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The Women’s Equality party deserves its fate
Of all the grotesque modern types who cast a silly-yet-sinister shadow over the dog-days of Western civilisation – the Queers for Palestine, the Jew-baiting anti-racists, the humanity-hating eco-nuts – the Transmaid has a special step of shame very near the top. The Transmaid is a handmaid, like in Margaret Atwood’s novel, with two vital differences.
Transmaids get everywhere, but they are often to be found in showbusiness and politics
Transmaids often curry favour, not with regular men – indeed, they may often think of themselves as feminists who hate the patriarchy – but with men who say they are women. This means they do not really practise feminism at all, but something I call ‘Frankenfeminism’ which, whatever the intention, ends up gratifying men and degrading women. A Transmaid may get cross about the high level of violence against women and the pathetic police prosecution of rape (now practically ‘decriminalised’ according to the victims’ commissioner, Dame Vera Baird), but in the next breath suggest it’s fine for a rapist to be housed in a female prison, if he decides he wants to be called Karen, not Kieron.
Transmaids aren’t necessarily forced into such positions, unlike the poor women in Atwood’s book. All too often, these women choose to be Transmaids, perhaps because they believe that doing so may bring more power, institutions being captured by the ideology the way they are. She is the worst sort of sell-out.
Transmaids get everywhere, but they are often to be found in showbusiness and politics. Some of the showbiz ones have a ‘trans child’. But Clare Balding doesn’t even have that excuse. Talking in the Times, the radio presenter (who takes blandness so far that it sometimes feels like a kind of outrageous performance art) spoke of her desire to see mixed sports teams of men and women: ‘I don’t ever want to fall into the trap of making it men versus women, because I genuinely believe that people doing stuff together in mixed environments is better for everyone.’ What, like a boxing match between a strapping six-foot bloke and a slip of a girl?
Though Balding didn’t mention ‘trans women’, I very much doubt that she would have come out with this ocean-going tosh if there wasn’t an attempt underway by men to colonise women’s sports. Mixed teams are a one-size-fits-all way of making sure that the men in frocks don’t have their feelings hurt. They’re also a sure way of guaranteeing that women who have trained hard to win won’t win anything anymore unless, as in the case of team sports, they have big strong men to help them out. But the joy of solitary excellence will be a thing of the past for the ghost girl champions of tomorrow.
Time and again we see the aggression of males attempting to rob women of their hard-won necessities and pleasures, from toilets to trophies. Brave women stand up against these wolves in ewes clothing, often to have their livelihoods and even lives ruined; cowardly women give in to them and become Transmaids.
It’s telling that the growth of #BeKind has taken place alongside the rise of increasingly noisy self-expression from other groups who feel hard done by, but only for females. As the social commentator, Laura Bishop, put it: ‘While shopping for my kids I noticed that there are so many items of clothing which say Be Kind – but they were all in the girls’ and womens’ section. Every. Single. One. It’s like indoctrination.’ Every other group: riot. Women: Be Kind.
Which brings us to the woman who makes Nicola Sturgeon look like Valerie Solanas when it comes to sucking up to her trans-sisters. I’ve always been so allergic to the terminally smug Sandi Toksvig that, when I paid my subs to the Women’s Equality party (WEP) – which she co-founded – back in 2015, I took great pains to join only to the level below the one where you got a free copy of her book. This was even though I was keen to contribute as much money as possible to this apparently noble cause. Between then and now, this awful hybrid of Lady Muck and a lumberjack has made seven sorts of fool of herself, including by suggesting Brexit might be ‘sexist’. Writing in the Independent in 2019, this ludicrous being opined:
Some of the enormous political issues we face today – the climate emergency, cyber crime, violence against women and girls – are truly global; we cannot fight them alone, and we cannot fight them outside of Europe…
Johnson’s insidious sexism is a dangerous threat to women’s rights. Ironically, he’s the very character that the European Union was designed to counteract, with its long-standing commitment to women’s working rights and gender equality…
For me the choice is starker than ever: a sexist Boris Johnson Brexit, or a bright future in Europe combined with a serious effort to heal the country.
Since the brave dawn of its inception, the WEP has gone from netting 0.01 per cent of the national vote in the 2017 general election – the first it put up candidates for – to 0.0 per cent this year. But it could probably have struggled on as a pressure group if, in 2022, it had not voted to support gender self-ID, thus revealing itself as a captured group run by, and for, Transmaids.
Now, in the ultimate act of male-pandering female erasure, the WEP looks set to vote to abolish itself. It has done so, as Suzanne Moore – who helped set the party up – wrote, after years of ‘taking the donations and membership subscriptions of women who could often ill afford them but remained hopeful somehow…a quick look at X will reveal just how betrayed so many women felt who put their heart and soul into trying to make it work’.
The fact is that, whatever excuses they may make, the WEP has chosen to take this cowardly decision because it knows that it cannot call itself a feminist party while putting men first. The party’s inability to place the hard facts of women’s lives over the fantasies and demands of men decreed ultimately that it should dissolve itself as it could not control its members. This brings to mind the Bertolt Brecht poem The Solution:
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Even otherwise sensible women come over all soppy when trying to make the final break from their long-time abusive boyfriend, the Labour party, in some instances taking it out on the gloriously autonomous Kellie-Jay Keen, whose angry, playful and unashamedly populist Party Of Women is everything the WEP wasn’t.
The death of the WEP should be a lesson to all of us that ideas of Right and Left have no place in feminism any longer – if ever they did; let’s not forget that Emmeline Pankhurst herself was barred from joining her local Manchester Labour party because she was a woman. (Her friend, Labour’s founder Keir Hardie, made a special dispensation so that she could join the London branch instead.)
It’s time for women to break up with their bully boyfriend once and for all; if they do not have the guts to make themselves politically homeless – but free – they will find that they become as confused and ultimately self-immolating as the WEP has turned out to be. Because he doesn’t love you despite it all, you don’t look fat in that blue dress – and there is someone else who likes you just the way you are, be they Kemi Badenoch or Kellie-Jay. But don’t waste your time on a party – be it Labour or the WEP – which would gladly chuck 51 per cent of the population under a bus, or even the king’s racehorse, in order to bag the tiny transgender vote. Because if their judgement is off on that obvious choice, it’s going to be off on everything – as the state of the current government so woefully shows.
