It’s one of the possible, but by no means certain, feedbacks from global warming and SST changes in the North Atlantic. Good for the Sahel, but conversely bad for global albedo therefore temperature. No concerted trend observed yet.
The ITCZ is north of mean along the length of Africa but mainly in the East.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
Pumping up your pension is sound personal advice. In fact, I might even give the link to my son as a valuable but relatively inexpensive birthday present. But from a political perspective the creation of an ever-expanding, ever-richer rentier class dependent on an ever-expanding, ever-poorer proletarian workforce cannot possibly last forever.
Can it?
That depends somewhat on whether the capital can be channelled into productive investment in the UK. For now the vast majority of pension fund capital isn't. Government coercion is likely to be unproductive, so it's not an simple problem.
The govt have also dropped the plans for the Brit ISA. I am not sure what this would have achieved anyway.
The UK is not a good environment to invest in in my view. If it was people would already be investing far more than they already are.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
If you made it £10,000 you’d raise £50bn. That’s the whole education budget!
Surrender of 35,000 Zombie Knives in response to the broadened ban.
This is by a knife wholesaler. They will get £10 compensation per qualifying item - that may even be a profitable level, as they sell for about £15-20 each. I was not expecting it to be on that scale.
I was watching one of the (short) videos and his movement seems very strange. Is there some mobility issue with the suit?
All space suits have low mobility. If you see the ISS operations you will see the same.
This is because they are a pressurised bag. Getting even limited movement is a serious design issue.
There are two possible answers to this - 100% hard suits and mechanical counter pressure.
The hard suits are a bit like the diving armour - see the AX5. NASA have been very resistant to these designs.
The mechanical counter pressure (AKA skin suits) have no air *inside* (apart from the helmet). They apply pressure to the body (think insane lycra). Again. NASA, really doesn't like the idea.
The SpaceX suits are the non-bulkiest space suits that offer some mobility, to date.
Interesting that they're at 100% oxygen during EVA, if I heard right ?
Yes - this is standard in EVAs.
This is because at 100% oxygen, you can use a much lower pressure in the suit. Which helps reduce ballooning and increases mobility.
So far, the only suit designs that have been tested to 1 atmosphere of internal pressure and were useable were the hard suit designs.
The utter resistance in NASA to all changes to design - to the point of claiming that NASA astronauts *lied* about testing results for suits - are a fascinating example of group think being promulgated by a very small number of senior people.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
Lawyers would have a field day with that under religious discrimination as all those Orthodox/Hasidic Jews who keep beards would be unfairly penalised.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
Fascinating interview with Sor John Bell just now on R4 re the NHS. Worth listening to - he is brutal about the BMA and makes huge sense about the fact that there isn’t a money problem but a structural problem.
That's a rather odd summary of an interview where he castigated the last government for running down NHS capital budgets leaving it with inadequate equipment and decrepit buildings.
His criticism of the BMA was based on GPs refusing additional work unless they got paid to deliver it. Best of luck with expecting a private system to be doing extra work for free.
Half-formed thought.
When people say pay rises should follow productivity, productivity becomes a function of the morality of staff- it's about how hard and effectively they work.
The other way of thinking about productivity is as a function of capital spending and task selection.
Do healthcare productivity discussions become unproductive because of people talking at cross-purposes?
Productivity increases come from two actual things. Nearly always.
1) People in an organisation waiting to do work. Because of resources/work queues. 2) Doing more work with the same effort. Better tools/techniques.
Very often 2 feeds into 1
Nearly no one has achieved productivity gains by getting the serfs to pick cotton faster, with threats.
That last bit's not quite true. Plantation slavery did just that. Though strictly speaking that was slaves rather than serfs, and they were deliberately worked to death in the sugar plantations.
Even then, it was probably less efficient than free, paid, labour would have been. Of course, the reasons why slave owners want to keep slaves are not purely economic ones.
Cruelty, violence and power over others is an elixir in itself, sadly.
The thing is, that institution toxified the slaveowners as well.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
Lawyers would have a field day with that under religious discrimination as all those Orthodox/Hasidic Jews who keep beards would be unfairly penalised.
Sikhs as well, IIRC?
Come to think of it, at one time the majority of government income was from recusancy fines.
£1,000 fine for each Sunday you don't rock up at the local CoE church and get signed off?
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
We had a computer game on the BBC Model B when I was a kid where you had to run the economy and try to get reelected by setting various tax and benefit levels and public spending and stuff.
One of the kids at school, I think it was almost definitely Charlie Elphicke, realized that you could set unemployment benefit to negative millions of pounds per week. This greatly increased the incentive to find work, and the 100,000 billionaires who continued to sign on were enough to fund lavish public spending and tax cuts for everyone else.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
Lawyers would have a field day with that under religious discrimination as all those Orthodox/Hasidic Jews who keep beards would be unfairly penalised.
Sex discrimination too....Neidle not on point with this one.
Larry Ellison said in the earnings call yesterday that Oracle will soon begin constructing 32,000-node cluster data centers with more than a 1 gigawatt draw. Oracle is currently in the design process of a 1GW+ datacenter powered by three local nuclear reactors. https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1833960831245320317
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
Lawyers would have a field day with that under religious discrimination as all those Orthodox/Hasidic Jews who keep beards would be unfairly penalised.
Sikhs as well, IIRC?
Come to think of it, at one time the majority of government income was from recusancy fines.
£1,000 fine for each Sunday you don't rock up at the local CoE church and get signed off?
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
We had a computer game on the BBC Model B when I was a kid where you had to run the economy and try to get reelected by setting various tax and benefit levels and public spending and stuff.
One of the kids at school, I think it was almost definitely Charlie Elphicke, realized that you could set unemployment benefit to negative millions of pounds per week. This greatly increased the incentive to find work, and the 100,000 billionaires who continued to sign on were enough to fund lavish public spending and tax cuts for everyone else.
Pumping up your pension is sound personal advice. In fact, I might even give the link to my son as a valuable but relatively inexpensive birthday present. But from a political perspective the creation of an ever-expanding, ever-richer rentier class dependent on an ever-expanding, ever-poorer proletarian workforce cannot possibly last forever.
Can it?
That depends somewhat on whether the capital can be channelled into productive investment in the UK. For now the vast majority of pension fund capital isn't. Government coercion is likely to be unproductive, so it's not an simple problem.
The govt have also dropped the plans for the Brit ISA. I am not sure what this would have achieved anyway.
The UK is not a good environment to invest in in my view. If it was people would already be investing far more than they already are.
Why?
The returns on your investment are crap in comparison to other parts of the world.
Look at the FTSE 100 v the S&P 500 for example over the last 15 years. Even allowing for Ex-Rate risk.
I know the FTSE has foreign firms in it as well but it is the UK stock market and the same can apply to the FTSE250, FTSE350 and AIM and look how many now shun the FTSE100 to list overseas due to a variety of reasons. Many don't leave simply due to inertia.
Until the govt do something to tackle that and having a more business friendly environment instead of bashing businesses and simply seeing businesses as doing well as being ripe for "windfall taxes" as well as what they may well do to CGT then this will not change.
I will invest where I think I will get the best return.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
The Tories can’t reform the NHS: anything meaningful they proposed would result in uproar and headlines about moving directly to the US system.
Only Labour has the political cover to actually do what needs to be done: look at how the best health systems in the world (so mostly Europe) do it and try to emulate them.
I doubt that is what they are planning. It all sounds so far like more of what Darzi was doing a decade or so ago with poly clinics and neighbourhood services like diagnostics plus loads more prevention.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
We had a computer game on the BBC Model B when I was a kid where you had to run the economy and try to get reelected by setting various tax and benefit levels and public spending and stuff.
One of the kids at school, I think it was almost definitely Charlie Elphicke, realized that you could set unemployment benefit to negative millions of pounds per week. This greatly increased the incentive to find work, and the 100,000 billionaires who continued to sign on were enough to fund lavish public spending and tax cuts for everyone else.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
We had a computer game on the BBC Model B when I was a kid where you had to run the economy and try to get reelected by setting various tax and benefit levels and public spending and stuff.
One of the kids at school, I think it was almost definitely Charlie Elphicke, realized that you could set unemployment benefit to negative millions of pounds per week. This greatly increased the incentive to find work, and the 100,000 billionaires who continued to sign on were enough to fund lavish public spending and tax cuts for everyone else.
In the original Theme Park you could set the stall games chance of winning a prize to 100% and the prize value to about half of the play fee and make an absolute fortune.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
The Tories can’t reform the NHS: anything meaningful they proposed would result in uproar and headlines about moving directly to the US system.
Only Labour has the political cover to actually do what needs to be done: look at how the best health systems in the world (so mostly Europe) do it and try to emulate them.
I doubt that is what they are planning. It all sounds so far like more of what Darzi was doing a decade or so ago with poly clinics and neighbourhood services like diagnostics plus loads more prevention.
A national Vitality scheme might be interesting....
Larry Ellison said in the earnings call yesterday that Oracle will soon begin constructing 32,000-node cluster data centers with more than a 1 gigawatt draw. Oracle is currently in the design process of a 1GW+ datacenter powered by three local nuclear reactors. https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1833960831245320317
Time to crack on with that SMR program.
