NIC Reeves and the wonder stuff – politicalbetting.com
NIC Reeves and the wonder stuff – politicalbetting.com
What would count as Labour breaking their tax promises? (1/2)-Increasing basic rate income tax: 69% breaking / 4% not breaking-Increasing higher rate income tax: 45% / 21%-Increasing additional rate income tax: 34% / 30%yougov.co.uk/politics/art…
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It is instructive that a lot of well-funded organisations stuffed with qutie well-off people are arguing for big rises in VAT or a massive cut in the threshold.
Meanwhile a lot of poorer people seem keener on income tax rises because that would be less costly for them.
If Labour go big on VAT, which is a Thatcherite tax and a very bad tax, they deserve everything they are going to get. If they go with income tax, at least they can claim to be helping the poorest and that may buy them favour with Green-leaning voters.
https://bristoliver.substack.com/p/nic-reeves-and-the-wonder-stuff
Hopefully the Chancellor doesn't repeat that tactic.
Looking at it, his headline predates mine by a year.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/meet-iron-chinese-ev-maker-152048348.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvLnVrLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAH15_qRa4GUhw0ie1bhUMVKSxl_1l4-0-uZ8xw-GvuudZc7k_JbJG69PZHGK9lzQf0Z5LD3o-iHw4k8apvl99f7a3usFT12uLF1IswS8i8NL0y2r6ODh2satzRzTxUbpyXVSmwxNdloiY4E8tvKS6h-azqfId-cf59SQwX0Haj1B
In terms of its operation, NICs are Income Tax, only worse. Yet it's always been the case that cutting Income Tax rates is popular, but raising NIC rates has been met with a shrug. Thatch did it, Major did it, and it was barely noticed.
(What's more, Hunt's NIC reductions, which are causing so much fiscal trouble, seemed to buy him approximately zero votes.)
Shifting burden from NIC to IT is probably the right thing to do for the economy, but it seems unlikely that people will see it that way.
I was thinking about this.
Obviously I have all the competition entries safely stored away in a spreadsheet. I haven't had time to look at that recently or cross-check with the actual polls - and probably there's not much point until we see how they move after the budget - but I suspect the outlying entries are going to scoop the points, and not just for the Labour polls.
Betting PostF1: backed Russell, boosted at 12 for qualifying each way.
His SQ3 run was iffy but he'd outpaced Antonelli in both SQ1 and SQ2. Odds are a shade too long.
https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2025/11/brazilian-grand-prix-2025-pre.html
Clearly Reeves is going to throw in some sweeteners as she breaks the manifesto pledge so the child benefit cap to go , VAT on energy to go . Raising income tax and cutting NI at the same time might look on the face of it as political damage limitation but that will mean pensioners and those self-employed miss out.
It might be better to do something with tax thresholds equivalent to the cost of lowering NI by 2p.
Reeves needs to do something surprising which can deflect from the broken manifesto pledge .
Interesting (and irrational) that combining income tax and NI is less unpopular than increasing income tax/reducing NI by same rate.
(*Scrapping NIC and increasing ICT rates by 7% will see most working people's tax burden reduce, whilst still netting more tax.)
They’re expecting high winds and thunderstorms, fair to say that the schedule for the day might change.
As the LDs discovered when they abandoned their tuition fees abolition pledge in 2010 too as did the Major and Bush Snr administrations after raising tax voters don't forget or betray broken promises even if there may be fiscal reasons to do so
Labour got the benefit of the doubt from voters in July 24 who thought they would be better than the Tories. How could they be worse? But Starmer turned up with no thought out plan, had a crap Budget last year - and Labour are paying the price. Voters' memories are quite short when it comes to crap governments. They seem not to remember much beyond the one in front of them. Starmer and Reeves are giving nobody any reason to look back in time, to the time of a worse government. Labour deserve to be hammered.
But the question that should be asked is, is the right thing to do? And the answer is obviously yes. Although damaging an increase in IT is much fairer and more evenly divided than endless squeezing and distortions caused by smaller taxes. It brings wealthy pensioners into the loop. If combined with cuts in NI it reduces the penalty on earned income. It is necessary. What is shocking and shameful is that it urgently needs to be combined with significant cuts in public spending. Pretending that is not the case condemns us to being back here again next year.
