to state that it's available to people aged 56 and over. It only went down to 60 earlier in the week, IIRC - so progress on first jabs has slowed but they're evidently still not doing at all badly
A rough rule of thumb - 800K people in a year cohort. So 4 years on the population is something like 3.2 million first vaccinations...
So, at the moment, we are doing about 3 years of population per week....
Gets us to the start of the fortysomethings in about a fortnight, assuming that the first dose rate doesn't get any worse. A fair improvement on April 15th!
They are talking about vaccine supply ramping up sometime in March so I'm hoping to see million-jab days.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
There is no such thing as right populism and left populism. There is only I-don`t-know-my-arse-from-my-elbow-yet-I-exert-power populism.
Yes. But I think you can make a distinction. By left populism I mean blame the rich for everything rather than foreigners.
There would never have been a better time to abolish the triple lock.
I would like to see the Government look at a much more radical review of tax and benefits. Set a minimum income level, sufficient to live on without needing benefits or charity. £16,200 per year would equate to a 35 hour week at the living wage. Set that as the personal allowance. Receive a rebate if your income is less. Pay tax if your income is more. Combine tax and NI for a basic rate of 32%. Same rate for self-employed. Income based on earned and unearned income (dividends and Capital Gains) at the same rate. Higher tax rates of 52% and 57%, so no upper limit on NI contributions. Don’t know what the net cost would be. A job for a think tank, maybe?
Why should the taxpayer subsidise low paying companies? If you want to improve people's standards of living in that way then increase the minimum wage to a level where someone working a standard week is earning whatever you consider to be the living wage level. If companies cannot afford to operate whilst paying their employees a basic living wage and paying their taxes under normal operating circumstances then they do not deserve to be in business.
UBI or anything like it is merely the taxpayer subsidising the profits of companies.
Agreed. That needs to be taken into the equation. It needs to charged to employers.
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
Two more points:
1. Sorry if everyone's already aware of this, but if you don't know your NHS number then you can find it virtually instantaneously through a search facility on their website - very helpful 2. I've also been to the vaccination booking page, and it has indeed been updated to state that it's available to people aged 56 and over. It only went down to 60 earlier in the week, IIRC - so progress on first jabs has slowed but they're evidently still not doing at all badly
Thanks for that. I`ve just booked my jabs. I`ll be done by 7 June.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
Using your hands to walk instead of your feet is also a greater achievement. But that doesn't make it a necessary, sensible, or popular thing to do...
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
Yes, please do - promise higher taxes and spending than an already high-taxing and high-spending Conservative government. Walk into my parlour...
That is a putting a positive gloss on the tough choice faced by the Cons. Embrace austerity again (or at least the sort of tight spending that can be labeled as such) or abandon just about every core principle they have ever had and offer a Labour manifesto with a blue cover and Johnson's mug on it.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
The easiest approach would probably be to say "we're in a worse state than you are, so the answer has to be 'no', for now." Though even that isn't trouble free. The response could reasonably be "but why, given you're not using the stuff?"
Sorry, are we talking about the Americans having failed to approve it, or the EU’s apparent inability to administer it?
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
Two more points:
1. Sorry if everyone's already aware of this, but if you don't know your NHS number then you can find it virtually instantaneously through a search facility on their website - very helpful 2. I've also been to the vaccination booking page, and it has indeed been updated to state that it's available to people aged 56 and over. It only went down to 60 earlier in the week, IIRC - so progress on first jabs has slowed but they're evidently still not doing at all badly
A rough rule of thumb - 800K people in a year cohort. So 4 years on the population is something like 3.2 million first vaccinations...
So, at the moment, we are doing about 3 years of population per week....
Gets us to the start of the fortysomethings in about a fortnight, assuming that the first dose rate doesn't get any worse. A fair improvement on April 15th!
They are talking about vaccine supply ramping up sometime in March so I'm hoping to see million-jab days.
Clearly if that comes to pass then there's a reasonable chance of all the over 40s having been for their first jabs by mid-April, but it hasn't happened yet...
It wouldn't be the first time in the pandemic this government has given preferential treatment to big flagship facilities over locally directed efforts.
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
Two more points:
1. Sorry if everyone's already aware of this, but if you don't know your NHS number then you can find it virtually instantaneously through a search facility on their website - very helpful 2. I've also been to the vaccination booking page, and it has indeed been updated to state that it's available to people aged 56 and over. It only went down to 60 earlier in the week, IIRC - so progress on first jabs has slowed but they're evidently still not doing at all badly
Thanks for that. I`ve just booked my jabs. I`ll be done by 7 June.
No ability to book jabs in Scotland. Just wait your turn and we will contact you. A bit frustrating. My wife is 60 and I am 59. Neither of us contacted yet.
When's Biden going to hike US CT up to 28% ? That's an important(ish) sidenote to our plans.
The US has a hugely generous R&D/capital investment tax system and a far, far more forgiving bankruptcy system that allows companies with good ideas to restructure and try many times to succeed over here a company with a good idea gets one shot and then it becomes easy pickings for larger, less productive rivals or foreign companies who will offshore the IP.
Our business environments just aren't close to comparable.
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
Two more points:
1. Sorry if everyone's already aware of this, but if you don't know your NHS number then you can find it virtually instantaneously through a search facility on their website - very helpful 2. I've also been to the vaccination booking page, and it has indeed been updated to state that it's available to people aged 56 and over. It only went down to 60 earlier in the week, IIRC - so progress on first jabs has slowed but they're evidently still not doing at all badly
A rough rule of thumb - 800K people in a year cohort. So 4 years on the population is something like 3.2 million first vaccinations...
So, at the moment, we are doing about 3 years of population per week....
Gets us to the start of the fortysomethings in about a fortnight, assuming that the first dose rate doesn't get any worse. A fair improvement on April 15th!
They are talking about vaccine supply ramping up sometime in March so I'm hoping to see million-jab days.
I think the Pfizer is in short supply. Our 3 hospital hubs in Leicester, one of the perpetual hotspots, is reducing hours and days for the next week, owing to lack of supply.
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
Two more points:
1. Sorry if everyone's already aware of this, but if you don't know your NHS number then you can find it virtually instantaneously through a search facility on their website - very helpful 2. I've also been to the vaccination booking page, and it has indeed been updated to state that it's available to people aged 56 and over. It only went down to 60 earlier in the week, IIRC - so progress on first jabs has slowed but they're evidently still not doing at all badly
Thanks for that. I`ve just booked my jabs. I`ll be done by 7 June.
The 56 and over thing on the website is slightly bizarre, since the JCVI grouping is 55 and over. Where exactly has the differentiation between 55 and 56 year olds come in?
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
Two more points:
1. Sorry if everyone's already aware of this, but if you don't know your NHS number then you can find it virtually instantaneously through a search facility on their website - very helpful 2. I've also been to the vaccination booking page, and it has indeed been updated to state that it's available to people aged 56 and over. It only went down to 60 earlier in the week, IIRC - so progress on first jabs has slowed but they're evidently still not doing at all badly
Thanks for that. I`ve just booked my jabs. I`ll be done by 7 June.
The 56 and over thing on the website is slightly bizarre, since the JCVI grouping is 55 and over. Where exactly has the differentiation between 55 and 56 year olds come in?
(A 50 year old asks)
We've had that at least once before, when they invited 64 year olds to come forward first. It may have happened in other small steps like this, but I don't look at the website regularly (I'm only in my mid-40s) so I wouldn't know.
I am working on the assumption that people are being unblocked in smaller steps as a way to regulate demand. The principle behind the JCVI plan - get older people done first - is absolutely clear, so there can be no particular objection to prioritising recipients in one year rather than five year blocks, so long as they're done in the right order.
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
Two more points:
1. Sorry if everyone's already aware of this, but if you don't know your NHS number then you can find it virtually instantaneously through a search facility on their website - very helpful 2. I've also been to the vaccination booking page, and it has indeed been updated to state that it's available to people aged 56 and over. It only went down to 60 earlier in the week, IIRC - so progress on first jabs has slowed but they're evidently still not doing at all badly
Thanks for that. I`ve just booked my jabs. I`ll be done by 7 June.