Yes, some of the first customers for the SMR nukes could actually be private date centres!
They’re getting bigger and bigger, and a realiable source of power close by is top of the priority list when deciding where to site them.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
In our sainted NHS, hallowed be its name, the employer contribution is 26.7%. Over a quarter of their salary.
Larry Ellison said in the earnings call yesterday that Oracle will soon begin constructing 32,000-node cluster data centers with more than a 1 gigawatt draw. Oracle is currently in the design process of a 1GW+ datacenter powered by three local nuclear reactors. https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1833960831245320317
Time to crack on with that SMR program.
Larry Ellison running nuclear reactors. That will be absolutely 100% fine and have no problems there.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
In our sainted NHS, hallowed be its name, the employer contribution is 26.7%. Over a quarter of their salary.
No wonder the doctors retire or go part time in their forties and fifties. Madness if as described.
I was watching one of the (short) videos and his movement seems very strange. Is there some mobility issue with the suit?
All space suits have low mobility. If you see the ISS operations you will see the same.
This is because they are a pressurised bag. Getting even limited movement is a serious design issue.
There are two possible answers to this - 100% hard suits and mechanical counter pressure.
The hard suits are a bit like the diving armour - see the AX5. NASA have been very resistant to these designs.
The mechanical counter pressure (AKA skin suits) have no air *inside* (apart from the helmet). They apply pressure to the body (think insane lycra). Again. NASA, really doesn't like the idea.
The SpaceX suits are the non-bulkiest space suits that offer some mobility, to date.
The first space walk, by Alexei Leonov, nearly went disastrously wrong when his suit swelled up, making it nearly impossible for him to move. He then got stuck getting back in through the hatch; he had to release some of the pressure to get back in.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
There would be a small number that would grow a beard to show they could afford the tax.
Better would be to start selling baronetcies again: should raise a few million with no cost to the state.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
The Tories can’t reform the NHS: anything meaningful they proposed would result in uproar and headlines about moving directly to the US system.
Only Labour has the political cover to actually do what needs to be done: look at how the best health systems in the world (so mostly Europe) do it and try to emulate them.
That is the problem with the debate in a nutshell
Whenever the NHS is criticised it is always compared with reverence to the US system. It is always presented as the choice is between the US system and the NHS. "At least the NHS is free in the US you have to pay $24,000 to have an ingrowing toenail removed" sort of thing.
We even had the crazy claim from Corbyn that the Tories wanted to sell the NHS off to Trump /The US in the 2019 election
There is never any mention of any other systems or how effective they are.
I was watching one of the (short) videos and his movement seems very strange. Is there some mobility issue with the suit?
All space suits have low mobility. If you see the ISS operations you will see the same.
This is because they are a pressurised bag. Getting even limited movement is a serious design issue.
There are two possible answers to this - 100% hard suits and mechanical counter pressure.
The hard suits are a bit like the diving armour - see the AX5. NASA have been very resistant to these designs.
The mechanical counter pressure (AKA skin suits) have no air *inside* (apart from the helmet). They apply pressure to the body (think insane lycra). Again. NASA, really doesn't like the idea.
The SpaceX suits are the non-bulkiest space suits that offer some mobility, to date.
The first space walk, by Alexei Leonov, nearly went disastrously wrong when his suit swelled up, making it nearly impossible for him to move. He then got stuck getting back in through the hatch; he had to release some of the pressure to get back in.
It was quite a feat.
Yeah, the lack of testing there was pretty mad.
Apparently they hadn't done a full pressure chamber test on the ground.
Pumping up your pension is sound personal advice. In fact, I might even give the link to my son as a valuable but relatively inexpensive birthday present. But from a political perspective the creation of an ever-expanding, ever-richer rentier class dependent on an ever-expanding, ever-poorer proletarian workforce cannot possibly last forever.
Can it?
That depends somewhat on whether the capital can be channelled into productive investment in the UK. For now the vast majority of pension fund capital isn't. Government coercion is likely to be unproductive, so it's not an simple problem.
The govt have also dropped the plans for the Brit ISA. I am not sure what this would have achieved anyway.
The UK is not a good environment to invest in in my view. If it was people would already be investing far more than they already are.
Why?
The returns on your investment are crap in comparison to other parts of the world.
Look at the FTSE 100 v the S&P 500 for example over the last 15 years. Even allowing for Ex-Rate risk.
I know the FTSE has foreign firms in it as well but it is the UK stock market and the same can apply to the FTSE250, FTSE350 and AIM and look how many now shun the FTSE100 to list overseas due to a variety of reasons. Many don't leave simply due to inertia.
Until the govt do something to tackle that and having a more business friendly environment instead of bashing businesses and simply seeing businesses as doing well as being ripe for "windfall taxes" as well as what they may well do to CGT then this will not change.
I will invest where I think I will get the best return.
Fascinating interview with Sor John Bell just now on R4 re the NHS. Worth listening to - he is brutal about the BMA and makes huge sense about the fact that there isn’t a money problem but a structural problem.
That's a rather odd summary of an interview where he castigated the last government for running down NHS capital budgets leaving it with inadequate equipment and decrepit buildings.
His criticism of the BMA was based on GPs refusing additional work unless they got paid to deliver it. Best of luck with expecting a private system to be doing extra work for free.
Half-formed thought.
When people say pay rises should follow productivity, productivity becomes a function of the morality of staff- it's about how hard and effectively they work.
The other way of thinking about productivity is as a function of capital spending and task selection.
Do healthcare productivity discussions become unproductive because of people talking at cross-purposes?
Productivity increases come from two actual things. Nearly always.
1) People in an organisation waiting to do work. Because of resources/work queues. 2) Doing more work with the same effort. Better tools/techniques.
Very often 2 feeds into 1
Nearly no one has achieved productivity gains by getting the serfs to pick cotton faster, with threats.
That last bit's not quite true. Plantation slavery did just that. Though strictly speaking that was slaves rather than serfs, and they were deliberately worked to death in the sugar plantations.
Even then, it was probably less efficient than free, paid, labour would have been. Of course, the reasons why slave owners want to keep slaves are not purely economic ones.
That's to assume there was a plentiful supply of free, paid labour, of course. It seems unlikely that could have been the case in early colonial sugar plantations (where the system developed). The earliest large scale sugar production involving slavery was reportedly in the 13th century Mediterranean.
https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-268 ...The production of sugar was first wed to slavery and large-scale agricultural enterprise in the Mediterranean in the 13th century and then this nascent plantation complex moved to the Atlantic Islands off the coast of Africa, closer to an emerging African labor supply for a labor-intensive and brutal crop.4 Sugar agriculture migrated again to northeastern Brazil in the second half of the 16th century.5 The Brazilians began by trying to use indigenous Brazilian labor but disease among that group and overwork soon destroyed the effort. Although Brazilian planters continued to use Natives as labor (even after such practice was banned in 1570), they turned to the transatlantic African slave trade to supply sugar plantation labor forces that were perpetually in need of replenishing.6 The sugar plantations in early Brazil were different than the archetype of the plantation that would emerge in the Caribbean as sugar agriculture spread there in the 17th century. The Brazilian model had individual cane farmers and separate mill owners for processing. The Caribbean model consolidated this division into larger landholdings in which the agricultural production of sugar and its processing at the mill was all part of one plantation, usually owned by a single plantation owner. By the 18th century, the largest Caribbean plantations had absentee owners. They entrusted estate management to local white managers and overseers and, for lower managers such as the drivers or head sugar boilers, even to the enslaved Africans...
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
There would be a small number that would grow a beard to show they could afford the tax.
Better would be to start selling baronetcies again: should raise a few million with no cost to the state.
Think big. How many billionaires would part with an actual billion to be an actual Duke? (citizenship included)
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
We had a computer game on the BBC Model B when I was a kid where you had to run the economy and try to get reelected by setting various tax and benefit levels and public spending and stuff.
One of the kids at school, I think it was almost definitely Charlie Elphicke, realized that you could set unemployment benefit to negative millions of pounds per week. This greatly increased the incentive to find work, and the 100,000 billionaires who continued to sign on were enough to fund lavish public spending and tax cuts for everyone else.
“Great Britian Limited”, it was called.
That's the one. It was weirdly cynical, the voters had really short memories so you could crash the economy pretty hard in the first couple of years and you'd still get reelected as long as you could engineer a short-term boom before the election.
A whole generation of nerdy political kids must have grown up on that game. I wonder if it explains the Truss budget.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
I think this is overbaked, actually. A manufacturer could and easily would ditch a linked bottle cap if it needed to access 60 million + wealthy consumers.
It already needs to print different labels and languages, and create different products.
Pumping up your pension is sound personal advice. In fact, I might even give the link to my son as a valuable but relatively inexpensive birthday present. But from a political perspective the creation of an ever-expanding, ever-richer rentier class dependent on an ever-expanding, ever-poorer proletarian workforce cannot possibly last forever.
Can it?
That depends somewhat on whether the capital can be channelled into productive investment in the UK. For now the vast majority of pension fund capital isn't. Government coercion is likely to be unproductive, so it's not an simple problem.
The govt have also dropped the plans for the Brit ISA. I am not sure what this would have achieved anyway.