Britain can grow faster than the OBR thinks
The UK economy may end up growing a bit faster by the end of this decade than the Office for Budget Responsibility expects – but if it does that will be no thanks to Rachel Reeves’s Budget.
The OBR’s projections are unambitious. This is their summary: ‘Having stagnated last year, the economy is expected to grow by just over 1 per cent this year, rising to 2 per cent in 2025, before falling to around 1½ per cent, slightly below its estimated potential growth rate of 1⅔ per cent, over the remainder of the forecast. Budget policies temporarily boost output in the near term, but leave GDP largely unchanged in five years.’
It does add that if the increase in public investment were sustained it ‘would raise supply in the long-term’, but the huge question remains: is the OBR’s estimate of the potential growth rate of 1⅔ per cent right? That’s higher than some other projections. For example, in May the NIESR said it expected ‘growth from 2025 onwards to fluctuate around a trend growth rate of 1 per cent – which is low both by historical and international comparison’. You could say that again. The long-term growth rate over the past couple of hundred years has been around 2.25 per cent and the more recent trend, between 1980 and 2014, was growth of 2.2 per cent a year. That is a good marker, because it takes bad years as well as good ones. It covers the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s and the banking crash of 2007-08, as well as the late 1980s boom, the New Labour (arguably unsustainable) burst of growth, the recession that followed the banking crash, and the early years of fiscal consolidation under the coalition.
There is a further, massively important, factor to be considered: population growth. The OBR’s forecasts are about overall growth, not growth per head. The Office for National Statistics assumes net annual inward migration of 315,000 a year through to the middle 2030s, which will push the population through the 70 million mark in 2026 and to nearly 74 million by 2036.
Given these levels of inward migration we surely ought to be growing far faster. The long-term assumption of the ONS is that we will add roughly 0.5 per cent to the population each year. In the past couple of years it has been around 1 per cent. Add in population growth and surely we should be growing at least at that 2.2 per cent figure we achieved from 1980 to 2014? What on earth is happening to productivity?
Economists trot out all sorts of explanations for the poor productivity performance of recent years, including low public investment in infrastructure, the weaker performance in the UK’s smaller firms, a sclerotic planning system, inadequate training of the workforce, and so on. But overriding everything is the general truth that increasing productivity in service industries, including the public sector, has proved much harder that lifting it in manufacturing. Since UK is a service-driven economy – the second largest exporter of services in the world after the US – it was always going to find it tough to boost its productivity. But the US has managed to do so. So too have Switzerland and Singapore.
Rachel Reeves acknowledged the need to do something about the public sector, requiring it to improve its productivity by 2 per cent next year. That is a tall order. Earlier this year the ONS reported that public sector productivity was lower in 2021 than it had been in 1997. It fell during the Blair/Brown years from an index of 100 in 1997 to 96.7 in 2010, rose slowly under the Coalition and Conservative governments to reach 104 in 2019, only to plunge during the pandemic. But – and here may be the sliver of light – there will not only be enormous pressure on the public sector from now on, but there is also the potential for artificial intelligence to improve its performance.
It always takes time to learn how to apply any new technology and we are at the very early stages of the AI revolution. But as Capital Economics reported earlier this year the UK, along with the US, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and the Nordics are expected to be the biggest beneficiaries. For what it is worth, the UK was ranked number three, behind only the US and Singapore, on the Capital Economics league table. They forecasted that productivity growth in the US would average 2.3 per cent a year by the 2030s, which would be slightly higher than it was during the 1990s internet boom.
Britain won’t do as well as America. But we ought to do better than we have been in recent years. Now, this has nothing to do with the policies of this new government, and the OBR is not designed to pick this up, but if the UK can get anywhere close to that US projection on productivity, and you add in population growth, the OBR will have to revise upwards its idea of trend growth to well over 2 per cent a year.
Below the belt: the indelicate truth about male grooming
Let’s get one thing perfectly clear. I’m British, divorced, ginger-haired and I once accidentally called the late Radio 1 DJ Annie Nightingale ‘mum’ during an interview. So there’s very little I can learn about embarrassment.
Or so I thought. My perspective changed somewhere around the moment that a male groomer versed in the nascent trend of the ‘boyzilian’ placed hot wax over my most intimate areas and told me, in the nonchalant manner of a butcher asking me how I’d like my sausages bagged, that I should prepare for a certain amount of pain.
A certain amount of pain? I have always considered my discomfort threshold to be somewhere between an aged poodle with lumbar ache and a toddler playing with a freshly singed match. So perhaps you shouldn’t be surprised when I tell you that getting every hair on my chest, perineum, scrotum, buttocks, anus and pubic bone removed is never going to compare with a glass of chablis on a French beach at sunset when it comes to congenial personal experiences.
Perhaps it’s a throwback to the era of Greek and Roman antiquity where, as statues of Caesar and Fauno Barberini et al depict, hirsuteness on a man was considered the nemesis of poor grooming
But my ‘waxers’ Vaishaliben and Ashlie are not interested in my plaintive calls for sedatives, gin or a hammer to knock me unconscious. ‘You have very fine hair Rob, which is unusual for blonde and ginger people,’ says Ashlie, a man who has been waxing men’s most vital areas for more than five years.
He and his business partner Vaishaliben own Vaisu Beauty in Soho, a place where men’s most exacting contemporary waxing needs are taken care of. This includes the ‘boyzilian’ treatment. Depending on the length of your historical perspective, this ‘manscaping’ is either the ultimate male sacrifice to the goals set by the glistening, hairless gammon slabs otherwise known as The Only Way is Essex and Made in Chelsea characters. Or it’s merely a throwback to the era of Greek and Roman antiquity where, as statues of Caesar and Fauno Barberini et al depict, hirsuteness on a man was also considered the nemesis of poor grooming.
It was, inevitably, David Beckham who became the first high-profile celebrity to have a ‘boyzilian’, putting this rather irritating neologism into the lexicon back in 2008. Prior to that, this male grooming equivalent of the total eclipse of the moon was almost exclusively the preserve of the gay community in the UK. But now, Ashlie says: ‘More and more men are coming to us to get a full boyzilian before their holiday. And I promise you that, these days, the majority of them are heterosexual.’