No ability to book jabs in Scotland. Just wait your turn and we will contact you. A bit frustrating. My wife is 60 and I am 59. Neither of us contacted yet.
It’s being done in order of importance. Ayrshire folk first.
It wouldn't be the first time in the pandemic this government has given preferential treatment to big flagship facilities over locally directed efforts.
Not a problem. The clinically higher risk have been able to book in on the NHS website since Thursday. Just leaving those who don't drive or are infirm to go to the GP.
Although I have to admit the amount of self-entitlement seems to be immense. I live in prosperous leafy Hampshire where most households seem to run two SUVs and we are down to age ranges and health conditions where most people are relatively fit, healthy and active. But the number of people whinging about having to go 10-15 miles for the most important thing that will happen to them this year is ridiculous.
I booked in at the Madejski Stadium (a) to save 11 days on a local jab (b) actually have an excuse to go for a drive and (c) leave local jabs for people unable to travel.
The Madejski was where I ran my first half marathon as well, so a suitable venue for a major life event...
Immunity for Good Friday (jab+22 days according to ZOE)
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
There would never have been a better time to abolish the triple lock.
I would like to see the Government look at a much more radical review of tax and benefits. Set a minimum income level, sufficient to live on without needing benefits or charity. £16,200 per year would equate to a 35 hour week at the living wage. Set that as the personal allowance. Receive a rebate if your income is less. Pay tax if your income is more. Combine tax and NI for a basic rate of 32%. Same rate for self-employed. Income based on earned and unearned income (dividends and Capital Gains) at the same rate. Higher tax rates of 52% and 57%, so no upper limit on NI contributions. Don’t know what the net cost would be. A job for a think tank, maybe?
Why should the taxpayer subsidise low paying companies? If you want to improve people's standards of living in that way then increase the minimum wage to a level where someone working a standard week is earning whatever you consider to be the living wage level. If companies cannot afford to operate whilst paying their employees a basic living wage and paying their taxes under normal operating circumstances then they do not deserve to be in business.
UBI or anything like it is merely the taxpayer subsidising the profits of companies.
No it is not. For two childless adults working full-time the minimum wage already does reach that threshold. No subsidies to any company at all.
The issue that needs to be fixed though is that if people aren't working we don't tell them "go get a job then" and let them and their children end up on the streets or starving to death if they don't. They get benefits to ensure that they have enough to survive.
So then the difference between someone not working and someone who is working full time is not the difference in income the working person earns because there is a corresponding loss of benefits to go with that.
Between loss of benefits, NIC and income tax the state can be reclaiming 90% of someone's income.
When's Biden going to hike US CT up to 28% ? That's an important(ish) sidenote to our plans.
The US has a hugely generous R&D/capital investment tax system and a far, far more forgiving bankruptcy system that allows companies with good ideas to restructure and try many times to succeed over here a company with a good idea gets one shot and then it becomes easy pickings for larger, less productive rivals or foreign companies who will offshore the IP.
Our business environments just aren't close to comparable.
Lockdown is in trouble in the US.
Its great champion Cuomo is under serious political pressure on a number of fronts.
That tin foil hat, conspiracy theory, anti vaxxer rag the.....er......Wall Street Journal is running articles on the path of the virus in Florida v New Mexico and North Dakota vs South Dakota.
Arizona has become the latest state to say sod this and open its businesses fully.
Nobody's seen hide nor hair of Biden.
The reflation trade is steaming ramming speed at Johnson's government.
It wouldn't be the first time in the pandemic this government has given preferential treatment to big flagship facilities over locally directed efforts.
Not a problem. The clinically higher risk have been able to book in on the NHS website since Thursday. Just leaving those who don't drive or are infirm to go to the GP.
Although I have to admit the amount of self-entitlement seems to be immense. I live in prosperous leafy Hampshire where most households seem to run two SUVs and we are down to age ranges and health conditions where most people are relatively fit, healthy and active. But the number of people whinging about having to go 10-15 miles for the most important thing that will happen to them this year is ridiculous.
I booked in at the Madejski Stadium (a) to save 11 days on a local jab (b) actually have an excuse to go for a drive and (c) leave local jabs for people unable to travel.
The Madejski was where I ran my first half marathon as well, so a suitable venue for a major life event...
Immunity for Good Friday (jab+22 days according to ZOE)
From the data for England vaccinations - data by age group at the MOSA level
This is very fine grained - nearly 7K locations/areas in England
When's Biden going to hike US CT up to 28% ? That's an important(ish) sidenote to our plans.
The US has a hugely generous R&D/capital investment tax system and a far, far more forgiving bankruptcy system that allows companies with good ideas to restructure and try many times to succeed over here a company with a good idea gets one shot and then it becomes easy pickings for larger, less productive rivals or foreign companies who will offshore the IP.
Our business environments just aren't close to comparable.
Lockdown is in trouble in the US.
Its great champion Cuomo is under serious political pressure on a number of fronts.
That tin foil hat, conspiracy theory, anti vaxxer rag the.....er......Wall Street Journal is running articles on the path of the virus in Florida v New Mexico and North Dakota vs South Dakota.
Arizona has become the latest state to say sod this and open its businesses fully.
Nobody's seen hide nor hair of Biden.
The reflation trade is steaming ramming speed at Johnson's government.
You keep using the term reflation as a threat. Do you know what it means? 🤔
Reflation would be a good thing right now. If it's coming then good.
It'll certainly be a test of his priorities. If he bails out the EU without doing likewise to Australia then it's going to look very like favouring one ally over another. Which would be particularly difficult set against the wider strategic backdrop (Australia being punished through trade measures for being critical of the Chinese at the same time as the EU has been cosying up to them.)
The easiest approach would probably be to say "we're in a worse state than you are, so the answer has to be 'no', for now." Though even that isn't trouble free. The response could reasonably be "but why, given you're not using the stuff?" I wonder how many more months the American authorities intend to drag their heels on giving approval to AZN in the first place?
JnJ has recently announced that (possibly under pressure from Biden admin) that it will licence Merck (known as MSD over here) to manufacture it's newly approved vaccine under licence to increase supply. The EU should be looking at similar arrangements and I expect it will. I suspect supply will be no longer a problem in the next month or so.
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
Two more points:
1. Sorry if everyone's already aware of this, but if you don't know your NHS number then you can find it virtually instantaneously through a search facility on their website - very helpful 2. I've also been to the vaccination booking page, and it has indeed been updated to state that it's available to people aged 56 and over. It only went down to 60 earlier in the week, IIRC - so progress on first jabs has slowed but they're evidently still not doing at all badly
Thanks for that. I`ve just booked my jabs. I`ll be done by 7 June.
The 56 and over thing on the website is slightly bizarre, since the JCVI grouping is 55 and over. Where exactly has the differentiation between 55 and 56 year olds come in?
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
Using your hands to walk instead of your feet is also a greater achievement. But that doesn't make it a necessary, sensible, or popular thing to do...
It's an ok analogy because I did simply mean greater achievement as in harder to do.
I think it's because the Thatcher revolution went deep and did something to our wiring. People now believe success comes mainly through hard work and talent rather than birth circumstances. Much in politics flows from this. Indeed imo almost everything flows from this. If you believe it's mainly hard work and talent deciding life outcomes you'll be on the right. If you believe it's mainly birth circumstances, to whom and where you are born, you'll be on the left.
And what's interesting is we get an inversion of the usual 'heart v head' trope when we follow this through. Because the right's view - it's mainly about hard work and talent - is the romantic one. A dreamy idealistic vision even people on the left would love to embrace if they could. Whereas the left's view - birth circumstances dominate - is the hard headed, rational assessment, and far closer to objective reality.
So, for me, if you're not a Tory when you're 21 you have no soul. But if you're still a Tory when you're 51 you have no brain.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
Two more points:
1. Sorry if everyone's already aware of this, but if you don't know your NHS number then you can find it virtually instantaneously through a search facility on their website - very helpful 2. I've also been to the vaccination booking page, and it has indeed been updated to state that it's available to people aged 56 and over. It only went down to 60 earlier in the week, IIRC - so progress on first jabs has slowed but they're evidently still not doing at all badly
Thanks for that. I`ve just booked my jabs. I`ll be done by 7 June.