The UK is not a good environment to invest in in my view. If it was people would already be investing far more than they already are.
I am happy for my Pensions and ISA to have minimal exposure to the UK and be more US and Global based.
Nothing I have heard from Kamala Harris so far concerns me a great deal about the USA if she wins. She seems to be to the right of Biden
Surely it is because UK investments are ordinarily less attractive than others, that the government should incentivise investment here?
If they do that how does that make the UK investments more attractive as investments ? It is just whatever the UK govt offering the investor that makes them attractive be it tax relief or whatever else they come up with.
Surely they need to make the climate more business friendly ?
That too, but if the government incentivises UK investment, say via the tax system, then by definition that will make UK investments more attractive.
How much can they possibly incentivise it over a bog-standard investment in an S&P500 tracker?
And even if companies can raise more money from retail or institutional investors through a more generous tax regime how does the environment for business operation and growth in the UK improve ? The govt will need to do far more than just look to bung a few extra quid at businesses from investors.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
Products are far less uniform than this implies. If you pick a random food product that's sold internationally and compare the packaging in different countries, you will often find quite a lot of variation.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
I think this is overbaked, actually. A manufacturer could and easily would ditch a linked bottle cap if it needed to access 60 million + wealthy consumers.
It already needs to print different labels and languages, and create different products.
So meh, really.
Lots of labels have various different languages on anyway.
Larry Ellison said in the earnings call yesterday that Oracle will soon begin constructing 32,000-node cluster data centers with more than a 1 gigawatt draw. Oracle is currently in the design process of a 1GW+ datacenter powered by three local nuclear reactors. https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1833960831245320317
Time to crack on with that SMR program.
Larry Ellison running nuclear reactors. That will be absolutely 100% fine and have no problems there.
Elon Musk already has a rocket delivery system that can reach any point on Earth, armoured personnel carriers disguised as Cybertrucks, flamethrowers, and is working on autonomous robots and brain control.
You may recall my rant about how the nation-state survives in an era of mass-travel, cross-border loyalties, seamless cross-border money and information transfer, and individuals with the power of armies. Maybe this is the point in history where the sovereign nation-state goes the same way as tribes.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
In our sainted NHS, hallowed be its name, the employer contribution is 26.7%. Over a quarter of their salary.
No wonder the doctors retire or go part time in their forties and fifties. Madness if as described.
My wife has asked me to look at her pension as she is looking at retire and return next year and I have been looking through it. The 26.7% was in her documents. As was the actuarial value of her final salary 1995 pension
People forget when Health workers drone on about their wage that their overall package is not bad at all
They have yearly increments til they reach the top of the band, the high level of employer contribution and the extra holidays they get all have a value too.
Unfortunately the media, when covering the issue, fails to raise this side of it.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
Employees talk about it - pensions and employer contributions are absolutely talked about when people are weighing up other jobs.
I myself turned down a private research role a couple of months ago because the salary offered, while notionally substantially more, wasn't enough to make up for the foregone pension contributions. I'm still looking at roles, but - in private sector - am only interested in those paying a chunk more than my current earnings as the employer pension contributions are much lower.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
Products are far less uniform than this implies. If you pick a random food product that's sold internationally and compare the packaging in different countries, you will often find quite a lot of variation.
Yet here we are with the same bottle caps you get on the continent.
You will find the product is the same, the label may differ but common labels also happen.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
In our sainted NHS, hallowed be its name, the employer contribution is 26.7%. Over a quarter of their salary.
No wonder the doctors retire or go part time in their forties and fifties. Madness if as described.
My wife has asked me to look at her pension as she is looking at retire and return next year and I have been looking through it. The 26.7% was in her documents. As was the actuarial value of her final salary 1995 pension
People forget when Health workers drone on about their wage that their overall package is not bad at all
They have yearly increments til they reach the top of the band, the high level of employer contribution and the extra holidays they get all have a value too.
Unfortunately the media, when covering the issue, fails to raise this side of it.
To be fair if you are a 30 year old doctor living in a flatshare with the opportunity to earn 2x in Canada or Australia it is not particularly relevant.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
The Tories can’t reform the NHS: anything meaningful they proposed would result in uproar and headlines about moving directly to the US system.
Only Labour has the political cover to actually do what needs to be done: look at how the best health systems in the world (so mostly Europe) do it and try to emulate them.
That is the problem with the debate in a nutshell
Whenever the NHS is criticised it is always compared with reverence to the US system. It is always presented as the choice is between the US system and the NHS. "At least the NHS is free in the US you have to pay $24,000 to have an ingrowing toenail removed" sort of thing.
We even had the crazy claim from Corbyn that the Tories wanted to sell the NHS off to Trump /The US in the 2019 election
There is never any mention of any other systems or how effective they are.
Pre-election Labour reportedly spent a fair amount of time looking at healthcare in places like Taiwan (which appears to do pretty well). Whether they learned anything at all from that remains an open question.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
Maybe it's different in financial services where most employees can math, but my employer puts in 10% minimum.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
This being logical, and obvious, namely that taxing something means you get less of it, the obvious question is why do we tax work and employment so much?
Surely the best taxes are either on things we would like less of (e.g. smoking) or things where supply is so inelastic that the tax doesn't make any difference (e.g. land, people).
OK, transitioning to this point would take some doing, but in theory, ditch income tax, all kinds of NI etc and replace with a poll tax and land tax (based on unimproved values, otherwise there's a massive disincentive to develop).
Like magic, you've replaced the current terrible economic incentives with good ones.
Yes, I know in the real world there are some drawbacks, and you couldn't implement anything quite this crude, but sometimes it is worth taking a step back, looking at the preverse incentives all over our system and seeing if there could be a more sane alternative.
(In all seriousness - exchanging a much lower rate of income tax for a higher rate of VAT in a revenue neutral way would almost certainly boost growth significantly).
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
We had a computer game on the BBC Model B when I was a kid where you had to run the economy and try to get reelected by setting various tax and benefit levels and public spending and stuff.
One of the kids at school, I think it was almost definitely Charlie Elphicke, realized that you could set unemployment benefit to negative millions of pounds per week. This greatly increased the incentive to find work, and the 100,000 billionaires who continued to sign on were enough to fund lavish public spending and tax cuts for everyone else.
“Great Britian Limited”, it was called.
That's the one. It was weirdly cynical, the voters had really short memories so you could crash the economy pretty hard in the first couple of years and you'd still get reelected as long as you could engineer a short-term boom before the election.
A whole generation of nerdy political kids must have grown up on that game. I wonder if it explains the Truss budget.
Possibly based on the real life lessons from the 60s and 70s ?
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
Maybe it's different in financial services where most employees can math, but my employer puts in 10% minimum.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
I think this is overbaked, actually. A manufacturer could and easily would ditch a linked bottle cap if it needed to access 60 million + wealthy consumers.
It already needs to print different labels and languages, and create different products.
So meh, really.
Lots of labels have various different languages on anyway.
They commonise where they can.
I don't think manufacturers, most of whom are tooled in the UK anyway, would have a problem in the UK disconnecting a bottle cap.
Pumping up your pension is sound personal advice. In fact, I might even give the link to my son as a valuable but relatively inexpensive birthday present. But from a political perspective the creation of an ever-expanding, ever-richer rentier class dependent on an ever-expanding, ever-poorer proletarian workforce cannot possibly last forever.
Can it?
That depends somewhat on whether the capital can be channelled into productive investment in the UK. For now the vast majority of pension fund capital isn't. Government coercion is likely to be unproductive, so it's not an simple problem.
The govt have also dropped the plans for the Brit ISA. I am not sure what this would have achieved anyway.
The UK is not a good environment to invest in in my view. If it was people would already be investing far more than they already are.
Why?
The returns on your investment are crap in comparison to other parts of the world.
Look at the FTSE 100 v the S&P 500 for example over the last 15 years. Even allowing for Ex-Rate risk.
I know the FTSE has foreign firms in it as well but it is the UK stock market and the same can apply to the FTSE250, FTSE350 and AIM and look how many now shun the FTSE100 to list overseas due to a variety of reasons. Many don't leave simply due to inertia.
Until the govt do something to tackle that and having a more business friendly environment instead of bashing businesses and simply seeing businesses as doing well as being ripe for "windfall taxes" as well as what they may well do to CGT then this will not change.
I will invest where I think I will get the best return.
Yeah, but why is the UK so poor?
Only good answers please, not political ones.
I think politics plays a part of it but so do other things like there's a hostility to business and high earners here, profit seems to be a dirty word, the tendency to go for windfall taxes on businesses who do well as well as hostility to some industries like oil and gas, the cost of energy for business, over regulation, local government hostility to business (Malmesbury told me a shocking story about a manufacturer who wanted to set up in the UK but the local council approached was hostile so they went to Eastern Europe), chronic underinvestment, people blame Brexit but this was all happening prior to Brexit.
To be honest these are systemic and taking money off investors to put into start ups wont change the environment. I only care about investing my money where I think I will get the best return and that certainly is not UK PLC at the moment.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
Maybe it's different in financial services where most employees can math, but my employer puts in 10% minimum.
As an employer - why put in more than the statutory minimum, unless your employee wants you to? The total cost of their renumeration is the same to you either way, you don't care if they spend it partying now, or stuff it all in a pension.