Since Becks got his golden balls tidied up, many celebs have made their pubic life part of their public life. Olympian Tom Daley is the new face (and many other body parts) of Gillette’s freshly launched ad campaign for their intimate male grooming kits. A spokesman for the brand claimed: ‘More and more guys across the UK are grooming their intimate area, but until now Gillette didn’t offer products with purpose-built features for such a sensitive and complex job.’
I’m not quite old enough to have had chest hair in the 1970s, an era when I was barely on solid food. But I’m of a vintage to be certain that male grooming was once an infinitely less painful, more plentiful affair. To have a filigree of chest hair climbing out of your polyester shirt was as essential for the 1970s male sex symbol as beige turtlenecks and bath taps that dispensed Old Spice and brandy Alexanders. Having copious chest hair (and presumably a veritable Art Garfunkel around the nether regions) didn’t do Tom Selleck or Burt Reynolds any harm with the opposite sex. So what changed?
Some surveys suggest that this American tide of anti-hirsuteness got to European shores before reaching our climes. The online retailer Galaxies found that in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Italy, body hair grooming was standard procedure for two in every three men they spoke to, while nearly 40 per cent of men disliked the au naturel look favoured by the Bee Gees in their prime.
But what you really want to know is how much it hurts. Let me be brutally honest. Firstly, the strip wax method was used on all parts of my body except my (no longer strictly) private parts.
Vaishaliben sprinkles powder on me to dry out the perspiration induced by my imminent trauma, then smears mint green-coloured tea tree wax over my chest and arms before applying a white strip. She counts, one, two, three, and yanks for all she’s worth.
The initial pain of the strip leaving my body, with my hair in tow, takes my breath away. A sensation akin to being stung by a wasp with anger management issues burns through my torso and causes me to yelp in a pitch higher than I thought possible since puberty began.
Forty minutes later and I am wishing for a blunt instrument to put me out of my misery. But I’m naked and trapped. Vaishaliben does chests, arms, legs and, basically, everything except the most intimate areas, where she feels guys would be more comfortable having a man take over proceedings, hence the presence of Ashlie.
Into the treatment room he steps and I start wondering if anyone would be perturbed by the sight of a nude journalist running through Soho screaming. ‘It won’t hurt as much from now on,’ says Ashlie, reassuring me as much as a gilt-edged invitation for a private dinner in Gaddafi’s tent.
For my most delicate regions, hot wax is used instead of strip paper. Ashlie smears the custard-coloured gunk all over me and, yes, gently clasps my penis to move it out of the way. The wax almost immediately hardens into a gel that can be ripped off in flapjack-style slabs.
Incredibly, this isn’t nearly as painful as getting my chest waxed. Or perhaps I’d simply got used to the notion of having my hair taken away from me so violently. Either way, I resolve from this moment onwards to give flowers to my partner every time she goes to a salon for a wax. I’m finally getting my own taste of what women go through to please men who have watched an excessive amount of hair-free pornography.
Three hours later and back home in South London, I’m lying in bed while writing this and I look and feel like a giant baby who has been plucked and trussed for some kind of cannibalistic cattle market. Which I suppose works as an adequate description for the fleshpots of Ibiza or Corfu.
I’m perfectly beach ready for the Med. Yet, I’ve timed it perfectly for the definitive end to the holiday season. So will my ‘boyzilian’ suit the less exotic climes of Stockwell and Brixton in autumn?
I must admit that I quite enjoy the fugitive vibe that comes with having a pubic area as serenely empty as a one-way flight to Pyongyang. I feel a little lighter. I feel more supple. The sensation of touching my hairless body is rather pleasing – like placing my hands on a warm teapot.
I won’t be butterflying past Tom Daley in a swimming pool anytime soon. But I also like knowing that my ‘boyzilian’ has made me look just a little more like a Roman senator and just a little less like Barry Gibb.
Would you rent a John Lewis home?
John Lewis recently returned to its roots, resurrecting its ‘never knowingly undersold’ price-matching promise. But it’s hard to imagine how the company, which opened its first store on London’s Oxford Street in 1864, could apply this undertaking to its latest venture. For, not content with supplying the nation with sofas and curtains, lightbulbs and sewing patterns, John Lewis wants to provide the actual homes to put these items into – dipping its corporate toe into the world of ‘build to rent’, or BTR.
The retailer has unveiled plans to construct almost 1,000 rental flats at three company-owned sites – above a Waitrose store in Bromley, south-east London; on a brownfield site in West Ealing, west London; and on a warehouse site in Reading, Berkshire. Katherine Russell, the firm’s director of BTR, confirms that John Lewis eventually wants to own and manage 10,000 rental properties around the country.
The acronym may be new but BTR can be seen as a modern incarnation of the old-fashioned boarding house. Tenants rent bedrooms – ensuite nowadays, and some with kitchenettes – and share communal amenities such as gyms, work spaces and lounges. Rents are – usually – inclusive of utility bills, although council tax is paid separately.
‘The focus is on creating vibrant communities, complemented by new public realm, green spaces, community rooms and commercial facilities,’ says Russell, who believes BTR offers a way to contribute ‘positively to society’ by providing high-quality rental homes at a time when small landlords are exiting the buy-to-let market in record numbers and tenants face spiralling rents as a result. ‘John Lewis Partnership aims to help alleviate some of that pressure.’
John Lewis is far from the only major firm which believes BTR is the future. Companies invested £4.5 billion in this burgeoning sector last year, according to estate agent Savills – up from a mere £360 million in 2022. Analysis from the British Property Federation found that 22,000 new BTR homes were completed in the year to June.
Many of the developers involved in BTR are specialist private student hall operators, but in September UK pension scheme Nest confirmed that it is working with Legal & General to invest up to £1 billion into BTR in city centre locations.
Since conventional house-building has all but ground to a halt thanks to increased construction costs and higher interest rates, the fact that someone is willing to build much-needed new homes sounds like good news. Rental properties are certainly in desperately short supply – tenants typically now rent for longer and many have simply given up hope of ever being able to afford to buy a home the old-fashioned way. BTR allows them to find a home without entering a depressing bun fight for a room in a grotty shared flat; they are a good place to find one’s feet and make friends; tenancies are flexible; and renters won’t get evicted because their landlord wants to sell up.