So more tax rises it will be
Labour have two choices:
Stick with the manifesto pledges, fiddle round the edges, the economy stagnates, they get blattered at the election
Man up, things are bad, tax rise for growth, economy performs, people feel better, nobody cares about the manifesto
They'll probably manage to splice the front half of the second one and the back half of the first one...
I think a problem is that that one can't be "middle way"-ed. It has to be the current "can earn a living without exceeding the threshold" (90k), or drop to a level where all such businesses are caught and "side gigs" are exempt, which would be more like £25k.
That imo makes it a difficult policy option - it is difficult to reduce to say £75k then £50k over several years.
This is an AI list of current EU numbers by country. They are free to set them below a max of €85k.
Austria €55,000
Belgium €25,000
Czech Republic ~€79,000 (CZK 2,000,000)
Denmark ~€6,700 (DKK 50,000)
Estonia €40,000
Finland €15,000
France €34,400 (services), €91,000 (goods)
Germany €25,000 (previous year turnover, current forecast to exceed €100,000)
Hungary None; exemption available for turnover below ~€30,000 (HUF 12,000,000)
Ireland €42,500 (services), €85,000 (goods)
Italy €85,000 (for special regime eligibility)
Latvia €50,000
Lithuania €45,000
Luxembourg €35,000
Netherlands €25,000
Poland ~€46,500 (PLN 200,000)
Slovak Republic €49,790
Slovenia €50,000
Spain No general threshold; registration required for any taxable activity
Sweden ~€7,000 (SEK 80,000)
Confirmation of the fact that people form opinions in a personalised way and that politicians trade on this is interesting but already well known.
If the opposition can provide no coherent opposition, and you have a large majority, the Blair years (and various other periods - eg Mrs Thatcher's time in some ways) demonstrate that your party provides its own opposition.
1. Generally people are more ok with taxing other people
2. The most interesting was the pairing of income tax increases/NIC reductions with only 23% seeing that as a breach
If the country just does not function because of degradation of basic facilities and maintenance of services - an example being the bush I saw growing out of a pedestrian refuge on one of the major roads in my town yesterday * - then investment in people, process and organisation is necessary.
We also have the bizarre idea that to improve in the private sector you spend money and invest in higher quality people, whilst in the public sector you just wave your chainsaw, cut everything, and make the quality of people lower to improve services. That perverse logic will not hold.
* Take any section of road and compare 2022 with 2009 on Streetview for what has changed since the local Councils were gutted.
https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/
We are a right wing nation and we always have been. I suspect the nature of media ownership has made us so. Remember what Hitler and Goebbels said about propaganda? The sooner the Tories get back into the saddle, the sooner the media can go back to writing and broadcasting about Coronation Street. And those scumbag filth voters who don't vote Ref or Con can carp on about how nasty the Tories are to their heart's content.
This is the precise wording of the tax promise from the Labour Manifesto in 2024:
We will ensure taxes on working people are kept as low as possible. Labour will not increase taxes on working people, which is why we will not increase National Insurance, the basic, higher, or additional rates of Income Tax, or VAT.
There's wriggle room, but not much.
Cash needs to flow or the economy contracts. Do YOU understand how the economy works? Rich people aren't letting the cash even trickle down any more - most people feel broke and the economy contracts which makes more people broke.
The downside of both of those things is that they will bite you on the bum in years 10-15, 15-20... and so on. As we are now seeing.
If you want to run the British government, I wouldn't be starting from here.
We may or we may not avert a scorching runaway world of two degrees plus, but whether we succeed will have nothing to do with anything said or agreed by 50,000 people descending on Belém. It will be decided by geopolitics, market prices and the tidal force of technological change.
http://andersongardenservices.co.uk/contact-us/
If they go bold and up income tax then don't wiggle and play word games: come out and say things have changed, we are in the shit and when the facts change minds have to change etc etc.
Make a virtue out of boldness and decisiveness.
Mexicanpete and BenPointer are quite right. Labour are fucked so they may as well do something transformative, as long as they can get it past their idiot backbenchers.