I'd do it for any employees that asked, but as a default - it's just paternalistic madness.
(I've virtually no pension, I've put my cash into real assets and building a business - I can get a much better rate of return that way than via a pension scheme).
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
In our sainted NHS, hallowed be its name, the employer contribution is 26.7%. Over a quarter of their salary.
No wonder the doctors retire or go part time in their forties and fifties. Madness if as described.
My wife has asked me to look at her pension as she is looking at retire and return next year and I have been looking through it. The 26.7% was in her documents. As was the actuarial value of her final salary 1995 pension
People forget when Health workers drone on about their wage that their overall package is not bad at all
They have yearly increments til they reach the top of the band, the high level of employer contribution and the extra holidays they get all have a value too.
Unfortunately the media, when covering the issue, fails to raise this side of it.
To be fair if you are a 30 year old doctor living in a flatshare with the opportunity to earn 2x in Canada or Australia it is not particularly relevant.
Indeed as people look short term.
So give them more salary in exchange for reduced pension benefits and reduced holiday benefits if it is not that relevant, eh ?
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
Lawyers would have a field day with that under religious discrimination as all those Orthodox/Hasidic Jews who keep beards would be unfairly penalised.
Sikhs as well, IIRC?
Come to think of it, at one time the majority of government income was from recusancy fines.
£1,000 fine for each Sunday you don't rock up at the local CoE church and get signed off?
And Muslims, shaving the beard is haram. You don't see clean shaven Taliban.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
Maybe it's different in financial services where most employees can math, but my employer puts in 10% minimum.
Yeah, same here.
Must be, I am in manufacturing. My employer puts in 9% if I put in 6%, if I put in 3% they put in 6%.
Previous place I was at used to offer this too but for new starters it is NEST
Private sector as a whole is far lower than public sector for Employer contribution.
Pumping up your pension is sound personal advice. In fact, I might even give the link to my son as a valuable but relatively inexpensive birthday present. But from a political perspective the creation of an ever-expanding, ever-richer rentier class dependent on an ever-expanding, ever-poorer proletarian workforce cannot possibly last forever.
Can it?
That depends somewhat on whether the capital can be channelled into productive investment in the UK. For now the vast majority of pension fund capital isn't. Government coercion is likely to be unproductive, so it's not an simple problem.
The govt have also dropped the plans for the Brit ISA. I am not sure what this would have achieved anyway.
The UK is not a good environment to invest in in my view. If it was people would already be investing far more than they already are.
Why?
The returns on your investment are crap in comparison to other parts of the world.
Look at the FTSE 100 v the S&P 500 for example over the last 15 years. Even allowing for Ex-Rate risk.
I know the FTSE has foreign firms in it as well but it is the UK stock market and the same can apply to the FTSE250, FTSE350 and AIM and look how many now shun the FTSE100 to list overseas due to a variety of reasons. Many don't leave simply due to inertia.
Until the govt do something to tackle that and having a more business friendly environment instead of bashing businesses and simply seeing businesses as doing well as being ripe for "windfall taxes" as well as what they may well do to CGT then this will not change.
I will invest where I think I will get the best return.
Yeah, but why is the UK so poor?
Only good answers please, not political ones.
I think politics plays a part of it but so do other things like there's a hostility to business and high earners here, profit seems to be a dirty word, the tendency to go for windfall taxes on businesses who do well as well as hostility to some industries like oil and gas, the cost of energy for business, over regulation, local government hostility to business (Malmesbury told me a shocking story about a manufacturer who wanted to set up in the UK but the local council approached was hostile so they went to Eastern Europe), chronic underinvestment, people blame Brexit but this was all happening prior to Brexit.
To be honest these are systemic and taking money off investors to put into start ups wont change the environment. I only care about investing my money where I think I will get the best return and that certainly is not UK PLC at the moment.
Thanks. I think planning has much to answer for as well.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
I think this is overbaked, actually. A manufacturer could and easily would ditch a linked bottle cap if it needed to access 60 million + wealthy consumers.
It already needs to print different labels and languages, and create different products.
So meh, really.
Lots of labels have various different languages on anyway.
They commonise where they can.
I don't think manufacturers, most of whom are tooled in the UK anyway, would have a problem in the UK disconnecting a bottle cap.
Minor point about knives: In some US prisons, prisoners make their own "shanks", which can be quite deadly -- and are easy to conceal. They don't look scary to most people, though.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
Maybe it's different in financial services where most employees can math, but my employer puts in 10% minimum.
As an employer - why put in more than the statutory minimum, unless your employee wants you to? The total cost of their renumeration is the same to you either way, you don't care if they spend it partying now, or stuff it all in a pension.
I'd do it for any employees that asked, but as a default - it's just paternalistic madness.
(I've virtually no pension, I've put my cash into real assets and building a business - I can get a much better rate of return that way than via a pension scheme).
I think the Friedman view that the only social value of a business is to maximise profits is falling out of fashion among board members a little compared to the start of the century.
Larry Ellison said in the earnings call yesterday that Oracle will soon begin constructing 32,000-node cluster data centers with more than a 1 gigawatt draw. Oracle is currently in the design process of a 1GW+ datacenter powered by three local nuclear reactors. https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1833960831245320317
Time to crack on with that SMR program.
Larry Ellison running nuclear reactors. That will be absolutely 100% fine and have no problems there.
Elon Musk already has a rocket delivery system that can reach any point on Earth, armoured personnel carriers disguised as Cybertrucks, flamethrowers, and is working on autonomous robots and brain control.
You may recall my rant about how the nation-state survives in an era of mass-travel, cross-border loyalties, seamless cross-border money and information transfer, and individuals with the power of armies. Maybe this is the point in history where the sovereign nation-state goes the same way as tribes.
There's a line in early William Gibson about African nations so backward they still took the notion of nationhood seriously. Musk and (president) Trump combined will have more power than Big Brother or the Man Who Fell To Earth or any two individuals in history.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
I think this is overbaked, actually. A manufacturer could and easily would ditch a linked bottle cap if it needed to access 60 million + wealthy consumers.
It already needs to print different labels and languages, and create different products.
So meh, really.
Lots of labels have various different languages on anyway.
They commonise where they can.
I don't think manufacturers, most of whom are tooled in the UK anyway, would have a problem in the UK disconnecting a bottle cap.
Presumably they have decided that, even if it's technically possible, it's more profitable not to bother.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
We had a computer game on the BBC Model B when I was a kid where you had to run the economy and try to get reelected by setting various tax and benefit levels and public spending and stuff.
One of the kids at school, I think it was almost definitely Charlie Elphicke, realized that you could set unemployment benefit to negative millions of pounds per week. This greatly increased the incentive to find work, and the 100,000 billionaires who continued to sign on were enough to fund lavish public spending and tax cuts for everyone else.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
Which is why we need to have a seat at the table where these rules are written.
Annoying things the EU does is one of the best reasons for joining it.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
Lawyers would have a field day with that under religious discrimination as all those Orthodox/Hasidic Jews who keep beards would be unfairly penalised.
Sikhs as well, IIRC?
Come to think of it, at one time the majority of government income was from recusancy fines.
£1,000 fine for each Sunday you don't rock up at the local CoE church and get signed off?
And Muslims, shaving the beard is haram. You don't see clean shaven Taliban.
I have never had a beard*, I like to behave as a pious Muslim in other ways.
*Except for three weeks in Australia when I tried to shave it felt like I was using barbed wire.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
This being logical, and obvious, namely that taxing something means you get less of it, the obvious question is why do we tax work and employment so much?
Surely the best taxes are either on things we would like less of (e.g. smoking) or things where supply is so inelastic that the tax doesn't make any difference (e.g. land, people).
OK, transitioning to this point would take some doing, but in theory, ditch income tax, all kinds of NI etc and replace with a poll tax and land tax (based on unimproved values, otherwise there's a massive disincentive to develop).
Like magic, you've replaced the current terrible economic incentives with good ones.
Yes, I know in the real world there are some drawbacks, and you couldn't implement anything quite this crude, but sometimes it is worth taking a step back, looking at the preverse incentives all over our system and seeing if there could be a more sane alternative.
(In all seriousness - exchanging a much lower rate of income tax for a higher rate of VAT in a revenue neutral way would almost certainly boost growth significantly).
Pumping up your pension is sound personal advice. In fact, I might even give the link to my son as a valuable but relatively inexpensive birthday present. But from a political perspective the creation of an ever-expanding, ever-richer rentier class dependent on an ever-expanding, ever-poorer proletarian workforce cannot possibly last forever.
Can it?
That depends somewhat on whether the capital can be channelled into productive investment in the UK. For now the vast majority of pension fund capital isn't. Government coercion is likely to be unproductive, so it's not an simple problem.
The govt have also dropped the plans for the Brit ISA. I am not sure what this would have achieved anyway.
The UK is not a good environment to invest in in my view. If it was people would already be investing far more than they already are.
Why?
The returns on your investment are crap in comparison to other parts of the world.
Look at the FTSE 100 v the S&P 500 for example over the last 15 years. Even allowing for Ex-Rate risk.