The acronym may be new, but BTR – ‘build to rent’ – can be seen as a modern incarnation of the old-fashioned boarding house
But BTR has fatal flaws which we ignore at our peril. The first is scale. Dinky little flatlets might work perfectly for students and recent graduates, for transient young professionals who are barely ever at home and, at a pinch, for couples. But since single bedroom units tend to measure between 200 and 300 sq ft (about the same size as a couple of standard car park spaces) they are no help to families or even to older people with a lifetime of possessions to store and a requirement for privacy and space.
And while a spokesman for John Lewis says that its rents will ‘be aligned with mid-market rental housing’, most BTR operators charge huge premiums. Just as in the rest of the private rental sector, there are no rent controls, and currently advertised homes range in price from around £1,500pcm in the London suburbs to well over £2,000pcm in the city centre.
In Leeds, Jonathan Morgan, a partner at Zenko City Living, says BTR tenants tend to be aged 25 to 35, and are a fairly even mix of young professionals and overseas students.
He estimates that their rents are about 20 per cent above regular rentals, and notes that some tenants are starting to vote with their feet. ‘We are getting the strong impression that dwell times are falling in BTR buildings and this is probably due to the combination of premium rents and a reaction against paying for amenities which some tenants rarely use,’ he says.
Leanna Sharman, head of lettings at RiverHomes, which specialises in property along the River Thames, thinks the London premium is a little lower, perhaps 5 to 10 per cent – possibly because London’s rents are already so stupidly high that there is less margin to hike prices. She agrees with Morgan that most tenants are ingenues – young, new to the city and often from overseas.
Despite BTR’s somewhat limited appeal, local councils tend to welcome the schemes when they come before planning committees. Cynics suggest that this is because developers must pay substantial Section 106 levies which can be put towards local facilities as a condition of winning planning permission. And the micro flats count towards their house-building quotas, too.
But what happens should we one day change our minds about whether BTR is the best use of finite building space in a nation gripped by a housing crisis? Once a building is designated for rental-only use, it becomes very challenging to repurpose the homes to sell them.
‘Planning permissions usually ensure the units are retained for rental only in perpetuity or sometimes for a fixed period of at least 15 years,’ explained planning consultant Grant Leggett, executive director of Boyer London. ‘It will sometimes be possible to sell the flats down the line subject to getting planning permission, or waiting out any fixed period specified in the permission. Some councils might think lifting the restriction for rental only is a fundamental change and require a whole new planning application be made to authorise it.
‘Basically it can be a big deal and not straightforward to sort out.’
Spare me the truffle takeover
I remember, vividly, when working at Raymond Blanc’s Michelin-starred Le Manoir, the moment the truffles were delivered. A frisson went round the kitchen staff as the napkin covering the precious morsels was dramatically whipped off. Physically inspecting the gnarled, knobbly nuggets was a right reserved for head chef alone. As a lowly pot-washer, I was confined to the back, neck craned for a glimpse.
So I am not blind to the excitement and sheer theatre of the treasured truffle. I even like them. But why on earth have they taken over every restaurant menu, as plentiful as lashings of ‘EV’ olive oil and flaky sea salt?
2018-19 was when the truffle takeover first got going on the London restaurant scene. Then the rot quickly set in. There is a five-store chain – Truffle Burger – serving, you guessed it. It’s not yet quite as bad as Salt Bae’s gold leaf-encrusted burgers, but it’s not far off. Truffle and parmesan fries were vaguely interesting when they first appeared; now I just groan and think back nostalgically to the days of ketchup and mustard. Mash and macaroni cheese are scarcely available without being truffled. Toasties are increasingly not safe. Cacio e pepe is long gone. What causes this delirium? Are people high, on, er, mushrooms? London’s NoMad hotel has even started an ‘at cost’ offering for truffles – a snip at £36 for 8g. Soon you’ll have restaurants doing BYOT (Bring Your Own Truffles).
Mash and macaroni cheese are scarcely available without being truffled. Toasties are increasingly not safe. Cacio e pepe is long gone. What causes this delirium? Are people high, on, er, mushrooms?
Prized white truffles, most famously from Piedmont and sold for up to £6,000/kg, are a little pricey even for avowed foodies. More common are the Instagrammable black truffles from Perigord or even southern England. All have a musky, mouldy, umami character, vaguely reminiscent of feet.
Truffle oil is much maligned, I think unfairly. Not a shaving on the proper stuff they say, you need the real McCoy (a venerable crisp at it happens, and so far admirably holding out against the truffle madness). Yes, some of the oils might be synthetic-tasting guff. But I once bought a bottle of English truffle oil for a relative snip at a tenner and ate practically nothing other than hunks of bread dipped in it and sprinkled with Maldon salt for a week. And it’s all very well getting the fresh stuff if used right away, but delay and you risk disaster. Given a little truffle in a jar, I kept it for so long awaiting a suitable occasion it shrivelled into a strange zoological specimen and was utterly tasteless.
They are a status symbol of course. Culinary conspicuous consumption. Their popularity is less about taste than fashion, and social media-fuelled fashions are the most inexplicable and vacuous of the lot. As with so much food in the TikTok age, it’s become just gluttonous excess for its own sake.
The only surprising thing is the relative staying power of truffles. Viral trends such as pancake cereal and cloud bread have come and gone, but truffle mania is still with us. Perhaps because this one’s been co-opted by the parents. The Brindisa Torres black truffle crisps, gracing every north London deli window, are now the chattering classes’ cocktail party nibble of choice. Goes oh so well with the Chateau Margaux, don’t you know.
Properly, sparingly used, truffle is a beautiful thing. On scrambled eggs it can elevate a breakfast into something really special. In a simple butter and parmesan pasta, truffle is given space to shine.
And the best thing really about truffle is the drama of hunting for it. Traditionally done with truffle hogs, using truffle hounds is now the norm (or just rakes, or even looking for flies). This is mainly due to the pigs’ unfortunate tendency to guzzle down the truffles that were rightfully theirs, depriving Giuseppe and Giovanni of their wages. Well-trained Lagotto Romagnolo, a gundog breed, can fetch astronomical sums and so the Italians resort to stealing them off each other instead.
It is all undeniably exciting. Like panning for gold or digging for diamonds. Little wonder that the sight of a large tartufo bianco d’Alba does more to titillate the millennial generation than gazing at the Koh-i-Noor. But while diamonds are forever, let’s hope this ridiculous truffle obsession is not.