No ability to book jabs in Scotland. Just wait your turn and we will contact you. A bit frustrating. My wife is 60 and I am 59. Neither of us contacted yet.
It’s being done in order of importance. Ayrshire folk first.
Don’t know why, but Edinburgh seems to be particularly slow. From Travelling Tabby. First DoseSecond Dose Na h-Eileanan Siar 42.5% 0.0% Dumfries & Galloway 41.1% 0.0% Shetland Islands 40.0% 0.0% South Ayrshire 39.4% 0.0% Scottish Borders 39.2% 0.0% North Ayrshire 38.5% 0.0% Angus 37.8% 0.0% East Ayrshire 37.0% 0.0% Argyll & Bute 36.7% 0.0% Orkney Islands 36.3% 0.0% Perth & Kinross 35.4% 0.0% East Dunbartonshire 34.9% 0.0% Inverclyde 34.6% 0.0% South Lanarkshire 34.3% 0.0% Dundee City 33.7% 0.0% Highland 33.4% 0.0% Fife 33.3% 0.0% North Lanarkshire 32.1% 0.0% Renfrewshire 31.7% 0.0% West Dunbartonshire 31.4% 0.0% East Lothian 31.3% 0.0% Midlothian 31.2% 0.0% East Renfrewshire 31.0% 0.0% Stirling 31.0% 0.0% Moray 30.9% 0.0% Aberdeenshire 29.7% 0.0% Clackmannanshire 29.4% 0.0% Falkirk 28.7% 0.0% West Lothian 27.5% 0.0% Glasgow City 25.3% 0.0% Aberdeen City 24.7% 0.0% Edinburgh City 24.7% 0.0%
It'll certainly be a test of his priorities. If he bails out the EU without doing likewise to Australia then it's going to look very like favouring one ally over another. Which would be particularly difficult set against the wider strategic backdrop (Australia being punished through trade measures for being critical of the Chinese at the same time as the EU has been cosying up to them.)
The easiest approach would probably be to say "we're in a worse state than you are, so the answer has to be 'no', for now." Though even that isn't trouble free. The response could reasonably be "but why, given you're not using the stuff?" I wonder how many more months the American authorities intend to drag their heels on giving approval to AZN in the first place?
JnJ has recently announced that (possibly under pressure from Biden admin) that it will licence Merck (known as MSD over here) to manufacture it's newly approved vaccine under licence to increase supply. The EU should be looking at similar arrangements and I expect it will. I suspect supply will be no longer a problem in the next month or so.
Setting up new production takes a great deal of time. Simply licensing vaccine A for production at facility B won't increase vaccine availability for a number of months. And that assumes crazy level effort.
There would never have been a better time to abolish the triple lock.
I would like to see the Government look at a much more radical review of tax and benefits. Set a minimum income level, sufficient to live on without needing benefits or charity. £16,200 per year would equate to a 35 hour week at the living wage. Set that as the personal allowance. Receive a rebate if your income is less. Pay tax if your income is more. Combine tax and NI for a basic rate of 32%. Same rate for self-employed. Income based on earned and unearned income (dividends and Capital Gains) at the same rate. Higher tax rates of 52% and 57%, so no upper limit on NI contributions. Don’t know what the net cost would be. A job for a think tank, maybe?
Why should the taxpayer subsidise low paying companies? If you want to improve people's standards of living in that way then increase the minimum wage to a level where someone working a standard week is earning whatever you consider to be the living wage level. If companies cannot afford to operate whilst paying their employees a basic living wage and paying their taxes under normal operating circumstances then they do not deserve to be in business.
UBI or anything like it is merely the taxpayer subsidising the profits of companies.
No it is not. For two childless adults working full-time the minimum wage already does reach that threshold. No subsidies to any company at all.
The issue that needs to be fixed though is that if people aren't working we don't tell them "go get a job then" and let them and their children end up on the streets or starving to death if they don't. They get benefits to ensure that they have enough to survive.
So then the difference between someone not working and someone who is working full time is not the difference in income the working person earns because there is a corresponding loss of benefits to go with that.
Between loss of benefits, NIC and income tax the state can be reclaiming 90% of someone's income.
Not a penny of this goes to the company.
Rubbish. If it is the unemployed or those unable to work we are talking about then they get money from the Government already. You can debate about increasing that amount but that has nothing to do with a UBI. And yes, if companies pay less than a living wage and the Government is expected to make up the difference as it is having to do now then it is absolutely the case that you are subsidising the companies. If they are, as you foolishly claim, already paying that amount then there is no need for UBI anyway.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
It'll certainly be a test of his priorities. If he bails out the EU without doing likewise to Australia then it's going to look very like favouring one ally over another. Which would be particularly difficult set against the wider strategic backdrop (Australia being punished through trade measures for being critical of the Chinese at the same time as the EU has been cosying up to them.)
The easiest approach would probably be to say "we're in a worse state than you are, so the answer has to be 'no', for now." Though even that isn't trouble free. The response could reasonably be "but why, given you're not using the stuff?" I wonder how many more months the American authorities intend to drag their heels on giving approval to AZN in the first place?
JnJ has recently announced that (possibly under pressure from Biden admin) that it will licence Merck (known as MSD over here) to manufacture it's newly approved vaccine under licence to increase supply. The EU should be looking at similar arrangements and I expect it will. I suspect supply will be no longer a problem in the next month or so.
Setting up new production takes a great deal of time. Simply licensing vaccine A for production at facility B won't increase vaccine availability for a number of months. And that assumes crazy level effort.
Indeed, but the announcement has been endorsed by industry leaders as potentially enabling the Biden ambition to offer vaccinate all US adults by May. There is of course, lead in time, but in the case of Merck (aka MSD) they already have a lot of the infrastructure in place as their own attempt has reportedly failed.
It'll certainly be a test of his priorities. If he bails out the EU without doing likewise to Australia then it's going to look very like favouring one ally over another. Which would be particularly difficult set against the wider strategic backdrop (Australia being punished through trade measures for being critical of the Chinese at the same time as the EU has been cosying up to them.)
The easiest approach would probably be to say "we're in a worse state than you are, so the answer has to be 'no', for now." Though even that isn't trouble free. The response could reasonably be "but why, given you're not using the stuff?" I wonder how many more months the American authorities intend to drag their heels on giving approval to AZN in the first place?
JnJ has recently announced that (possibly under pressure from Biden admin) that it will licence Merck (known as MSD over here) to manufacture it's newly approved vaccine under licence to increase supply. The EU should be looking at similar arrangements and I expect it will. I suspect supply will be no longer a problem in the next month or so.
Setting up new production takes a great deal of time. Simply licensing vaccine A for production at facility B won't increase vaccine availability for a number of months. And that assumes crazy level effort.
Indeed, but the announcement has been endorsed by industry leaders as potentially enabling the Biden ambition to offer vaccinate all US adults by May. There is of course, lead in time, but in the case of Merck (aka MSD) they already have a lot of the infrastructure in place as their own attempt has reportedly failed.
PS. It is therefore possible that there are similar companies in Europe that will not be starting from scratch, though that is speculation on my part
Did Rishi actually change anything for students in the Budget?
To be the obvious-as-abolishing-triple-lock move was to bring the Student Loan interest rate down to either base rate or CPI, from the current 6.1%.
May only be a start, but needed.
A good free hit for Labour would be to have zero interest on Student Loans and make it retrospective.
It wouldn't even cost much as few will be repaid in full anyway, so the money coming in will remain the same, just the nominal student debt reducing for individuals. It would remove the disincentive to earn more, and incentive to emigrate.
Is it 2032 that the first of the debts will be written off? That will be a big loss to the exchequer, compounded annually, perhaps £8 billion per year in current terms.
It would be a good idea if the Conservatives suggested it.
But Labour have already promised to write off all student debt so changing to only writing off the interest will be viewed as an anti-student move.