I know the FTSE has foreign firms in it as well but it is the UK stock market and the same can apply to the FTSE250, FTSE350 and AIM and look how many now shun the FTSE100 to list overseas due to a variety of reasons. Many don't leave simply due to inertia.
Until the govt do something to tackle that and having a more business friendly environment instead of bashing businesses and simply seeing businesses as doing well as being ripe for "windfall taxes" as well as what they may well do to CGT then this will not change.
I will invest where I think I will get the best return.
Yeah, but why is the UK so poor?
Only good answers please, not political ones.
I think politics plays a part of it but so do other things like there's a hostility to business and high earners here, profit seems to be a dirty word, the tendency to go for windfall taxes on businesses who do well as well as hostility to some industries like oil and gas, the cost of energy for business, over regulation, local government hostility to business (Malmesbury told me a shocking story about a manufacturer who wanted to set up in the UK but the local council approached was hostile so they went to Eastern Europe), chronic underinvestment, people blame Brexit but this was all happening prior to Brexit.
To be honest these are systemic and taking money off investors to put into start ups wont change the environment. I only care about investing my money where I think I will get the best return and that certainly is not UK PLC at the moment.
Thanks. I think planning has much to answer for as well.
We need new businesses as well as new houses.
Who has made the profits from Silicon Fen?
Some has gone to the inventors, some to the investors. Not much goes to the active boffins; it's tremendous fun, but you struggle to get rich that way.
A lot of it (with less risk and hassle) has gone to the owners of property on the Cambridge area, who can charge people a fortune to live nearby.
Until that money pipeline gets blocked up, there's not much point trying to invest. Whatever their other flaws, I think the new government sort of gets that in a way its predecessor didn't.
Larry Ellison said in the earnings call yesterday that Oracle will soon begin constructing 32,000-node cluster data centers with more than a 1 gigawatt draw. Oracle is currently in the design process of a 1GW+ datacenter powered by three local nuclear reactors. https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1833960831245320317
Time to crack on with that SMR program.
Larry Ellison running nuclear reactors. That will be absolutely 100% fine and have no problems there.
Elon Musk already has a rocket delivery system that can reach any point on Earth, armoured personnel carriers disguised as Cybertrucks, flamethrowers, and is working on autonomous robots and brain control.
You may recall my rant about how the nation-state survives in an era of mass-travel, cross-border loyalties, seamless cross-border money and information transfer, and individuals with the power of armies. Maybe this is the point in history where the sovereign nation-state goes the same way as tribes.
The problem is that many nation states have abdicated doing things. In favour of pushing large sums of money at their favourite contractors.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
We had a computer game on the BBC Model B when I was a kid where you had to run the economy and try to get reelected by setting various tax and benefit levels and public spending and stuff.
One of the kids at school, I think it was almost definitely Charlie Elphicke, realized that you could set unemployment benefit to negative millions of pounds per week. This greatly increased the incentive to find work, and the 100,000 billionaires who continued to sign on were enough to fund lavish public spending and tax cuts for everyone else.
“Great Britian Limited”, it was called.
That's the one. It was weirdly cynical, the voters had really short memories so you could crash the economy pretty hard in the first couple of years and you'd still get reelected as long as you could engineer a short-term boom before the election.
A whole generation of nerdy political kids must have grown up on that game. I wonder if it explains the Truss budget.
Yes, that was exactly how you’d play it. Serious tax rises and spending cuts in the first year, then a bit of a move back in Years 2 and 3, before massive generosity in Year 4 ahead of the election.
Minor point about knives: In some US prisons, prisoners make their own "shanks", which can be quite deadly -- and are easy to conceal. They don't look scary to most people, though.
Funny you say that, I was watching Larry Lawton's youtube channel about exactly this.
They also make their own hooch in plastic bags !!!
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
Which is why we need to have a seat at the table where these rules are written.
Annoying things the EU does is one of the best reasons for joining it.
Of course, now we're out of the EU we're free to tackle these issues.
If the current government fails to pass a Bottle Tops (Mandatory Separation Of) bill then we can simply vote in another one at the next election that commits to this in its manifesto and so be free of the tyranny of EU regulation* in practice as well as in theory, if not of an increasing tangle of red tape our own regulations.
*is it? What's the thinking - I think I saw something about making recycling easier on some packaging, is it because the caps are small enough by themselves to be harder for the sorting machines/people to handle and pick out?
Pumping up your pension is sound personal advice. In fact, I might even give the link to my son as a valuable but relatively inexpensive birthday present. But from a political perspective the creation of an ever-expanding, ever-richer rentier class dependent on an ever-expanding, ever-poorer proletarian workforce cannot possibly last forever.
Can it?
That depends somewhat on whether the capital can be channelled into productive investment in the UK. For now the vast majority of pension fund capital isn't. Government coercion is likely to be unproductive, so it's not an simple problem.
The govt have also dropped the plans for the Brit ISA. I am not sure what this would have achieved anyway.
The UK is not a good environment to invest in in my view. If it was people would already be investing far more than they already are.
Why?
The returns on your investment are crap in comparison to other parts of the world.
Look at the FTSE 100 v the S&P 500 for example over the last 15 years. Even allowing for Ex-Rate risk.
I know the FTSE has foreign firms in it as well but it is the UK stock market and the same can apply to the FTSE250, FTSE350 and AIM and look how many now shun the FTSE100 to list overseas due to a variety of reasons. Many don't leave simply due to inertia.
Until the govt do something to tackle that and having a more business friendly environment instead of bashing businesses and simply seeing businesses as doing well as being ripe for "windfall taxes" as well as what they may well do to CGT then this will not change.
I will invest where I think I will get the best return.
Yeah, but why is the UK so poor?
Only good answers please, not political ones.
I think politics plays a part of it but so do other things like there's a hostility to business and high earners here, profit seems to be a dirty word, the tendency to go for windfall taxes on businesses who do well as well as hostility to some industries like oil and gas, the cost of energy for business, over regulation, local government hostility to business (Malmesbury told me a shocking story about a manufacturer who wanted to set up in the UK but the local council approached was hostile so they went to Eastern Europe), chronic underinvestment, people blame Brexit but this was all happening prior to Brexit.
To be honest these are systemic and taking money off investors to put into start ups wont change the environment. I only care about investing my money where I think I will get the best return and that certainly is not UK PLC at the moment.
Far East actually. The whole story was a fascinating example of how it works.
Larry Ellison said in the earnings call yesterday that Oracle will soon begin constructing 32,000-node cluster data centers with more than a 1 gigawatt draw. Oracle is currently in the design process of a 1GW+ datacenter powered by three local nuclear reactors. https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1833960831245320317
Time to crack on with that SMR program.
Larry Ellison running nuclear reactors. That will be absolutely 100% fine and have no problems there.
Elon Musk already has a rocket delivery system that can reach any point on Earth, armoured personnel carriers disguised as Cybertrucks, flamethrowers, and is working on autonomous robots and brain control.
You may recall my rant about how the nation-state survives in an era of mass-travel, cross-border loyalties, seamless cross-border money and information transfer, and individuals with the power of armies. Maybe this is the point in history where the sovereign nation-state goes the same way as tribes.
There's a line in early William Gibson about African nations so backward they still took the notion of nationhood seriously. Musk and (president) Trump combined will have more power than Big Brother or the Man Who Fell To Earth or any two individuals in history.
Snow Crash has the burbclaves - small ideologically-linked gated communities run as franchises of a State-like corp or ideology and spread out over the US. The sequel had something similar over the rest of the world.
On topic (if you don't mind): I think optimism will increase in US politics, now that the Supreme Court has restored our civil rights laws. We are already seeing substantial changes in college admissions in the Ivy League, and changes in hiring at large firms.
(There are some creepy historical parallels in the ways many universities discriminated against Jews, to the way they have been, more recently, discriminating against Asians.)
Pumping up your pension is sound personal advice. In fact, I might even give the link to my son as a valuable but relatively inexpensive birthday present. But from a political perspective the creation of an ever-expanding, ever-richer rentier class dependent on an ever-expanding, ever-poorer proletarian workforce cannot possibly last forever.
Can it?
That depends somewhat on whether the capital can be channelled into productive investment in the UK. For now the vast majority of pension fund capital isn't. Government coercion is likely to be unproductive, so it's not an simple problem.
The govt have also dropped the plans for the Brit ISA. I am not sure what this would have achieved anyway.
The UK is not a good environment to invest in in my view. If it was people would already be investing far more than they already are.
Why?
The returns on your investment are crap in comparison to other parts of the world.
Look at the FTSE 100 v the S&P 500 for example over the last 15 years. Even allowing for Ex-Rate risk.
I know the FTSE has foreign firms in it as well but it is the UK stock market and the same can apply to the FTSE250, FTSE350 and AIM and look how many now shun the FTSE100 to list overseas due to a variety of reasons. Many don't leave simply due to inertia.
Until the govt do something to tackle that and having a more business friendly environment instead of bashing businesses and simply seeing businesses as doing well as being ripe for "windfall taxes" as well as what they may well do to CGT then this will not change.
I will invest where I think I will get the best return.
Yeah, but why is the UK so poor?
Only good answers please, not political ones.