Have the economy actually start to recover, have Refuk continue to fracture with a hard right battle between Farage and Tommeh Tiny-Dick about how many muslims they can deport and who knows where we go. Labour may seem like the least worst option.
Running stuff competently (not letting prisoners out, police responding properly to crimes, eliminating benefit and tax fraud, teaching small boys to read even if they don't want to, smashing the gangs and stopping the boats, making sure poor kids don't miss school, getting medical stuff done right first time, answering the phone when Leon calls the HMRC) is cheaper than running it badly. Once that is all sorted, then people will be much more open to paying for improving what is already a very excellent service.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/08/england-faces-extreme-drought-next-year
It was instructive listening to Matt Vickers foam on about Labour and high streets. Councillor Matt Vickers and his Stockton Tory colleagues voted against Every Single one of the Labour council projects to regenerate Stockton-on-Tees. Repave the high street? Waste of money. Take over closed shops and open small business arcade? Waste of money. Build a hotel? White elephant. Reopen the Globe Theatre? Waste of money.
Tories against Every Single Thing done to regenerate Stockton. And now look at it - a roaring success, with the white elephants of the hotel and the theatre regularly sold out and things like the business arcade lauded by national reports as the way to do stuff.
So, do we listen to the Tories and let the place rot? Or do something different?
I have no expectation whatsoever that this is what Labour intend to spend thr money raised on.
*He wasn't uniquely culpable in this to be fair. But he was one of the most consistent examples.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/11/07/the-cop30-summit-wont-save-us-but-technology-just-might
Edit: and the state of the water mains is a known issue. Replacing them is (a) investment and (b) saves water, a lot of it.
Building a few more reservoirs would help too. Sadly NIMBYism has nixed that more than once.
https://www.unitedutilities.com/help-and-support/your-water-supply/your-reservoirs/reservoir-levels/
Note of course there is quite a lag from rainfall on dry landscape to the sponge of the moors filling up and then to the runoff which gets into the reservoir. As anyone who's been out in the hills lately can tell you, the sponge is noe definitely full.
Edit: which as any fule kno is where News Happens.
I am assuming the Tories go full Jenrick and steal the vile stinking rags worn by Farage and Yaxley-Lennon ( why are we even considering these ****s as mainstream?). That is probably the least worst option going forward. Jenrick is a ruthless opportunist so once at the top of the greasy poll he might calm the rhetoric down.
I believe the nation is ungovernable by a party that antagonises the press and now the broadcast media like Labour did in 1964 to 70, in 74 to 79 and now from 2024. I have missed out the New Labour Government because hostility was limited, because initially Blair courted the Press Barons and sought approval from Mrs Thatcher, before then embarking on a US Republican led war against people the Press Barons didn't like and which the media were four square behind.
This time around the Telegraph's Allister Heath and Allison Pearson have been in the vanguard of unhinged headline after unhinged headline. On here too, we get a "scandal" a day. A "scandal" that wouldn't even have registered between 2010 and just prior to Johnson's defenestration.That said media hostility has gone hand in hand this time with appalling comms from the Government and an inertia that few would have forecast. So it's not entirely the media's fault.
If only the Tories (or Reform?) are allowed to govern unhindered by the Fourth Estate, why should anyone else bother trying?
Cut taxes to entrepreneurs like me to go generate economic growth. OK, infrastructure is bad and getting worse, my potential customers feel broke and aren't spending and now feel even worse as you've cut expenditure on vital stuff again.
Government could borrow to pay for the tax cuts for growth. No, hang on that was the Truss Delusion.
Whilst I agree that taxes are too high, they can't cut them now. But what they could do is unveil a completely revised tax code - change the game completely by rolling welfare into a universal payment and scrapping all the tax loopholes by abolishing the taxes they avoid.
You can't drive growth by taxing less. But you could drive growth by taxing differently...
Unless it's a rich physics teacher (oxymoron)
And at Gosport War Memorial Hospital. Some years ago. There is - inevitably - an inquiry report (after 12 investigations over 27 years). https://www.gosportpanel.independent.gov.uk/panel-report/. And as inevitably its recommendations and lessons have been ignored.
It is very concerning that more has not been made of it in the AD debate given its relevance.
But when we have a society with the attention span of a gnat which values selfishness above everything else that too should not come as a surprise.