Labour’s farm tax makes no sense
Amid the furore over Lord Alli’s contributions to Lady Starmer’s wardrobe the new environment secretary, Steve Reed, was able to stay under the radar. Most of us weren’t aware that he had been schmoozing his way around British farms during the election campaign wearing brand new, top of the range Le Chameau wellies – also apparently gifted by the ubiquitous Lord Alli. At the time Reed was promising that Labour had no intention of changing Agricultural Property Relief. In fact, responding to an accusation by his Tory opponent, Steve Barclay, he dismissed it as ‘desperate nonsense’.
The efforts of the generations before me may all have been for nothing
So you can imagine the anger on British farms this morning after Rachel Reeves not only changed APR but also Business Property Relief (BPR). Tempers were further inflamed as it became apparent from social media posts that in the run-up to the Budget the mendacious Reed was chirruping, ‘Farmers are going to have to learn to do more with less’, presumably to manage our expectations.
Coming from someone who has climbed the greasy pole as a public sector fat cat in Lambeth Council – doing less with more, as one might say – this has landed like a prolapsed cow’s uterus with farmers who have proved themselves able to make ends meet in tough times more than most.
The fact is, though some families will, indeed, somehow tighten their belts and find a way through this crisis so that their farms can pass on to the next generation, paying inheritance tax on agricultural land and business assets worth over £1 million will be the final nail in the coffin for many. What Reeves appears not to understand, or maybe she is just deeply cynical, is that the only farmers who will benefit from her £1 million threshold are at the llama-owning end of the spectrum – hobby farmers with a nice house and a few acres, much like Sir Keir Starmer’s late parents’ donkey sanctuary in fact. Even small commercial farmers are, for now anyway, sitting on assets worth over £3 million for a 200-acre farm once all the livestock, plant and machinery is totted up.
Metropolitan readers may be starting to sneer at this ‘first world problem’ but, though most farmers are rich on paper, there is a famously low return on assets in farming. And the brutal facts are that, for the next generation, paying, say, £50,000 for ten years to clear the inheritance tax on our hypothetical small family farm would be simply too much out of taxed farming income. Land would have to be sold off (further reducing income) either in bits or, if a farm is already at critical mass, outright.
Society as a whole loses when that happens. The obvious bits to sell off under those circumstances are outlying fields to wealthy weekenders as pony paddocks (meaning land is lost to food production), or farm cottages to retirees or second home owners (meaning fewer affordable homes to rent in the countryside, or for young farmworkers to live in).
Of course there will be ways to mitigate the tax but these come at a cost. For those young enough and healthy enough to take out life insurance, that will be the route for many. So the spare cash currently spent on ‘working people,’ laying hedges or mending drystone walls, will now have to be spent on life insurance premiums.
It’s bound to be inflationary, too. Costs always feed into higher prices. Farmers may be price takers rather than price makers but the market always ends up setting prices at a level where efficient farmers can make a living and reinvest in their farms. Dairy farmers like me will need more for our milk and consumers will end up footing the bill for Labour’s ideological crusade. Gordon Brown could see that and didn’t touch APR, Rachel Reeves obviously can’t.
The economic illiteracy and ideological spite are extremely aggravating. But, most of all, I feel a deep sense of sadness that everything I have put into my farm over the last 25 years, and the efforts of the generations before me in the 150 years before that, may all have been for nothing. I am off to buy a large coffin-sized freezer and my children will be under strict instructions to stick my corpse in it and only report my death once we no longer have a Labour government.
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The wrong-sightedness of ‘buffer zones’
As of today, in Britain, it will be illegal to ‘intentionally or recklessly influence any person’s decision to access… abortion services’ within approximately 500 feet of the building. If the national law mirrors local prototypes, it may even prohibit silent prayer, or offers of help.
Politicians voted to implement these localised bans – known as ‘buffer zones’ – under the guise of needing to restrict harassment near abortion clinics. A noble cause, yet one without a basis of need. Harassment is already illegal in the UK. A government review proved that in mild-mannered England, instances of harassment near clinics are ‘relatively few’, and easily policed under existing laws. Instituting buffer zones would ‘not be a proportionate response’, the review concluded.
Despite the evidence against them, buffer zones were voted in nonetheless – passed under the watch of the Conservative government, and now implemented under Labour. In practice, the loose wording of the new ban – criminalising mere influence – could go far further than policing ‘harassment’, and result in prosecutions on the basis of consensual conversations. Could a parent be criminalised for advising their daughter? A friend fined for sharing a word of concern? What about an offer of help from a crisis pregnancy volunteer?
This isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem.
Where ‘buffer zones’ have already been installed by local authorities, several prosecutions have resulted. Livia Tossici-Bolt, a retiree, will face trial in March for holding a sign reading ‘Here to talk if you want.’ In other instances, people have faced trial for merely praying silently in their heads.
In Birmingham last year, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested for her thoughts. She was tried, found innocent, and arrested yet again weeks later for the very same, peaceful, imperceptible prayers. After an arduous legal ordeal, she was finally compensated £13,000 for her unlawful arrests.
In Bournemouth, Adam Smith-Connor, an army veteran who served in Afghanistan, was convicted of breaching a safe zone after praying silently outside an abortion centre and refusing to move on. Adam was standing on a public green, with his back to the clinic so as not to give the impression that he was trying to ‘influence’ anyone. He prayed in his head about a child that he had lost to abortion 22 years prior. If he had thought about bank robbery – or preached about climate change – he would not have been charged. The content of his thoughts – abortion – was critical to his prosecution. The judge handed him a £9,000 cost order as a result. With support from legal charity ADF UK, he’s appealing his verdict.
The differing rulings on such similar cases expose the subjectivity of ‘buffer zones’. What one police officer may deem to be a woman’s mere harmless presence could be interpreted by another to be a violation. Citizens should know what’s within the rules. But a vague ban on ‘influence’ will likely chill freedom of speech and thought, with people exposing themselves to significant legal costs to obtain clarity that should have been provided by the legislation.
Ironically, in banning free speech for pro-life volunteers, the government has equally restricted the right of women in crisis pregnancies to hear and receive information. When Alina Dulgheriu made an appointment at an abortion facility in 2011, she had lost her job, and had been abandoned by her boyfriend. She thought abortion was her only option. It was because of an interaction with a pro-life volunteer outside the clinic – a soon-to-be-forbidden conversation – that she found out about resources available to women in her position, from financial support, to housing, to the provision of baby supplies and a supportive community.