I think a part of the answer is that the UK pension industry used to be much more interested in dividends than it was in growth. They were also resistant to firms building up capital rather than distributing "surplus" capital to shareholders. This made it much more difficult to grow businesses here than in many other countries where investors were much more interested in capital returns than dividends. They also looked to "cash out" any capital gain that had accrued by selling out the business to a new, often foreign, buyer rather than sitting in for the ride.
Why this happened is much more complex but I suspect that it was a response to the tax structure that was in place at the relevant time which gave the pension funds an extra bonus on each dividend cheque. Brown was right to stop that but went rather too far in the opposite direction which resulted in a long term withdrawal of investment funds from the UK stock market which now only forms a relatively small part of Pension fund investments.
To recreate an entrepreneurial environment we need to encourage firms to retain capital, to grow their value and to invest for the longer term than the next quarter. Reeves, in fairness, mentioned the problem in her speeches before the election but was somewhat lighter on the solutions. And she now seems to have been captured by Mandarins in the Treasury who never saw a profit or a gain anywhere without wanting their share of it right now.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
Which is why we need to have a seat at the table where these rules are written.
Annoying things the EU does is one of the best reasons for joining it.
Most likely our politicians would have lobbied for the measure, free of domestic criticism, and then voted against knowing it would pass, then come home and told us they tried their hardest, but nothing could be done.
The lack of interest in what happens in Brussels wasn't unique to Britain - I suspect this game happens continent-wide.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
There would be a small number that would grow a beard to show they could afford the tax.
Better would be to start selling baronetcies again: should raise a few million with no cost to the state.
Think big. How many billionaires would part with an actual billion to be an actual Duke? (citizenship included)
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
Lawyers would have a field day with that under religious discrimination as all those Orthodox/Hasidic Jews who keep beards would be unfairly penalised.
Sikhs as well, IIRC?
Come to think of it, at one time the majority of government income was from recusancy fines.
£1,000 fine for each Sunday you don't rock up at the local CoE church and get signed off?
And Muslims, shaving the beard is haram. You don't see clean shaven Taliban.
We used to have a religious exemption for beards in the sixth-form, but after Covid we got rid of it by getting rid of the ban on facial hair entirely.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
Which is why we need to have a seat at the table where these rules are written.
Annoying things the EU does is one of the best reasons for joining it.
Of course, now we're out of the EU we're free to tackle these issues.
If the current government fails to pass a Bottle Tops (Mandatory Separation Of) bill then we can simply vote in another one at the next election that commits to this in its manifesto and so be free of the tyranny of EU regulation* in practice as well as in theory, if not of an increasing tangle of red tape our own regulations.
*is it? What's the thinking - I think I saw something about making recycling easier on some packaging, is it because the caps are small enough by themselves to be harder for the sorting machines/people to handle and pick out?
Also generally reduction of litter. Some of us remember (you may not!) the old ringpull openings on drinks cans which came completely off the tin as designed, and were a plague on wildlife and coin op machines, and those PBers who couldn't give a damn would be horrified at their effect on motor vehicle tyres.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
Well a lot of that increase is, since 2016, civil servants employed to do what the EU civil servants used to do for us.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
In our sainted NHS, hallowed be its name, the employer contribution is 26.7%. Over a quarter of their salary.
No wonder the doctors retire or go part time in their forties and fifties. Madness if as described.
My wife has asked me to look at her pension as she is looking at retire and return next year and I have been looking through it. The 26.7% was in her documents. As was the actuarial value of her final salary 1995 pension
People forget when Health workers drone on about their wage that their overall package is not bad at all
They have yearly increments til they reach the top of the band, the high level of employer contribution and the extra holidays they get all have a value too.
Unfortunately the media, when covering the issue, fails to raise this side of it.
To be fair if you are a 30 year old doctor living in a flatshare with the opportunity to earn 2x in Canada or Australia it is not particularly relevant.
Indeed as people look short term.
So give them more salary in exchange for reduced pension benefits and reduced holiday benefits if it is not that relevant, eh ?
Is the NHS pension funded, or is the employer contribution an accounting fiction related to a promise to pay a pension out of future tax revenues?
It's much cheaper to "pay" a pension contribution that doesn't actually need to be paid for a few decades, than a higher salary now.
It’s one of the possible, but by no means certain, feedbacks from global warming and SST changes in the North Atlantic. Good for the Sahel, but conversely bad for global albedo therefore temperature. No concerted trend observed yet.
The ITCZ is north of mean along the length of Africa but mainly in the East.
I had heard - and I cannot remember whether from 'bloke in a pub told me' or 'verifiable surveys done by reputable and independent bodies' that the Sahel is, in general, regreening as higher levels of CO2 make it more favourable for plants in marginal environments.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
Lawyers would have a field day with that under religious discrimination as all those Orthodox/Hasidic Jews who keep beards would be unfairly penalised.
Pumping up your pension is sound personal advice. In fact, I might even give the link to my son as a valuable but relatively inexpensive birthday present. But from a political perspective the creation of an ever-expanding, ever-richer rentier class dependent on an ever-expanding, ever-poorer proletarian workforce cannot possibly last forever.
Can it?
That depends somewhat on whether the capital can be channelled into productive investment in the UK. For now the vast majority of pension fund capital isn't. Government coercion is likely to be unproductive, so it's not an simple problem.
The govt have also dropped the plans for the Brit ISA. I am not sure what this would have achieved anyway.
The UK is not a good environment to invest in in my view. If it was people would already be investing far more than they already are.
Why?
The returns on your investment are crap in comparison to other parts of the world.
Look at the FTSE 100 v the S&P 500 for example over the last 15 years. Even allowing for Ex-Rate risk.
I know the FTSE has foreign firms in it as well but it is the UK stock market and the same can apply to the FTSE250, FTSE350 and AIM and look how many now shun the FTSE100 to list overseas due to a variety of reasons. Many don't leave simply due to inertia.
Until the govt do something to tackle that and having a more business friendly environment instead of bashing businesses and simply seeing businesses as doing well as being ripe for "windfall taxes" as well as what they may well do to CGT then this will not change.
I will invest where I think I will get the best return.
Yeah, but why is the UK so poor?
Only good answers please, not political ones.
I think politics plays a part of it but so do other things like there's a hostility to business and high earners here, profit seems to be a dirty word, the tendency to go for windfall taxes on businesses who do well as well as hostility to some industries like oil and gas, the cost of energy for business, over regulation, local government hostility to business (Malmesbury told me a shocking story about a manufacturer who wanted to set up in the UK but the local council approached was hostile so they went to Eastern Europe), chronic underinvestment, people blame Brexit but this was all happening prior to Brexit.
To be honest these are systemic and taking money off investors to put into start ups wont change the environment. I only care about investing my money where I think I will get the best return and that certainly is not UK PLC at the moment.
Far East actually. The whole story was a fascinating example of how it works.
apologies, I misremembered. Yes, it was a fascinating story, and somewhat disappointing.
British counter-terror police assist in investigating death of Telegraph journalist David Knowles
The 32-year-old creator of the Ukraine: The Latest podcast was on holiday in Gibraltar when he died suddenly from a suspected cardiac arrest
Counter-terror police from Scotland Yard are supporting officers in Gibraltar investigating the death of Telegraph journalist David Knowles.
Detectives from the Metropolitan Police travelled to Gibraltar following a request for assistance for their colleagues in the British Overseas Territory.
Mr Knowles, 32, who was one of the presenters on the award-winning Telegraph podcast, Ukraine: The Latest, was on holiday in Gibraltar at the weekend, when he died suddenly from a suspected cardiac arrest.
In a statement the Royal Gibraltar Police (RGP) stressed that despite the request for assistance from Scotland Yard, there were no specific concerns at this time surrounding the death.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
In our sainted NHS, hallowed be its name, the employer contribution is 26.7%. Over a quarter of their salary.
No wonder the doctors retire or go part time in their forties and fifties. Madness if as described.
My wife has asked me to look at her pension as she is looking at retire and return next year and I have been looking through it. The 26.7% was in her documents. As was the actuarial value of her final salary 1995 pension
People forget when Health workers drone on about their wage that their overall package is not bad at all
They have yearly increments til they reach the top of the band, the high level of employer contribution and the extra holidays they get all have a value too.
Unfortunately the media, when covering the issue, fails to raise this side of it.
To be fair if you are a 30 year old doctor living in a flatshare with the opportunity to earn 2x in Canada or Australia it is not particularly relevant.
Indeed as people look short term.
So give them more salary in exchange for reduced pension benefits and reduced holiday benefits if it is not that relevant, eh ?
Is the NHS pension funded, or is the employer contribution an accounting fiction related to a promise to pay a pension out of future tax revenues?
It's much cheaper to "pay" a pension contribution that doesn't actually need to be paid for a few decades, than a higher salary now.
Good question - don't know. ETA: unfunded from Google
The USS is funded and us whinging academics all got a nice (effective) pay rise a year or two back when the USS valuation improved (due to interest rates/gilt prices?) and the employee contribution dropped from near ~9% to ~6%. Prior to that, there was a chance of contributions moving the other way, quite substantially
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
Which is why we need to have a seat at the table where these rules are written.
Annoying things the EU does is one of the best reasons for joining it.