This is valid research complete with numbers and everything showing how water levels continue to drop.
The part that is conjecture is how much rain we will get in spring / summer 2026 and they say that.
In 1981 Howe also cut the top rate of income tax from 83% to 60%
Economically, if we need tax rises it’s far better to rip the band aid off and go for the biggies like IT rather than tinkering round the edges and generating all sorts of weird outcomes. Reeves needs more fiscal headroom to reassure the markets, so let’s get more money in the tank. In my view the only responsible thing to do when making these tax choices is to also compliment them with spending reductions. The jury is still out on whether she’ll go there.
The bigger problem with all this is that Labour are appalling political communicators. They have spent the past 18 months backing their “no main tax rises” pledge to the hilt, and basing a large part of their political image on not backing down from it. The timing is all wrong - if they were going to have the best chance of moving on, this was best done in 2024. They are now pivoting on a sixpence and they have absolutely no-one who can sell this in a way that it doesn’t look like a straightforward lie and a repudiation of their economic and political tactics of the past 2 years. Reeves knows this I think. Frankly, she looks haunted. The fallout from breaking what was probably one of their only headline manifesto pledges is going to be seismic. And governments very rarely recover from the politics of that.
They've been able to do it in the past - Rutland Water in relatively recent years. Relatively recent admittedly taking a lot of load there, it was 1980s IIRC, but Rutlandshire even then was not your average Welsh valley with about 50 people and a trillion sheep.
And as a bonus they got lots of birds and a giant ichthyosaur. What's not to like?
Efficiency gain has to run alongside that, and thought about what level of quality we want in our public realm. That last needs input from national policy.
I can give you several prime examples just from my own beat. Here's one.
The "Reference Wheelchair" is a set of dimensions for a wheelchair which feed into design of things like wheelchair spaces on buses and trains. The current set of dimensions relate to 2 or 3 decades ago. Obviously this is crucial - once a bus is out there, it will last 25 or 30 years, or 30-40 years for a train. More for street infrastructure.
There was a research report about the "Reference Wheelchair" published around 2021 *, which demonstrated that perhaps 20-40% of wheelchair susers do not fit within the standard dimensions.
What's happened since then? There has been a Gadarene rush to roll out Electric Buses.
What do the manufacturers do? They design to the absolute legal minimum they can get away with. Given the name "Reference Wheelchair", that is understandable.
Were the new required dimensions introduced before hundreds of millions were made available for new buses and pressure applied to move fast on it? Of course they bloody weren't.
So we have a big chunk of wheelchair users institutionally excluded from "accessible" (kneeling etc) electric buses until the 2050s.
* https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6230946ce90e070ed04a1d6f/reference-wheelchair-report.pdf
https://x.com/LaylaMoran/status/1504510591976853522
At the moment Jenrick is more likely to be next Reform leader than next Conservative leader, if Kemi resigned or lost a VONC it would almost certainly be Cleverly who replaced her.
Unless and until Farage loses the next general election and steps down as Reform leader enabling the Tories to reunite the right again, most Tory MPs will not even consider making Jenrick their leader
By 2029 I fully expect the Tories to be the least worse option.
The Politicians are always Shocked And Appalled.
The Senior Managers Were Blameless.
That Something Will Be Done.
That Lessons Will Be Learned.
That the Results Of The Public Enquiry Will Be Fully Implemented.
And then it happens again. Before the gravestones have begun to weather.
Besides, one of the New Scientist articles I read 35 years ago, when I wanted to signal my keenness as an A Level student, was about applying statistical thermodynamics to economies.
It turns out that pure Boltzmann theory- dumb particles exchanging energy/money at random- was a pretty good model.
However they are not mutually exclusive. They could do both.
Now the water companies are getting a large cash injection through front loaded increases, and some have been back to the regulator for a little more and got it, let’s see what happens.
The sighs of a cow.
I am trying to persuade my children to save as much as possible, which is hard for them given the pressures on their income etc and it will be even harder in future. It also means that paradoxically they become even more concerned about what I will be able to leave them because it will be possibly their only chance to get some real capital for their own old age. It is an absurd situation we have got ourselves into. And at this point I am mostly concerned about doing my absolute best for them. This may be one reason why IHT is so disliked. In a sane world we should not have to depend on inheritances or they should be modest - a sort of treat - but these days they may be people's only chance to have any sort of rainy day cushion because there are so few other ways of getting that cushion.