‘Removing the option to receive help to keep a child in case we feel offended is deeply patronising’, she said. ‘It assumes that women can’t make a decision for ourselves or that we might choose the wrong option.’
In a time when 50,000 knife crimes are recorded across England and Wales per year, and a rape is recorded in London every hour, it’s surprising to see government attention and public resources funnelled into punishing peaceful people, standing alone with their thoughts. The UK should urgently clarify its priorities – and its protections of basic human rights. The world is watching.
When it comes to trash talk, you can’t beat the Donald
‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’ is a computer programming principle which states that the quality of a system’s output is determined by the quality of its input. It’s also a phrase that speaks to US politics this week.
After a string of good news cycles for the Republican campaign, the Democrats finally believed they had caught a break on Sunday night after the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made a joke about Puerto Rico on stage at Trump’s mega-rally in Madison Square Garden in New York. ‘I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now,’ said Hinchcliffe. ‘It’s called Puerto Rico.’ Other speakers made other ill-judged remarks, but the garbage line seemed to stick.
Trump’s hyperbole is half the fun
Hinchcliffe is famous for the sheer offensiveness of his comedy but the Democrats, knowing that nearly a million Puerto Ricans live in swing states, seized on his quip as yet more evidence that Trumpworld is racist. Armies of Harris campaign surrogates duly marched to the airwaves to express their horror at such ‘dehumanising’ rhetoric. The Trump campaign, on the back foot for the first time in weeks, felt compelled to officially distance itself from the remark.
But then Joe Biden went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid, as he often does. On a zoom call with Latino voters, he said: ‘The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters – his – his – his demonisation of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.’
Oops. Team Biden-Harris quickly sought to clarify that Joe meant ‘supporter’s’ – with an apostrophe. He was talking about Hinchcliffe, not the millions of Americans who support Trump.
But everybody remembers Hillary Clinton calling Trump fans a ‘basket of deplorables’ in 2016 – and look how well that worked out. Suddenly, Team Trump was on the offended offensive. ‘Moments ago,’ declared a Donald-signed campaign email. ‘Kamala’s boss crooked Joe Biden just called ALL my supporters GARBAGE – HE WAS TALKING TO YOU!’
Biden backtracked. Harris distanced herself from his remark. But it was too late. Trump knew he was on to a winner, and yesterday he performed his second brilliant and hilarious campaign stunt of the past ten days. Sporting a high-vis trucker vest, he walked off Trump Force One, his luxury jet, in the swing state of Wisconsin. He then climbed into the front of the magnificent white garbage truck marked Trump-Vance and drove off the tarmac. After that, still wearing the vest, he went on stage in the city of Green Bay and said: ‘I have to begin by saying 250 million Americans are not garbage,’ he said. His hyperbole is half the fun: 250 million is not the number of Trump fans in America; it’s roughly the amount of Americans who didn’t vote for Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump also made some amusing, instantly viral remarks about how his staff told him he looked slim in his common-man attire. It was as electrifyingly ridiculous and internet-savvy a campaign moment as his shift in McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. ‘Genius-level trolling,’ said Elon Musk, on Twitter/X, and many people agree. When it comes to trash talk, you can’t beat the Donald.
That said, Trumpworld might be getting carried away with the power of these comedy routines. Yes, it’s publicity gold. But Trump’s recovery in the polls in recent weeks has mostly come from Harris’s poor performances, not his sublime attention-grabbing.
Last night, at Harris’s rally at the Pennsylvania Farm Show, the stench of manure was overwhelming. A perfect metaphor for her candidacy, some might say, if we weren’t all too busy talking about the Republican nominee and his garbage truck.
This article was first published in Freddy Gray’s subscriber-only Americano newsletter. Sign up here.
Can Rachel Reeves calm the markets?
The more investors dig into Labour’s first Budget, the less they seem to like it. After the Office for Budget Responsibility published its assessment of the Chancellor’s measures yesterday afternoon, some immediate (and expected) volatility set in. But rather than settling down, market jitters seem to have worsened today, as a gilt sell-off saw government borrowing costs hit their highest level in 2024 this afternoon, with the 10-year gilt yield reaching 4.52 per cent and the five-year gilt yield reaching 4.41 per cent.
So far the situation is manageable for the government – but is a strong indication that the markets are not quite as on-side with their plans for spending as had been suggested. It seems not even the staggering £40 billion worth of tax hikes have not balanced out the £160 billion worth of additional borrowing Rachel Reeves has planned over the course of this Parliament.
Meanwhile the pound has also taken a tumble, falling to its lowest point in two months: $1.29 against the dollar. While austerity in the form of tax hikes was certainly implemented in the Budget, it hasn’t quite worked to convince markets that the UK’s plans for borrowing are fully under control.
Part of the problem will be the massive increase in spending on services like the NHS. With more than £22 billion worth of additional day-to-day spending going to the health service (without any reform attached), already public policy circles are doubting that tax and borrowing will stick at the levels announced in yesterday’s Budget. Paul Johnson at the Institute for Fiscal Studies notes how ‘incredibly front loaded’ the borrowing and spending is; ‘day-to-day public service spending, after inflation and the additional cost to public sector employers of rising NI, is set to rise by 4.3 per cent this year and 2.6 per cent next year, but then by just 1.3 per cent each year thereafter.’ Similar to the Tories’ pledge to cut spending dramatically in the years to come, it’s hard to believe Labour really intends to reduce its spending plans so substantially, especially in the run-up to an election. This suggests yesterday’s announcements are the start of what’s to come. Far from giving markets confidence, it’s uncertainty that has come to characterise the government’s borrowing strategy.
It should be said that Reeves is still far off breaking her own borrowing rules. And unlike the aftermath of the mini-Budget, the story of borrowing costs is being told over days, not hours. But costs are still moving in a more expensive direction, which will cause the Treasury plenty of problems, even if no policy undergoes a U-turn. The OBR forecasts that both interest rates and government borrowing costs will be roughly a quarter of a percentage point higher due to Reeves’s plans – but if headline figures settle higher than expected, that will add billions of pounds on to the government’s bills.