Of course, now we're out of the EU we're free to tackle these issues.
If the current government fails to pass a Bottle Tops (Mandatory Separation Of) bill then we can simply vote in another one at the next election that commits to this in its manifesto and so be free of the tyranny of EU regulation* in practice as well as in theory, if not of an increasing tangle of red tape our own regulations.
*is it? What's the thinking - I think I saw something about making recycling easier on some packaging, is it because the caps are small enough by themselves to be harder for the sorting machines/people to handle and pick out?
On topic (if you don't mind): I think optimism will increase in US politics, now that the Supreme Court has restored our civil rights laws. We are already seeing substantial changes in college admissions in the Ivy League, and changes in hiring at large firms.
(There are some creepy historical parallels in the ways many universities discriminated against Jews, to the way they have been, more recently, discriminating against Asians.)
The US fixation with its sacred “rights” will eventually rear it apart; for example it will continue to be a place where the legislature is bought by the highest bidder as long as it treats money as speech and then applies the 1st Amendment to it. The 2nd amendment is turning schools into combat zones, and the less said about the 3rd amendment the better,
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
That's a very interesting question.
I'd say probably a combination of reasons.
Firstly they believe the fantasy of "green growth", "green jobs", etc., peddled by Miliband and others - the idea that jobs lost by massively increasing regulatory burdens will somehow be outweighed by jobs created in elsewhere in the economy to implement growth. Whereas, of course, the opposite has been and will continue to be the case - our industry is shafted with the highest energy costs in the world, while most of the "green" manufacturing jobs, such as they are, have gone overseas.
Secondly, neither Starmer nor his Chancellor have ever earned a penny from business or been involved in supply side economic policy. Reeves' only experience was as a tea girl in the Bank of England, which deals with demand side policy, not supply side, whereas the obstacles to growth in this country are all on the supply side. This lack of experience means they simply don't understand the importance, and fragility, of business confidence and light regulation in economic growth.
Thirdly, Starmer in particular is a technocrat, and like all technocrats of both parties - Heseltine, Gordon Brown, Ted Heath, etc. - completely overestimates the ability of the government to promote economic growth by meddling with the market. They think that government can create good and viable businesses (rather than union-dominated obsolete wrecks) and that a subsidy here or there will make business more effective, rather than just encouraging business to seek more subsidies as that's much easier than increasing sales and cutting costs.
Fourthly, related, Starmer is a lawyer, and like all lawyers has a tendency to assume that if the government issues a law, it will happen, and the law, being issued by him, must be good and so will never have negative side-effects. Whereas, in fact, all laws have negative side-effects, which very often outweigh whatever good comes of them (see lockdowns as the most egregious recent example).
Fifthly, he may have believed his own propaganda that leaving the Single Market had a massive negative effect on the UK economy, and that if he turned up smiling in Brussels they would fall over themselves to give him an amazing deal which would get things back to the Nirvana of 2015.
Finally, of course, there is the electoral reason. The electorate realises, however dimly, that the economy hasn't done well over the last decade and a half and he needs to pretend he has some answers.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
That's a very interesting question.
I'd say probably a combination of reasons.
Firstly they believe the fantasy of "green growth", "green jobs", etc., peddled by Miliband and others - the idea that jobs lost by massively increasing regulatory burdens will somehow be outweighed by jobs created in elsewhere in the economy to implement growth. Whereas, of course, the opposite has been and will continue to be the case - our industry is shafted with the highest energy costs in the world, while most of the "green" manufacturing jobs, such as they are, have gone overseas.
Secondly, neither Starmer nor his Chancellor have ever earned a penny from business or been involved in supply side economic policy. Reeves' only experience was as a tea girl in the Bank of England, which deals with demand side policy, not supply side, whereas the obstacles to growth in this country are all on the supply side. This lack of experience means they simply don't understand the importance, and fragility, of business confidence and light regulation in economic growth.
Thirdly, Starmer in particular is a technocrat, and like all technocrats of both parties - Heseltine, Gordon Brown, Ted Heath, etc. - completely overestimates the ability of the government to promote economic growth by meddling with the market. They think that government can create good and viable businesses (rather than union-dominated obsolete wrecks) and that a subsidy here or there will make business more effective, rather than just encouraging business to seek more subsidies as that's much easier than increasing sales and cutting costs.
Fourthly, related, Starmer is a lawyer, and like all lawyers has a tendency to assume that if the government issues a law, it will happen, and the law, being issued by him, must be good and so will never have negative side-effects. Whereas, in fact, all laws have negative side-effects, which very often outweigh whatever good comes of them (see lockdowns as the most egregious recent example).
Fifthly, he may have believed his own propaganda that leaving the Single Market had a massive negative effect on the UK economy, and that if he turned up smiling in Brussels they would fall over themselves to give him an amazing deal which would get things back to the Nirvana of 2015.
Finally, of course, there is the electoral reason. The electorate realises, however dimly, that the economy hasn't done well over the last decade and a half and he needs to pretend he has some answers.
On the last, there's also the "it will probably happen" factor. 2010-2024 was shitty for growth (overall) for a number of reasons in and out of government control - hangover from the GFC (although that should in itself have had potential for substantial bounce-back growth; Brexit (whether good or bad, the uncertainty for years post-vote can't have helped investment); Covid. If the government can avoid a massive crash, a pandemic and not reopen the EU question in any major/exciting ways then growth should be a bit better than in 2010-2024. If it's not, they're going to look like failures anyway, whether they mentioned it or not. If it is, they can point to a promise delivered. It's a bit like Sunak's pledge on cutting inflation.
Comments
https://x.com/paulblight6/status/1834186315081884079?s=46
Note a little bit of Lake Chad refilling.
It’s one of the possible, but by no means certain, feedbacks from global warming and SST changes in the North Atlantic. Good for the Sahel, but conversely bad for global albedo therefore temperature. No concerted trend observed yet.
The ITCZ is north of mean along the length of Africa but mainly in the East.
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/international/itf/itcz.shtml
Graft not grift surely?
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
(don't get me started on the banned TNG episode about Irish reunification in 2024)
This is because at 100% oxygen, you can use a much lower pressure in the suit. Which helps reduce ballooning and increases mobility.
So far, the only suit designs that have been tested to 1 atmosphere of internal pressure and were useable were the hard suit designs.
The utter resistance in NASA to all changes to design - to the point of claiming that NASA astronauts *lied* about testing results for suits - are a fascinating example of group think being promulgated by a very small number of senior people.
Some historical parallels if not.
The thing is, that institution toxified the slaveowners as well.
Come to think of it, at one time the majority of government income was from recusancy fines.
£1,000 fine for each Sunday you don't rock up at the local CoE church and get signed off?
One of the kids at school, I think it was almost definitely Charlie Elphicke, realized that you could set unemployment benefit to negative millions of pounds per week. This greatly increased the incentive to find work, and the 100,000 billionaires who continued to sign on were enough to fund lavish public spending and tax cuts for everyone else.
https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1833960831245320317
Time to crack on with that SMR program.
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
Look at the FTSE 100 v the S&P 500 for example over the last 15 years. Even allowing for Ex-Rate risk.
I know the FTSE has foreign firms in it as well but it is the UK stock market and the same can apply to the FTSE250, FTSE350 and AIM and look how many now shun the FTSE100 to list overseas due to a variety of reasons. Many don't leave simply due to inertia.
Until the govt do something to tackle that and having a more business friendly environment instead of bashing businesses and simply seeing businesses as doing well as being ripe for "windfall taxes" as well as what they may well do to CGT then this will not change.
I will invest where I think I will get the best return.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
They’re getting bigger and bigger, and a realiable source of power close by is top of the priority list when deciding where to site them.
It was quite a feat.
Better would be to start selling baronetcies again: should raise a few million with no cost to the state.
Whenever the NHS is criticised it is always compared with reverence to the US system. It is always presented as the choice is between the US system and the NHS. "At least the NHS is free in the US you have to pay $24,000 to have an ingrowing toenail removed" sort of thing.
We even had the crazy claim from Corbyn that the Tories wanted to sell the NHS off to Trump /The US in the 2019 election
There is never any mention of any other systems or how effective they are.
Apparently they hadn't done a full pressure chamber test on the ground.
Only good answers please, not political ones.
It seems unlikely that could have been the case in early colonial sugar plantations (where the system developed).
The earliest large scale sugar production involving slavery was reportedly in the 13th century Mediterranean.
https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-268
...The production of sugar was first wed to slavery and large-scale agricultural enterprise in the Mediterranean in the 13th century and then this nascent plantation complex moved to the Atlantic Islands off the coast of Africa, closer to an emerging African labor supply for a labor-intensive and brutal crop.4 Sugar agriculture migrated again to northeastern Brazil in the second half of the 16th century.5 The Brazilians began by trying to use indigenous Brazilian labor but disease among that group and overwork soon destroyed the effort. Although Brazilian planters continued to use Natives as labor (even after such practice was banned in 1570), they turned to the transatlantic African slave trade to supply sugar plantation labor forces that were perpetually in need of replenishing.6 The sugar plantations in early Brazil were different than the archetype of the plantation that would emerge in the Caribbean as sugar agriculture spread there in the 17th century. The Brazilian model had individual cane farmers and separate mill owners for processing. The Caribbean model consolidated this division into larger landholdings in which the agricultural production of sugar and its processing at the mill was all part of one plantation, usually owned by a single plantation owner. By the 18th century, the largest Caribbean plantations had absentee owners. They entrusted estate management to local white managers and overseers and, for lower managers such as the drivers or head sugar boilers, even to the enslaved Africans...