It feels for many people as if government is standing in the way of them making a life for themselves rather than making it easier or helping them. Government is seen as necessary but somehow obstructive and incompetent and sometimes malicious. Labour have done nothing to show that that they understand this and are trying to address it. If anything they sometimes give the impression of making this worse.
Although the swivelliest-eyed of the members have presumably gone of to Reform, goodness knows what the remnant will do.
I agree about the US. The culture is very much entrepreneurial and supportive of promotion of the wealthy in the expectation that one day they all arrive at that point. The majority of US, predominantly white voters (specifically voters) are either millionaires or expectant millionaires. Despite what Donald Trump says Democrats are more akin to Cameron Tories than Corbyn Labour
Meta studies show a consensus of eight or nine to one that higher tax/spending ratios are associated with lower economic growth - a truly extraordinary ratio for a controversial issue in a social science.
This country desperately needs lower taxes and spending, not higher. Basic behavioural economics, not to mention common sense, teaches that the private sector, though not perfect, allocates resources much more efficiently than the public sector on average, for two simple reasons: private sector companies are constrained by a fear of bankruptcy in the way that the public sector, which can always extort more money, isn't, and the public sector is impeded from quick and effective decision making by political accountability constraints. Reducing taxes and serious deregulation are the two things the government could do to spur economic growth the most.
Hence Rishi was elected Tory leader after Truss resigned despite having lost the members vote a few months earlier as the 1922 cttee set the threshold for MPs to nominate high enough that only Rishi but not Boris or Mordaunt could meet it.
The problem is it's hard to see any threshold that eliminates the lockdown breaker without making it impossible for anyone else to be elected too.
Few thoughts from what's been posted this morning.
As a one-time small businessman I'm inclined to support lowering the VAT threshold. Doing so makes people keep proper accounts, and gives 'the authorities' the right to poke about in their affairs. I wondered, as I watched the BBC News feature the other day on dodgy small 'businessmen' immigrants how much more difficult it would have been for them if they'd had to produce quarterly returns and been subject to inspection. Not a cure for the situation, but anything that makes life more difficult for the likes of them is welcome. Might actually produce some more tax, too, even though more inspectors would be needed.
Looking at a rise in basic rate income tax caused me to think of one of my grandsons. Graduate, now a deputy head-teacher, although of a small school, with a teacher wife and one small child. Should, surely, be comfortably off, but they find life expensive due to what I at any rate consider an astronomical mortgage on a former council house, two lots of graduate loan repayments and child-care costs.
And I look at my own financial situation, and hope that my Old Age Pension equals the income tax allowance. I've no objection to paying tax on my employment-related pensions, or on the pensions I've gathered as a result of lifetime savings. I had tax relief on them when I was saving, so fair enough.
The Conservatives won their Brexit on the back of too many Poles in the queue at the GP, and I suspect the accession country immigration policy wasn't managed optimally by New Labour (and besides they have all gone home now) but nothing like the chaos and bad feeling generated by the Boriswave. Asylum policy by removing all the legitimate routes has been chaotic under your Government too.
This Government's timidity, pandering to the Daily Telegraph (which hates them anyway) over immigration has been a disgrace. Their absurdity in continuing your policy of curtailment of student visas has killed the lucrative University sector. Growth, my arse! But what really gets my goat is you Conservatives present that it was all hunky dory on your watch, and you were only useless because of the ECHR.
At least Jenrick conceded this week that both this government, AND your Government have lost control of immigration. Everyone was and is guilty it would seem, except Robert Jenrick, who was doing something else at the time (maybe too busy saving Desmond a local tax bill of £60m) despite being the Immigration Minister responsible for filling Britannia hotels full of asylum seekers.
Cleverly is the preferred choice of all voters in polls over Jenrick and Cleverly is more likely to hold the 2024 Tory voters who voted for Sunak and Cleverly is more likely to get tactical votes from Labour and LD voters in Tory seats to beat Farage and Reform than Jenrick too