Winning over the markets was one of the biggest challenges in Reeves’s first Budget – and borrowing more was always going to be tricky, with the era of low interest rates long gone. So far they don’t seem convinced that this is an agenda for growth, which is why investors want a bigger pay-off for the risk they’re taking. Don’t be surprised if the goalposts shift: the hope for the government now is not that markets celebrate this Budget, but that they come to tolerate it.
China hawks hit back at Lammy rapprochement
First, it was the Chagos Islands. Then it was David Lammy’s visit. Now many in Westminster are asking: when it comes to China, where does this government draw the line? In recent weeks it has been reported that Labour is both dropping plans to classify Beijing’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims as a ‘genocide’ and is pushing to reopen trade talks via the Jetco forum. So much for getting tough on Xi eh?
Mr S hears word though that already a backlash is under way. The seven current and former parliamentarians who were sanctioned by China in March 2021 have fired off an angry reprimand to Lammy, in the wake of his visit to Beijing. In a letter seen by The Spectator, the likes of Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Tom Tugendhat and Neil O’Brien have co-signed a statement to Lammy addressing rumours of ‘a deal whereby our sanctions might be lifted in exchange for the UK withdrawing sanctions against those who have mercilessly persecuted the Uyghur community’.
Such a proposal would be ‘beneath contempt and must be rejected’, they warn. The group says that:
Each of us would rather remain unjustly sanctioned by the CCP than to insult the suffering of the Uyghur community by comparing the genocidal atrocities they have endured with what has happened to us. Such a tit-for-tat exchange would show Beijing that they can evade accountability by imposing entirely unjust penalties upon foreign lawmakers. We must not do it.
The letter – co-signed by Baroness Kennedy, Lord Alton, Nus Ghani and Tim Loughton – notes how the Labour party ‘stood so strongly with the Uyghur community in opposition’ and urges them to ‘make clear to the Uyghur community that the many lives destroyed in Xinjiang mean something.’
Will they now do so?
What’s upset Kim Jong-un?
When Kim Jong-un does not get what he wants, he makes his displeasure known far and wide. Over the past few weeks, one would have thought that Kim would be reasonably content. In return for sending artillery shells, ballistic missiles, and most recently, troops to Russia, North Korea has been receiving food, cash, and most likely, technological assistance, the latter which is what Kim craves the most. But instead of calming down, Kim has responded in the way that he knows best – by launching yet another intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) designed to hit the US mainland.
Relations between the two Koreas have plummeted to a nadir over the past year
From North Korea’s perspective, Thursday’s launch of a Hwasong-18 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was something to be proud of. It was not just the fact that, as Kim Jong-un proclaimed in a statement soon afterwards, the ICBM test signalled North Korea’s unwavering ‘will to respond to our enemies’. The timing of the launch was no accident, with the world’s eyes glued to the Ukraine war and as observers keen to dissect just who has been – and will be – sent from Pyongyang to Kursk and beyond.
For North Korean troops, many of whom will be little more than Putin’s mercenaries, the war will provide crucial combat experience in a modern-day war, but on an unfamiliar terrain with unfamiliar people and in an unfamiliar language. Their deployment has catalysed a deluge of speculation as to how they will fare, and what tactics they will use. Thus, for the North Korean regime, how better to divert global attention from one sanctions-violating action to another than by testing an intercontinental ballistic missile for the first time in nearly a year?
This morning’s launch was not just any ordinary ICBM test-fire. The missile may have only flown for ten minutes longer than the ICBM launched in December 2023, but with a flight time of 86 minutes – and having reached a height of 4,350 miles – it marked the longest flight time of any North Korean missile to date. Moreover, the fact that this test was of a solid-fuel ICBM underscores another concerning development in North Korea’s missile technology. Solid-fuel missiles are not only easier to manoeuvre than their liquid-fuel counterparts, but harder to detect.
The bleak reality is that with its missiles flying higher, further, and for longer than before, Pyongyang is making progress on its quest to improve the scope and sophistication of its nuclear weapons and delivery systems. This was, perhaps, to be expected. After all, in January 2021, Kim Jong-un announced his five-year military plan with the explicit aim of enhancing the quantity and quality of his conventional and unconventional weapons arsenals, including satellite technology, drones, ICBMs with a 9,320 mile-range, and, of course, solid-fuel missile capability.
But the North Korean leader is upset. For a start, he is unhappy – as he has always been – with South Korea’s alliance with the United States, a relationship that is only going to strengthen over time. With North Korea justifying today’s ICBM launch as a response to the ‘nuclear alliance’ between Washington and Seoul, Kim is making clear how he wants to be left alone and has no interest in negotiations unless North Korea will benefit. In Kim’s mind, the United States’s strengthening relationship with South Korea and Japan will not stop him from spending vast sums of money on missile delivery systems at the expense of the 26 million North Korean people. In fact, it will only motivate him to become even more aggressive.
Relations between the two Koreas have plummeted to a nadir over the past year, and North Korea is largely to blame. By declaring, at the start of the year, that South Korea would become the North’s ‘primary foe’ – rather than part of the same, divided but once unified Korean nation – Pyongyang has sought to justify heightened provocations towards its southern counterpart. The most infamous such provocation has been the ongoing sending of excrement-filled balloons across the inter-Korean border, with one such disbursement, only last week, reaching the South Korean presidential compound.
But maybe Kim can smile a little. Earlier today, in what was a not-so-tacit admission of just how tense inter-Korean relations have become, authorities in the South Korean Gyeong-gi provincial government declared three cities and counties near the inter-Korean border to comprise a ‘danger zone’. No anti-North Korean leaflets – what North Korea claims is the cause of its retaliation by balloon – could be dispatched from these regions, despite South Korea’s constitutional court repealing a ban on the sending of such leaflets in September last year.
With only one week to go before the US presidential election, Kim Jong-un will not be calming down. North Korea frequently ramps up provocations in US election years, both prior to the election and in its immediate aftermath. Even though a Trump victory will likely lead to Kim Jong-un meeting his correspondant for yet another round of optical summitry, sometime in the future, such occasions will likely have little effect in altering North Korea’s attitude towards the West.