A whole generation of nerdy political kids must have grown up on that game. I wonder if it explains the Truss budget.
It already needs to print different labels and languages, and create different products.
So meh, really.
They commonise where they can.
You may recall my rant about how the nation-state survives in an era of mass-travel, cross-border loyalties, seamless cross-border money and information transfer, and individuals with the power of armies. Maybe this is the point in history where the sovereign nation-state goes the same way as tribes.
People forget when Health workers drone on about their wage that their overall package is not bad at all
They have yearly increments til they reach the top of the band, the high level of employer contribution and the extra holidays they get all have a value too.
Unfortunately the media, when covering the issue, fails to raise this side of it.
I myself turned down a private research role a couple of months ago because the salary offered, while notionally substantially more, wasn't enough to make up for the foregone pension contributions. I'm still looking at roles, but - in private sector - am only interested in those paying a chunk more than my current earnings as the employer pension contributions are much lower.
You will find the product is the same, the label may differ but common labels also happen.
Whether they learned anything at all from that remains an open question.
Surely the best taxes are either on things we would like less of (e.g. smoking) or things where supply is so inelastic that the tax doesn't make any difference (e.g. land, people).
OK, transitioning to this point would take some doing, but in theory, ditch income tax, all kinds of NI etc and replace with a poll tax and land tax (based on unimproved values, otherwise there's a massive disincentive to develop).
Like magic, you've replaced the current terrible economic incentives with good ones.
Yes, I know in the real world there are some drawbacks, and you couldn't implement anything quite this crude, but sometimes it is worth taking a step back, looking at the preverse incentives all over our system and seeing if there could be a more sane alternative.
(In all seriousness - exchanging a much lower rate of income tax for a higher rate of VAT in a revenue neutral way would almost certainly boost growth significantly).
To be honest these are systemic and taking money off investors to put into start ups wont change the environment. I only care about investing my money where I think I will get the best return and that certainly is not UK PLC at the moment.
I'd do it for any employees that asked, but as a default - it's just paternalistic madness.
(I've virtually no pension, I've put my cash into real assets and building a business - I can get a much better rate of return that way than via a pension scheme).
So give them more salary in exchange for reduced pension benefits and reduced holiday benefits if it is not that relevant, eh ?
Previous place I was at used to offer this too but for new starters it is NEST
Private sector as a whole is far lower than public sector for Employer contribution.
We need new businesses as well as new houses.
Linda Ronstadt endorses.
https://x.com/FilmmakerJulie/status/1834184402697396270
Annoying things the EU does is one of the best reasons for joining it.
*Except for three weeks in Australia when I tried to shave it felt like I was using barbed wire.
Some has gone to the inventors, some to the investors. Not much goes to the active boffins; it's tremendous fun, but you struggle to get rich that way.
A lot of it (with less risk and hassle) has gone to the owners of property on the Cambridge area, who can charge people a fortune to live nearby.
Until that money pipeline gets blocked up, there's not much point trying to invest. Whatever their other flaws, I think the new government sort of gets that in a way its predecessor didn't.
So https://oig.nasa.gov/office-of-inspector-general-oig/audit-reports/nasas-management-of-the-mobile-launcher-2-project/ $2.7 billion buys a launch tower. Maybe. If they don't over run the cost.
The SLS rocket itself costs $2 billion per launch.
Meanwhile, this project
Costs $90 million dollars per launch. Yes, that's right. 5%.
There is no ubergenius required. Just spending money on launching rockets, rather than paying everyone else in a pyramid.
They also make their own hooch in plastic bags !!!
If the current government fails to pass a Bottle Tops (Mandatory Separation Of) bill then we can simply vote in another one at the next election that commits to this in its manifesto and so be free of the tyranny of EU regulation* in practice as well as in theory, if not of an increasing tangle of red tape our own regulations.
*is it? What's the thinking - I think I saw something about making recycling easier on some packaging, is it because the caps are small enough by themselves to be harder for the sorting machines/people to handle and pick out?
You can find some background here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_California_v._Bakke
And here: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans-and-affirmative-action-how-the-public-sees-the-consideration-of-race-in-college-admissions-hiring/
(There are some creepy historical parallels in the ways many universities discriminated against Jews, to the way they have been, more recently, discriminating against Asians.)
This made it much more difficult to grow businesses here than in many other countries where investors were much more interested in capital returns than dividends. They also looked to "cash out" any capital gain that had accrued by selling out the business to a new, often foreign, buyer rather than sitting in for the ride.
Why this happened is much more complex but I suspect that it was a response to the tax structure that was in place at the relevant time which gave the pension funds an extra bonus on each dividend cheque. Brown was right to stop that but went rather too far in the opposite direction which resulted in a long term withdrawal of investment funds from the UK stock market which now only forms a relatively small part of Pension fund investments.
To recreate an entrepreneurial environment we need to encourage firms to retain capital, to grow their value and to invest for the longer term than the next quarter. Reeves, in fairness, mentioned the problem in her speeches before the election but was somewhat lighter on the solutions. And she now seems to have been captured by Mandarins in the Treasury who never saw a profit or a gain anywhere without wanting their share of it right now.
The lack of interest in what happens in Brussels wasn't unique to Britain - I suspect this game happens continent-wide.
Others can't.
And others can't do either.
I'm guessing Starmer, based on his performance so far, is in the last category.
It's much cheaper to "pay" a pension contribution that doesn't actually need to be paid for a few decades, than a higher salary now.
I had heard - and I cannot remember whether from 'bloke in a pub told me' or 'verifiable surveys done by reputable and independent bodies' that the Sahel is, in general, regreening as higher levels of CO2 make it more favourable for plants in marginal environments.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Henry-VIII-Beard-Tax/
Also tried in russia by one of the tsars but dont remember which
The 32-year-old creator of the Ukraine: The Latest podcast was on holiday in Gibraltar when he died suddenly from a suspected cardiac arrest
Counter-terror police from Scotland Yard are supporting officers in Gibraltar investigating the death of Telegraph journalist David Knowles.
Detectives from the Metropolitan Police travelled to Gibraltar following a request for assistance for their colleagues in the British Overseas Territory.
Mr Knowles, 32, who was one of the presenters on the award-winning Telegraph podcast, Ukraine: The Latest, was on holiday in Gibraltar at the weekend, when he died suddenly from a suspected cardiac arrest.
In a statement the Royal Gibraltar Police (RGP) stressed that despite the request for assistance from Scotland Yard, there were no specific concerns at this time surrounding the death.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/12/david-knowles-journalist-counter-terror-police-death/
The USS is funded and us whinging academics all got a nice (effective) pay rise a year or two back when the USS valuation improved (due to interest rates/gilt prices?) and the employee contribution dropped from near ~9% to ~6%. Prior to that, there was a chance of contributions moving the other way, quite substantially
A measure to reduce plastic waste. An EU directive from 2018.
The 2nd amendment is turning schools into combat zones, and the less said about the 3rd amendment the better,
I'd say probably a combination of reasons.
Firstly they believe the fantasy of "green growth", "green jobs", etc., peddled by Miliband and others - the idea that jobs lost by massively increasing regulatory burdens will somehow be outweighed by jobs created in elsewhere in the economy to implement growth. Whereas, of course, the opposite has been and will continue to be the case - our industry is shafted with the highest energy costs in the world, while most of the "green" manufacturing jobs, such as they are, have gone overseas.
Secondly, neither Starmer nor his Chancellor have ever earned a penny from business or been involved in supply side economic policy. Reeves' only experience was as a tea girl in the Bank of England, which deals with demand side policy, not supply side, whereas the obstacles to growth in this country are all on the supply side. This lack of experience means they simply don't understand the importance, and fragility, of business confidence and light regulation in economic growth.
Thirdly, Starmer in particular is a technocrat, and like all technocrats of both parties - Heseltine, Gordon Brown, Ted Heath, etc. - completely overestimates the ability of the government to promote economic growth by meddling with the market. They think that government can create good and viable businesses (rather than union-dominated obsolete wrecks) and that a subsidy here or there will make business more effective, rather than just encouraging business to seek more subsidies as that's much easier than increasing sales and cutting costs.
Fourthly, related, Starmer is a lawyer, and like all lawyers has a tendency to assume that if the government issues a law, it will happen, and the law, being issued by him, must be good and so will never have negative side-effects. Whereas, in fact, all laws have negative side-effects, which very often outweigh whatever good comes of them (see lockdowns as the most egregious recent example).
Fifthly, he may have believed his own propaganda that leaving the Single Market had a massive negative effect on the UK economy, and that if he turned up smiling in Brussels they would fall over themselves to give him an amazing deal which would get things back to the Nirvana of 2015.
Finally, of course, there is the electoral reason. The electorate realises, however dimly, that the economy hasn't done well over the last decade and a half and he needs to pretend he has some answers.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.