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
Two more points:
1. Sorry if everyone's already aware of this, but if you don't know your NHS number then you can find it virtually instantaneously through a search facility on their website - very helpful 2. I've also been to the vaccination booking page, and it has indeed been updated to state that it's available to people aged 56 and over. It only went down to 60 earlier in the week, IIRC - so progress on first jabs has slowed but they're evidently still not doing at all badly
A rough rule of thumb - 800K people in a year cohort. So 4 years on the population is something like 3.2 million first vaccinations...
So, at the moment, we are doing about 3 years of population per week....
Gets us to the start of the fortysomethings in about a fortnight, assuming that the first dose rate doesn't get any worse. A fair improvement on April 15th!
They are talking about vaccine supply ramping up sometime in March so I'm hoping to see million-jab days.
I think the Pfizer is in short supply. Our 3 hospital hubs in Leicester, one of the perpetual hotspots, is reducing hours and days for the next week, owing to lack of supply.
It might be held back for 2nd doses?
Got mine this morning - AZ/Oxford - at the local stadium.
There were 5 desks using AZ and there was 1 desk doing second vaccinations with Pfizer.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
It'll certainly be a test of his priorities. If he bails out the EU without doing likewise to Australia then it's going to look very like favouring one ally over another. Which would be particularly difficult set against the wider strategic backdrop (Australia being punished through trade measures for being critical of the Chinese at the same time as the EU has been cosying up to them.)
The easiest approach would probably be to say "we're in a worse state than you are, so the answer has to be 'no', for now." Though even that isn't trouble free. The response could reasonably be "but why, given you're not using the stuff?" I wonder how many more months the American authorities intend to drag their heels on giving approval to AZN in the first place?
JnJ has recently announced that (possibly under pressure from Biden admin) that it will licence Merck (known as MSD over here) to manufacture it's newly approved vaccine under licence to increase supply. The EU should be looking at similar arrangements and I expect it will. I suspect supply will be no longer a problem in the next month or so.
Setting up new production takes a great deal of time. Simply licensing vaccine A for production at facility B won't increase vaccine availability for a number of months. And that assumes crazy level effort.
Indeed, but the announcement has been endorsed by industry leaders as potentially enabling the Biden ambition to offer vaccinate all US adults by May. There is of course, lead in time, but in the case of Merck (aka MSD) they already have a lot of the infrastructure in place as their own attempt has reportedly failed.
It would be pretty impressive to successfully make a high yield batch of a vaccine they haven't made before inside the first few attempts. Minimum that is months....
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
That might have been a risky strategy because debt levels might have stayed higher for longer while we waited for the Laffer pay off down the line.
Sunak does not have that luxury. He is extremely vulnerable to rising rates as Johnson gets Britain deeper and deeper into the debt mire maintaining the notion his strategy was correct. A faster escape from lockdown might lead to very awkward questions that are now be asked in America.
From the latest weekly vaccine data for England - NHS staff who have had at least the 1st vaccination
Total 93.1% East Of England 96.2% London 78.7% Midlands 93.3% North East And Yorkshire 98.5% North West 96.0% South East 96.0% South West 98.1%
Perhaps someone can suggest what pay rise NHS anti-vaxxers deserve ?
On that subject I saw a very poor interview on Breakfast this morning of a representative of the BMA who was bleating about the 1%. I would have liked to have heard him questioned on what he would like to say to the millions of people who have had their pay massively cut, lost their jobs or their business.
Perhaps he could also have been asked what is the average pension that a doctor retires on? Or perhaps whether maybe medics, who are amongst the best paid of their profession in the world, could perhaps forego an increase so that nursing and auxiliary staff could have a bigger slice? Sadly none of these questions were asked because the media generally seems totally obsequious to anyone with a medical degree as though they are far too holy to have their financial motivations questioned.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
Speaking as an old-fashioned leftist, I regard fulminating about individual actions as a distraction, and accept that people will seek to maximise their finances and pleasure in whatever financial environment they live. The objective of leftists is to make that environment one in which the pursuit of wealth and pleasure benefits society and the wider world. I don't care if you spend your money on expensive dinners or holidays or whatever you like. Why should the Government take an interest in what you enjoy, if it doesn't hurt others?
But I'm not convinced that IHT or taxes generally are really hated (and I've paid IHT myself). People get used to reasonably high taxation (Scandinavia) and a modest wealth tax on substantial wealth (Switzerland), so long as they feel that on the whole the money is being used to maintain a pleasant social environment - no extreme inequality (beggars, food kitchens), low crime, good health care and education available, even a reasonable effort to help in desperate situations overseas. It's partly that if their own situation is OK they feel fairly willing to see others helped, and partly that they think that a balanced, not absurdly unequal, society is safer and pleasanter.
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
Two more points:
1. Sorry if everyone's already aware of this, but if you don't know your NHS number then you can find it virtually instantaneously through a search facility on their website - very helpful 2. I've also been to the vaccination booking page, and it has indeed been updated to state that it's available to people aged 56 and over. It only went down to 60 earlier in the week, IIRC - so progress on first jabs has slowed but they're evidently still not doing at all badly
A rough rule of thumb - 800K people in a year cohort. So 4 years on the population is something like 3.2 million first vaccinations...
So, at the moment, we are doing about 3 years of population per week....
Gets us to the start of the fortysomethings in about a fortnight, assuming that the first dose rate doesn't get any worse. A fair improvement on April 15th!
They are talking about vaccine supply ramping up sometime in March so I'm hoping to see million-jab days.
I think the Pfizer is in short supply. Our 3 hospital hubs in Leicester, one of the perpetual hotspots, is reducing hours and days for the next week, owing to lack of supply.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Did he really have a choice? the low tax alternative might have meant even higher bond borrowing in the short term that is already being planned. V. risky, given where rates are trending.
When's Biden going to hike US CT up to 28% ? That's an important(ish) sidenote to our plans.
The US has a hugely generous R&D/capital investment tax system and a far, far more forgiving bankruptcy system that allows companies with good ideas to restructure and try many times to succeed over here a company with a good idea gets one shot and then it becomes easy pickings for larger, less productive rivals or foreign companies who will offshore the IP.
Our business environments just aren't close to comparable.
Lockdown is in trouble in the US.
Its great champion Cuomo is under serious political pressure on a number of fronts.
That tin foil hat, conspiracy theory, anti vaxxer rag the.....er......Wall Street Journal is running articles on the path of the virus in Florida v New Mexico and North Dakota vs South Dakota.
Arizona has become the latest state to say sod this and open its businesses fully.
Nobody's seen hide nor hair of Biden.
You mean, you haven’t because you haven’t been looking. In the real world, the funny place where the rest of us live, he’s been all over the airwaves.
Oddly, Biden is himself no fan of lockdowns, but his views on them are to some extent irrelevant as it is a state matter unless he invokes emergency powers. So while he can criticise going too far, it is most unlikely he would overrule any governor to impose a lockdown.
It'll certainly be a test of his priorities. If he bails out the EU without doing likewise to Australia then it's going to look very like favouring one ally over another. Which would be particularly difficult set against the wider strategic backdrop (Australia being punished through trade measures for being critical of the Chinese at the same time as the EU has been cosying up to them.)
The easiest approach would probably be to say "we're in a worse state than you are, so the answer has to be 'no', for now." Though even that isn't trouble free. The response could reasonably be "but why, given you're not using the stuff?" I wonder how many more months the American authorities intend to drag their heels on giving approval to AZN in the first place?
JnJ has recently announced that (possibly under pressure from Biden admin) that it will licence Merck (known as MSD over here) to manufacture it's newly approved vaccine under licence to increase supply. The EU should be looking at similar arrangements and I expect it will. I suspect supply will be no longer a problem in the next month or so.
Setting up new production takes a great deal of time. Simply licensing vaccine A for production at facility B won't increase vaccine availability for a number of months. And that assumes crazy level effort.
Indeed, but the announcement has been endorsed by industry leaders as potentially enabling the Biden ambition to offer vaccinate all US adults by May. There is of course, lead in time, but in the case of Merck (aka MSD) they already have a lot of the infrastructure in place as their own attempt has reportedly failed.
It would be pretty impressive to successfully make a high yield batch of a vaccine they haven't made before inside the first few attempts. Minimum that is months....
Yes of course, but we do need to think about in months as well! All of these are adding to the baseline that is already there! Not sure what your point is? I heard about this from a leading healthcare analyst who used to be a CEO of one of the largest US healthcare giants. He thought it was fairly ground breaking even if you don't!
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Switzerland is in the single market.
Meanwhile financial services equivalence status with the EU looks dead in the water.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
So would you advocate a policy to give poorer people access to elite schooling based on merit?
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
Two more points:
1. Sorry if everyone's already aware of this, but if you don't know your NHS number then you can find it virtually instantaneously through a search facility on their website - very helpful 2. I've also been to the vaccination booking page, and it has indeed been updated to state that it's available to people aged 56 and over. It only went down to 60 earlier in the week, IIRC - so progress on first jabs has slowed but they're evidently still not doing at all badly
A rough rule of thumb - 800K people in a year cohort. So 4 years on the population is something like 3.2 million first vaccinations...
So, at the moment, we are doing about 3 years of population per week....
Gets us to the start of the fortysomethings in about a fortnight, assuming that the first dose rate doesn't get any worse. A fair improvement on April 15th!
They are talking about vaccine supply ramping up sometime in March so I'm hoping to see million-jab days.
I think the Pfizer is in short supply. Our 3 hospital hubs in Leicester, one of the perpetual hotspots, is reducing hours and days for the next week, owing to lack of supply.
"There will be minimal allocations of new vaccine in the first part of the week commencing 8 March, reflecting national supply available to the programme. However, we are expecting substantial increased supply in the volume of vaccine available into week of 15 March and are therefore asking you to start planning now."
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
Using your hands to walk instead of your feet is also a greater achievement. But that doesn't make it a necessary, sensible, or popular thing to do...
It's an ok analogy because I did simply mean greater achievement as in harder to do.
I think it's because the Thatcher revolution went deep and did something to our wiring. People now believe success comes mainly through hard work and talent rather than birth circumstances. Much in politics flows from this. Indeed imo almost everything flows from this. If you believe it's mainly hard work and talent deciding life outcomes you'll be on the right. If you believe it's mainly birth circumstances, to whom and where you are born, you'll be on the left.
Hope for you yet (if I have your age right).
The interesting thing over the last two decades, is the number of people born into privilege who are certain others at the bottom of the scale are always there of their own making, in a post-Thatcherite or post-Reaganite meritocracy, with very little self-awareness or insight into the irony of this situation at all. Duncan-Smith, and to a certain extent even Osborne, are good examples of this, and it betrays an increasing lack of intellectual and social curiosity in British and American society since the turn of the millennium. Trump's brattish and arrogant children are much the same.
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
It certainly worked with me. After NigelB very kindly tipped us off early yesterday, I booked my jab. Then I went on two Whatsapp Groups - friends and family - and told everyone. At least 7 people booked their jab once they'd heard my story. Chain reaction. Clever
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Did he really have a choice? the low tax alternative might have meant even higher bond borrowing in the short term that is already being planned. V. risky, given where rates are trending.
Ultimately the BoE has monetised all of our virus debt, we pay ourselves the interest so even in an inflationary environment ~60% of our debt interest is funneled back to the treasury via the APF so Rishi wasn't playing a completely straight bat on those warnings of debt interest rising as a share of GDP becuase the net interest bill is about half of that figure.
So yes, he did have a choice, he chose to put taxes up on businesses and set us on a path of lower trend growth, something that has been made clear in the OBR's own forecast.
When's Biden going to hike US CT up to 28% ? That's an important(ish) sidenote to our plans.
The US has a hugely generous R&D/capital investment tax system and a far, far more forgiving bankruptcy system that allows companies with good ideas to restructure and try many times to succeed over here a company with a good idea gets one shot and then it becomes easy pickings for larger, less productive rivals or foreign companies who will offshore the IP.
Our business environments just aren't close to comparable.
Lockdown is in trouble in the US.
Its great champion Cuomo is under serious political pressure on a number of fronts.
That tin foil hat, conspiracy theory, anti vaxxer rag the.....er......Wall Street Journal is running articles on the path of the virus in Florida v New Mexico and North Dakota vs South Dakota.
Arizona has become the latest state to say sod this and open its businesses fully.
Nobody's seen hide nor hair of Biden.
You mean, you haven’t because you haven’t been looking. In the real world, the funny place where the rest of us live, he’s been all over the airwaves.
Oddly, Biden is himself no fan of lockdowns, but his views on them are to some extent irrelevant as it is a state matter unless he invokes emergency powers. So while he can criticise going too far, it is most unlikely he would overrule any governor to impose a lockdown.
Biden is MIA in terms of press conferences. We are in day 44 of his presidency, at least 11 days after successive presidents have given their first.
Apparently one is planned for before the end of the month. Lucky America.
It'll certainly be a test of his priorities. If he bails out the EU without doing likewise to Australia then it's going to look very like favouring one ally over another. Which would be particularly difficult set against the wider strategic backdrop (Australia being punished through trade measures for being critical of the Chinese at the same time as the EU has been cosying up to them.)
The easiest approach would probably be to say "we're in a worse state than you are, so the answer has to be 'no', for now." Though even that isn't trouble free. The response could reasonably be "but why, given you're not using the stuff?" I wonder how many more months the American authorities intend to drag their heels on giving approval to AZN in the first place?
JnJ has recently announced that (possibly under pressure from Biden admin) that it will licence Merck (known as MSD over here) to manufacture it's newly approved vaccine under licence to increase supply. The EU should be looking at similar arrangements and I expect it will. I suspect supply will be no longer a problem in the next month or so.
Setting up new production takes a great deal of time. Simply licensing vaccine A for production at facility B won't increase vaccine availability for a number of months. And that assumes crazy level effort.
Indeed, but the announcement has been endorsed by industry leaders as potentially enabling the Biden ambition to offer vaccinate all US adults by May. There is of course, lead in time, but in the case of Merck (aka MSD) they already have a lot of the infrastructure in place as their own attempt has reportedly failed.
It would be pretty impressive to successfully make a high yield batch of a vaccine they haven't made before inside the first few attempts. Minimum that is months....
Yes of course, but we do need to think about in months as well! All of these are adding to the baseline that is already there! Not sure what your point is? I heard about this from a leading healthcare analyst who used to be a CEO of one of the largest US healthcare giants. He thought it was fairly ground breaking even if you don't!
Any new manufacturing capacity will be producing new supplies of vaccine several months down the line.
In your original message, you suggest that supply will no longer be a problem in the next month or so. The problem is that the next month or so can't be changed, in terms of production.
The supply for the next few months is "baked in" - the length of the supply chain means that all the vaccines to be used in the next month or so already exist and are in the bottling and QA process.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
Using your hands to walk instead of your feet is also a greater achievement. But that doesn't make it a necessary, sensible, or popular thing to do...
It's an ok analogy because I did simply mean greater achievement as in harder to do.
I think it's because the Thatcher revolution went deep and did something to our wiring. People now believe success comes mainly through hard work and talent rather than birth circumstances. Much in politics flows from this. Indeed imo almost everything flows from this. If you believe it's mainly hard work and talent deciding life outcomes you'll be on the right. If you believe it's mainly birth circumstances, to whom and where you are born, you'll be on the left.
And what's interesting is we get an inversion of the usual 'heart v head' trope when we follow this through. Because the right's view - it's mainly about hard work and talent - is the romantic one. A dreamy idealistic vision even people on the left would love to embrace if they could. Whereas the left's view - birth circumstances dominate - is the hard headed, rational assessment, and far closer to objective reality.
So, for me, if you're not a Tory when you're 21 you have no soul. But if you're still a Tory when you're 51 you have no brain.
Hope for you yet (if I have your age right).
I seem to be doing surprisingly well on both soul and brain so far then.
I also see you've been returning to the well of Toby Senior's monitory tome The Rise of the Meritocracy - he saw what was coming long before the 80s. Thatcher was indeed a right old romantic (who knew?), but obviously Tories know all about the influence of birth circumstances; we just don't consider them to be in need of radical corrective action from the state. I like to think that our vision is appealing precisely because it embraces both meritocracy and privilege, the modern and the antique: certainly many of the proudest moments of my life have been the result of things I earned entirely through my own efforts, but many of the most enjoyable were the result of pure, unmerited privilege, and all the more delightful for it...
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
So would you advocate a policy to give poorer people access to elite schooling based on merit?
When's Biden going to hike US CT up to 28% ? That's an important(ish) sidenote to our plans.
The US has a hugely generous R&D/capital investment tax system and a far, far more forgiving bankruptcy system that allows companies with good ideas to restructure and try many times to succeed over here a company with a good idea gets one shot and then it becomes easy pickings for larger, less productive rivals or foreign companies who will offshore the IP.
Our business environments just aren't close to comparable.
Lockdown is in trouble in the US.
Its great champion Cuomo is under serious political pressure on a number of fronts.
That tin foil hat, conspiracy theory, anti vaxxer rag the.....er......Wall Street Journal is running articles on the path of the virus in Florida v New Mexico and North Dakota vs South Dakota.
Arizona has become the latest state to say sod this and open its businesses fully.
Nobody's seen hide nor hair of Biden.
You mean, you haven’t because you haven’t been looking. In the real world, the funny place where the rest of us live, he’s been all over the airwaves.
Oddly, Biden is himself no fan of lockdowns, but his views on them are to some extent irrelevant as it is a state matter unless he invokes emergency powers. So while he can criticise going too far, it is most unlikely he would overrule any governor to impose a lockdown.
Biden is MIA in terms of press conferences. We are in day 44 of his presidency, at least 11 days after successive presidents have given their first.
Apparently one is planned for before the end of the month. Lucky America.
So just to be clear - you equate ‘not seeing hide nor hair of Biden’ with ‘not having given a press conference?’
Even though he has, in fact been speaking to the press and what you initially said was therefore demonstrably incorrect - and indeed, demonstrated to be incorrect?
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Switzerland is in the single market.
Meanwhile financial services equivalence status with the EU looks dead in the water.
Switzerland isn't in the single market. It's not in the EEA and isn't subject to the ECJ.
Once again, you're talking about stuff you don't really understand beyond the headline. Financial services equivalence might be nice to have but ultimately the proposed 33% corporation tax rate for the industry is going to be 10x more damaging than anything to do with LCH having to operate it's clearing business outside of the scope of the ECB.
It'll certainly be a test of his priorities. If he bails out the EU without doing likewise to Australia then it's going to look very like favouring one ally over another. Which would be particularly difficult set against the wider strategic backdrop (Australia being punished through trade measures for being critical of the Chinese at the same time as the EU has been cosying up to them.)
The easiest approach would probably be to say "we're in a worse state than you are, so the answer has to be 'no', for now." Though even that isn't trouble free. The response could reasonably be "but why, given you're not using the stuff?" I wonder how many more months the American authorities intend to drag their heels on giving approval to AZN in the first place?
JnJ has recently announced that (possibly under pressure from Biden admin) that it will licence Merck (known as MSD over here) to manufacture it's newly approved vaccine under licence to increase supply. The EU should be looking at similar arrangements and I expect it will. I suspect supply will be no longer a problem in the next month or so.
Setting up new production takes a great deal of time. Simply licensing vaccine A for production at facility B won't increase vaccine availability for a number of months. And that assumes crazy level effort.
Indeed, but the announcement has been endorsed by industry leaders as potentially enabling the Biden ambition to offer vaccinate all US adults by May. There is of course, lead in time, but in the case of Merck (aka MSD) they already have a lot of the infrastructure in place as their own attempt has reportedly failed.
It would be pretty impressive to successfully make a high yield batch of a vaccine they haven't made before inside the first few attempts. Minimum that is months....
Yes of course, but we do need to think about in months as well! All of these are adding to the baseline that is already there! Not sure what your point is? I heard about this from a leading healthcare analyst who used to be a CEO of one of the largest US healthcare giants. He thought it was fairly ground breaking even if you don't!
Any new manufacturing capacity will be producing new supplies of vaccine several months down the line.
In your original message, you suggest that supply will no longer be a problem in the next month or so. The problem is that the next month or so can't be changed, in terms of production.
The supply for the next few months is "baked in" - the length of the supply chain means that all the vaccines to be used in the next month or so already exist and are in the bottling and QA process.
I did not say anything of the sort! I was simply saying that the news was positive from the US and it may be a way forward for Europe, so for some odd reason you are trying to misrepresent what I said.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
I knew we'd have to agree on something one day - well said!
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
So would you advocate a policy to give poorer people access to elite schooling based on merit?
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
There is a quote today in the Times (££) from a senior Tory MP (I think, I read it late last night), which says "hopefully growth will be strong enough to avoid us actually raising CT all the way to 25%"
So maybe our wishful speculations were right. Sunak made his 25% CT announcement to calm the markets, and appear prudent - but HMG is secretly hoping they won't have to do it, or, at least, not as dramatically
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Switzerland is in the single market.
Meanwhile financial services equivalence status with the EU looks dead in the water.
Switzerland isn't in the single market. It's not in the EEA and isn't subject to the ECJ.
Once again, you're talking about stuff you don't really understand beyond the headline. Financial services equivalence might be nice to have but ultimately the proposed 33% corporation tax rate for the industry is going to be 10x more damaging than anything to do with LCH having to operate it's clearing business outside of the scope of the ECB.
Switzerland is in the single market via bilateral agreement.
If you don’t get that basic fact it does tend to cast doubt on your other prognostications.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Absolute unadulterated twaddle. The amount of new red tape my own employer (nothing to do with agriculture or fisheries) has to deal with is vast. There's no doubt that this will eat away at the competitiveness of British business. You're very talented - you give the impression of knowing what you're talking about, but scratch beneath the surface and you clearly know diddly squat about bugger all.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Did he really have a choice? the low tax alternative might have meant even higher bond borrowing in the short term that is already being planned. V. risky, given where rates are trending.
Ultimately the BoE has monetised all of our virus debt, we pay ourselves the interest so even in an inflationary environment ~60% of our debt interest is funneled back to the treasury via the APF so Rishi wasn't playing a completely straight bat on those warnings of debt interest rising as a share of GDP becuase the net interest bill is about half of that figure.
So yes, he did have a choice, he chose to put taxes up on businesses and set us on a path of lower trend growth, something that has been made clear in the OBR's own forecast.
One way or another the government has to look like its concerned about 'fairness'.
It'll certainly be a test of his priorities. If he bails out the EU without doing likewise to Australia then it's going to look very like favouring one ally over another. Which would be particularly difficult set against the wider strategic backdrop (Australia being punished through trade measures for being critical of the Chinese at the same time as the EU has been cosying up to them.)
The easiest approach would probably be to say "we're in a worse state than you are, so the answer has to be 'no', for now." Though even that isn't trouble free. The response could reasonably be "but why, given you're not using the stuff?" I wonder how many more months the American authorities intend to drag their heels on giving approval to AZN in the first place?
JnJ has recently announced that (possibly under pressure from Biden admin) that it will licence Merck (known as MSD over here) to manufacture it's newly approved vaccine under licence to increase supply. The EU should be looking at similar arrangements and I expect it will. I suspect supply will be no longer a problem in the next month or so.
Setting up new production takes a great deal of time. Simply licensing vaccine A for production at facility B won't increase vaccine availability for a number of months. And that assumes crazy level effort.
Indeed, but the announcement has been endorsed by industry leaders as potentially enabling the Biden ambition to offer vaccinate all US adults by May. There is of course, lead in time, but in the case of Merck (aka MSD) they already have a lot of the infrastructure in place as their own attempt has reportedly failed.
It would be pretty impressive to successfully make a high yield batch of a vaccine they haven't made before inside the first few attempts. Minimum that is months....
Yes of course, but we do need to think about in months as well! All of these are adding to the baseline that is already there! Not sure what your point is? I heard about this from a leading healthcare analyst who used to be a CEO of one of the largest US healthcare giants. He thought it was fairly ground breaking even if you don't!
Any new manufacturing capacity will be producing new supplies of vaccine several months down the line.
In your original message, you suggest that supply will no longer be a problem in the next month or so. The problem is that the next month or so can't be changed, in terms of production.
The supply for the next few months is "baked in" - the length of the supply chain means that all the vaccines to be used in the next month or so already exist and are in the bottling and QA process.
I did not say anything of the sort! I was simply saying that the news was positive from the US and it may be a way forward for Europe, so for some odd reason you are trying to misrepresent what I said.
"I suspect supply will be no longer a problem in the next month or so."
Sadly, the supply for the next month or so is "written"
It is worth remembering that supplies of all vaccines haven't been what was hoped. If they were, the UK would have had 100s of millions of doses by now.
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
It certainly worked with me. After NigelB very kindly tipped us off early yesterday, I booked my jab. Then I went on two Whatsapp Groups - friends and family - and told everyone. At least 7 people booked their jab once they'd heard my story. Chain reaction. Clever
I don't think it is a deliberate policy. I read here yesterday that it was possible for under-60s to book, decided I would wait for it to be official, and today received a letter from the NHS inviting me.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Did he really have a choice? the low tax alternative might have meant even higher bond borrowing in the short term that is already being planned. V. risky, given where rates are trending.
Ultimately the BoE has monetised all of our virus debt, we pay ourselves the interest so even in an inflationary environment ~60% of our debt interest is funneled back to the treasury via the APF so Rishi wasn't playing a completely straight bat on those warnings of debt interest rising as a share of GDP becuase the net interest bill is about half of that figure.
So yes, he did have a choice, he chose to put taxes up on businesses and set us on a path of lower trend growth, something that has been made clear in the OBR's own forecast.
One way or another the government has to look like its concerned about 'fairness'.
But that brings us back to triple lock guarantee and the NI bung to working pensioners.
Just put Aladdin on as our family movie on Disney+ and it's got the 'cultural stereotypes' disclaimer they had already for Dumbo and other older movies. First time I've noticed the disclaimer on Aladdin so guessing it was recently added.
Amusing that Aladdin from the 90s is now in the same category as having disclaimers as films from the 40s and 50s now.
In the long run it seems everything will have a disclaimer.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
There is a quote today in the Times (££) from a senior Tory MP (I think, I read it late last night), which says "hopefully growth will be strong enough to avoid us actually raising CT all the way to 25%"
So maybe our wishful speculations were right. Sunak made his 25% CT announcement to calm the markets, and appear prudent - but HMG is secretly hoping they won't have to do it, or, at least, not as dramatically
All this bed-wetting over 25% CT.
If Germany, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Spain, Italy and France can all survuve at >=25% CT rates I am sure we can.
I suspect the tears are for the dissolving Singapore-on-Thames fantasy.
In defeat unbearable: in victory unbearable. Is the French flag some sort of anti lockdown thing or have they just got a Dutch one the wrong way round?
Maybe it's simply that the NHS is updating the website every day or two, unblocking the NHS numbers for the next year group, and not bothering to advertise the fact? Relying on pro-active citizens to go to the mass vax centres and letting the GPs mop up those who aren't internet savvy or are willing to wait for a letter - a means to regulate demand?
If they keep applying the same principle all the way down the age scale then it will certainly be worth 48-49 year olds starting to check regularly from about the middle of the month.
Two more points:
1. Sorry if everyone's already aware of this, but if you don't know your NHS number then you can find it virtually instantaneously through a search facility on their website - very helpful 2. I've also been to the vaccination booking page, and it has indeed been updated to state that it's available to people aged 56 and over. It only went down to 60 earlier in the week, IIRC - so progress on first jabs has slowed but they're evidently still not doing at all badly
A rough rule of thumb - 800K people in a year cohort. So 4 years on the population is something like 3.2 million first vaccinations...
So, at the moment, we are doing about 3 years of population per week....
Gets us to the start of the fortysomethings in about a fortnight, assuming that the first dose rate doesn't get any worse. A fair improvement on April 15th!
They are talking about vaccine supply ramping up sometime in March so I'm hoping to see million-jab days.
I think the Pfizer is in short supply. Our 3 hospital hubs in Leicester, one of the perpetual hotspots, is reducing hours and days for the next week, owing to lack of supply.
"There will be minimal allocations of new vaccine in the first part of the week commencing 8 March, reflecting national supply available to the programme. However, we are expecting substantial increased supply in the volume of vaccine available into week of 15 March and are therefore asking you to start planning now."
My bold
Looking at what's been happening so far this week, I'd say at a rough guess that they're expecting four million per week from mid-month, for however long "several weeks" turns out to be.
Really substantial numbers of second doses don't become due until about Easter (the first week with a million first doses was w/e Jan 10th) so the NHS can have a decent crack at clearing cohort 10 before doling out the boosters becomes a serious problem. After that we're going to need another substantial increase in supply or else immunisation for the under 40s will proceed at a snail's pace.
Comments
Once restrictions are lifted the spending power of the parts of the economy that haven't been shutdown will be able to be unleashed to pull up those parts that were.
This is not a normal recession. It will have been an interregnum.
In my area there is desperation for 2nd stage growth units - that is when a company needs to grow from founders to say 10-20 people.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
Total 93.1%
East Of England 96.2%
London 78.7%
Midlands 93.3%
North East And Yorkshire 98.5%
North West 96.0%
South East 96.0%
South West 98.1%
UBI or anything like it is merely the taxpayer subsidising the profits of companies.
"The EU will urge the US to allow the export of millions of doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine to Europe, it has emerged.
The European Union also wants Washington to allow the free flow of vaccine ingredients for production, according to the Financial Times.
"We trust that we can work together with the U.S. to ensure that vaccines produced or bottled in the U.S. for the fulfilment of vaccine producers' contractual obligations with the EU will be fully honoured,” the European Commission told the newspaper.
This came after the commission and Italy blocked the shipment of AstraZeneca jabs to Australia as it tried to boost its vaccine rollout which has been behind that of nations like the UK.
This follows months of issues around the EU and the Oxford vaccine, which saw the jab limited to under-65s by several European countries such as Germany, a move which it reversed this month."
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/bosses-concerned-over-three-weeks-19965408
It wouldn't be the first time in the pandemic this government has given preferential treatment to big flagship facilities over locally directed efforts.
Our business environments just aren't close to comparable.
(A 50 year old asks)
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
I am working on the assumption that people are being unblocked in smaller steps as a way to regulate demand. The principle behind the JCVI plan - get older people done first - is absolutely clear, so there can be no particular objection to prioritising recipients in one year rather than five year blocks, so long as they're done in the right order.
Although I have to admit the amount of self-entitlement seems to be immense. I live in prosperous leafy Hampshire where most households seem to run two SUVs and we are down to age ranges and health conditions where most people are relatively fit, healthy and active. But the number of people whinging about having to go 10-15 miles for the most important thing that will happen to them this year is ridiculous.
I booked in at the Madejski Stadium (a) to save 11 days on a local jab (b) actually have an excuse to go for a drive and (c) leave local jabs for people unable to travel.
The Madejski was where I ran my first half marathon as well, so a suitable venue for a major life event...
Immunity for Good Friday (jab+22 days according to ZOE)
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The issue that needs to be fixed though is that if people aren't working we don't tell them "go get a job then" and let them and their children end up on the streets or starving to death if they don't. They get benefits to ensure that they have enough to survive.
So then the difference between someone not working and someone who is working full time is not the difference in income the working person earns because there is a corresponding loss of benefits to go with that.
Between loss of benefits, NIC and income tax the state can be reclaiming 90% of someone's income.
Not a penny of this goes to the company.
Its great champion Cuomo is under serious political pressure on a number of fronts.
That tin foil hat, conspiracy theory, anti vaxxer rag the.....er......Wall Street Journal is running articles on the path of the virus in Florida v New Mexico and North Dakota vs South Dakota.
Arizona has become the latest state to say sod this and open its businesses fully.
Nobody's seen hide nor hair of Biden.
The reflation trade is steaming ramming speed at Johnson's government.
This is very fine grained - nearly 7K locations/areas in England
I've uploaded the data as a spreadsheet
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PiwcgjB3SjLoLaWNczmLAeNN-engqnPa/view?usp=sharing
Reflation would be a good thing right now. If it's coming then good.
55 930,783
56 909,684
I think it's because the Thatcher revolution went deep and did something to our wiring. People now believe success comes mainly through hard work and talent rather than birth circumstances. Much in politics flows from this. Indeed imo almost everything flows from this. If you believe it's mainly hard work and talent deciding life outcomes you'll be on the right. If you believe it's mainly birth circumstances, to whom and where you are born, you'll be on the left.
And what's interesting is we get an inversion of the usual 'heart v head' trope when we follow this through. Because the right's view - it's mainly about hard work and talent - is the romantic one. A dreamy idealistic vision even people on the left would love to embrace if they could. Whereas the left's view - birth circumstances dominate - is the hard headed, rational assessment, and far closer to objective reality.
So, for me, if you're not a Tory when you're 21 you have no soul. But if you're still a Tory when you're 51 you have no brain.
Hope for you yet (if I have your age right).
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
First DoseSecond Dose
Na h-Eileanan Siar
42.5%
0.0%
Dumfries & Galloway
41.1%
0.0%
Shetland Islands
40.0%
0.0%
South Ayrshire
39.4%
0.0%
Scottish Borders
39.2%
0.0%
North Ayrshire
38.5%
0.0%
Angus
37.8%
0.0%
East Ayrshire
37.0%
0.0%
Argyll & Bute
36.7%
0.0%
Orkney Islands
36.3%
0.0%
Perth & Kinross
35.4%
0.0%
East Dunbartonshire
34.9%
0.0%
Inverclyde
34.6%
0.0%
South Lanarkshire
34.3%
0.0%
Dundee City
33.7%
0.0%
Highland
33.4%
0.0%
Fife
33.3%
0.0%
North Lanarkshire
32.1%
0.0%
Renfrewshire
31.7%
0.0%
West Dunbartonshire
31.4%
0.0%
East Lothian
31.3%
0.0%
Midlothian
31.2%
0.0%
East Renfrewshire
31.0%
0.0%
Stirling
31.0%
0.0%
Moray
30.9%
0.0%
Aberdeenshire
29.7%
0.0%
Clackmannanshire
29.4%
0.0%
Falkirk
28.7%
0.0%
West Lothian
27.5%
0.0%
Glasgow City
25.3%
0.0%
Aberdeen City
24.7%
0.0%
Edinburgh City
24.7%
0.0%
Incidentally, take a look at the data for England vaccinations - data by age group at the MOSA level
This is very fine grained - nearly 7K locations/areas in England
A bunch of your preconceptions may go away.....
I've uploaded the data as a spreadsheet
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PiwcgjB3SjLoLaWNczmLAeNN-engqnPa/view?usp=sharing
But Labour have already promised to write off all student debt so changing to only writing off the interest will be viewed as an anti-student move.
Got mine this morning - AZ/Oxford - at the local stadium.
There were 5 desks using AZ and there was 1 desk doing second vaccinations with Pfizer.
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Nor is it 93% in London where it seems 15% of NHS staff are anti-vaxxers.
Sunak does not have that luxury. He is extremely vulnerable to rising rates as Johnson gets Britain deeper and deeper into the debt mire maintaining the notion his strategy was correct. A faster escape from lockdown might lead to very awkward questions that are now be asked in America.
Perhaps he could also have been asked what is the average pension that a doctor retires on? Or perhaps whether maybe medics, who are amongst the best paid of their profession in the world, could perhaps forego an increase so that nursing and auxiliary staff could have a bigger slice? Sadly none of these questions were asked because the media generally seems totally obsequious to anyone with a medical degree as though they are far too holy to have their financial motivations questioned.
But I'm not convinced that IHT or taxes generally are really hated (and I've paid IHT myself). People get used to reasonably high taxation (Scandinavia) and a modest wealth tax on substantial wealth (Switzerland), so long as they feel that on the whole the money is being used to maintain a pleasant social environment - no extreme inequality (beggars, food kitchens), low crime, good health care and education available, even a reasonable effort to help in desperate situations overseas. It's partly that if their own situation is OK they feel fairly willing to see others helped, and partly that they think that a balanced, not absurdly unequal, society is safer and pleasanter.
1st dose 2nd dose
16,377 13,344
https://www.england.nhs.uk/coronavirus/wp-content/uploads/sites/52/2021/03/C1165-COVID-19-vaccination-deployment-next-steps-and-plans-for-weeks-of-8-and-15-March.pdf
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/03/biden-texas-mask-order/
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/03/president-joe-biden-slams-governors-for-lifting-mask-mandates-calls-it-neanderthal-thinking.html
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/03/973414135/neanderthal-thinking-biden-says-too-soon-for-states-to-lift-mask-mandates
Oddly, Biden is himself no fan of lockdowns, but his views on them are to some extent irrelevant as it is a state matter unless he invokes emergency powers. So while he can criticise going too far, it is most unlikely he would overrule any governor to impose a lockdown.
Meanwhile financial services equivalence status with the EU looks dead in the water.
"There will be minimal allocations of new vaccine in the first part of the week commencing 8 March, reflecting national supply available to the programme. However, we are expecting substantial increased supply in the volume of vaccine available into week of 15 March and are therefore asking you to start planning now."
My bold
So yes, he did have a choice, he chose to put taxes up on businesses and set us on a path of lower trend growth, something that has been made clear in the OBR's own forecast.
Apparently one is planned for before the end of the month. Lucky America.
In your original message, you suggest that supply will no longer be a problem in the next month or so. The problem is that the next month or so can't be changed, in terms of production.
The supply for the next few months is "baked in" - the length of the supply chain means that all the vaccines to be used in the next month or so already exist and are in the bottling and QA process.
I also see you've been returning to the well of Toby Senior's monitory tome The Rise of the Meritocracy - he saw what was coming long before the 80s. Thatcher was indeed a right old romantic (who knew?), but obviously Tories know all about the influence of birth circumstances; we just don't consider them to be in need of radical corrective action from the state. I like to think that our vision is appealing precisely because it embraces both meritocracy and privilege, the modern and the antique: certainly many of the proudest moments of my life have been the result of things I earned entirely through my own efforts, but many of the most enjoyable were the result of pure, unmerited privilege, and all the more delightful for it...
Even though he has, in fact been speaking to the press and what you initially said was therefore demonstrably incorrect - and indeed, demonstrated to be incorrect?
Once again, you're talking about stuff you don't really understand beyond the headline. Financial services equivalence might be nice to have but ultimately the proposed 33% corporation tax rate for the industry is going to be 10x more damaging than anything to do with LCH having to operate it's clearing business outside of the scope of the ECB.
So maybe our wishful speculations were right. Sunak made his 25% CT announcement to calm the markets, and appear prudent - but HMG is secretly hoping they won't have to do it, or, at least, not as dramatically
If you don’t get that basic fact it does tend to cast doubt on your other prognostications.
Sadly, the supply for the next month or so is "written"
It is worth remembering that supplies of all vaccines haven't been what was hoped. If they were, the UK would have had 100s of millions of doses by now.
Amusing that Aladdin from the 90s is now in the same category as having disclaimers as films from the 40s and 50s now.
In the long run it seems everything will have a disclaimer.
If Germany, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Spain, Italy and France can all survuve at >=25% CT rates I am sure we can.
I suspect the tears are for the dissolving Singapore-on-Thames fantasy.
Is the French flag some sort of anti lockdown thing or have they just got a Dutch one the wrong way round?
https://twitter.com/RadioClydeNews/status/1368164746923540486?s=20
Really substantial numbers of second doses don't become due until about Easter (the first week with a million first doses was w/e Jan 10th) so the NHS can have a decent crack at clearing cohort 10 before doling out the boosters becomes a serious problem. After that we're going to need another substantial increase in supply or else immunisation for the under 40s will proceed at a snail's pace.