When after the infamous ‘no deal’ of the Hanoi Summit in February 2019 – when Trump and Kim did not even have lunch – North Korea’s now-foreign minister, Choe Son Hui, declared that the Supreme Leader had ‘lost the will to negotiate’, perhaps she was foreshadowing just what the next five years would hold. ‘I want; doesn’t get’, so the saying goes: but if you’re Kim Jong-un, you’ll just keep testing missiles.
Treasury staff leave a mess after Budget tax hikes
For most Brits, there was little to celebrate in Rachel Reeves’s fiscal statement – but that didn’t stop Treasury staff from toasting the Budget. Just hours after the Chancellor delivered her 80-minute speech to MPs on Wednesday, Treasury aides made the short hop across St James’s Park to Westminster’s Two Chairmen pub. From 4 p.m. onwards, while gilt yields continued to rise and markets tried to make sense of Labour’s plans, Whitehall mandarins drank the afternoon away in a post-Budget bash. But not everyone was left feeling merry by the end of the night…
Despite Reeves enthusiastically announcing that pubgoers can now enjoy a ‘penny off a pint’, Steerpike noted that a number of trollied Treasury staffers had the audacity to turn up with shop-bought tinnies in hand. Those who were gracious enough to actually buy drinks from the establishment still caused problems, however, with one onlooker remarking that ‘they left rubbish and smashed glass everywhere’. Another regular pub presence lamented to Mr S that the evening was ‘the worst night’ the Westminster pub had seen. Good heavens.
Mr S hears that so many civil servants flocked to the famous watering hole that the Whitehall crowd ended up commandeering neighbouring streets in order to continue partying. Pedestrians struggled to push through the swathes of drinkers, while cars could barely make it onto Old Queen Street. Nothing like a beer or five to make good pub etiquette fly out the window, eh?
Car unsuccessfully attempts to force its way through throng of HMT officials as they enjoy a post-Budget pint at the Two Chairmen. Each 700 pints = a free one, thanks to Rachel Reeves’ beer duty largesse pic.twitter.com/I8suD2eS5Q
— George Parker (@GeorgeWParker) October 30, 2024
While the drink flowed, the Office for Budget Responsibility was predicting that the tax burden is now set to rise to its highest ever level. Meanwhile gilt yields opened at even higher levels this morning. Crikey. Not that Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones or indeed the Chancellor were spending time worrying about that, of course. Both were too busy celebrating outside the Two Chairmen…
Businessman tears up over Labour’s Budget
The first full day post-Budget has not been a happy one. While Labour’s spinners are hard at work trying to convince the nation – and themselves – that Rachel Reeves’s fiscal statement was a success, real people across the country are reeling from Wednesday’s announcement. Mr S wrote yesterday about how leading figures in the hospitality industry were quick to express their outrage at Reeves’s call to raise alcohol duty – but this isn’t the only sector in shock at the Chancellor’s proposals.
Salon Employers Association founder Toby Dicker spoke on Sky News today about the impact Labour’s Budget will have on his business. At times finding himself emotional, and at one point having to stop to gather himself, the visibly shocked businessman told Kay Burley: ‘I’m angry and sad and shellshocked…’. Setting out his case, Dicker told viewers:
The initial reaction from our supporters is, to be honest, shell shock. It is much, much, much worse than we ever thought it could be. I thought the worst scenario would be £75,000 for my business – it’s cost me £127,000. [The worst bit is] particularly employers’ NIC.
200 people from our industry wrote specifically a 17-page paper that went into the ministry. We’ve been speaking to HMRC for five years, we’ve been speaking to the Department for Business and Trade for five years. They’ve promised us things that they haven’t delivered on – and that’s forced most of our industry into the gig economy.
The gig economy didn’t get touched by this Budget. You can be a delivery company turning over £1.5bn, making £120 million in profit and from my calculations – although I’m doing it all on my own – you don’t pay a penny. What the hell? I pay £86,000. Why? Why? Just tell me why?
Tearing up, the businessman pushed on:
You haven’t listened to us for successive administrations. We’ve tried to tell you – and you haven’t listened. I’m sorry, I’m angry and sad and shell-shocked and our industry is totally done. They have no choice now. They’re just going to say: we have to go into this gig economy, we have to get rid of all our apprentices. We can’t afford it.
It comes after Reeves’s announcement that employers’ national insurance will rise by 1.2 per cent – a move that even the OBR has suggested could result in workforce participation to fall. The Labour government was insistent that this Budget would ‘protect the payslips of working people’, but it seems that already that promise is starting to fall apart…
Watch the clip here:
Why should we trust the IMF?
It wasn’t an aggrieved business leader, facing a sharply increased wage bill thanks to the Budget, that led the 8 a.m. news bulletin on Radio 4 this morning, but the reassuring verdict of the IMF. ‘We support the envisaged reduction in the deficit over the medium term, including by sustainably raising revenue,’ the body declared. It rather seemed as if the BBC was trying to tell us: never mind the carping from the Tories and other enemies of the government; here is a highly respected, disinterested body of wise men and women telling us that Rachel Reeves’s Budget was great.
To be fair, Nick Robinson did give the Chancellor a proper grilling a few minutes later, taking in Labour’s broken promises on National Insurance and many other things, but does the IMF really deserve to be elevated into the position of delivering the ultimate, defining judgment on the Budget? Let’s just have a look at its record in recent years. In January last year it confidently predicted that Britain would be the only major economy to suffer a shrinking economy in 2023 as the effects of Brexit continued to make their mark. In the event, the UK economy managed to keep its head above water last year; it was instead Germany that suffered a drawn-out recession, its economy suffering a 0.3 per cent slump over the year.
In 2016, in a view endorsed by the entire board, the IMF declared that Brexit would ‘do severe regional and global damage by disrupting established trading relationships’. A year later it was forced to upgrade its lowly forecasts for UK economic growth in 2017, admitting that the UK had by that stage become the fastest-growing major economy in the world. Last week it had to upgrade its forecast for the UK again this year, in what was described as a boost for Rachel Reeves, but which was really just yet another episode in a long series of having to correct excessively negative predictions for the UK.
Is the IMF biased towards Labour? It wouldn’t be a surprise, given the tendency of supra-national bodies to conform to a soft-left vision of the world. On the other hand, the IMF famously has a bit of previous with Labour chancellors, in the form of Denis Healey’s visit in 1976 to beg it for a bailout (this from an organisation which was created principally to help economic stability and growth in the developing world).
Whatever the inner political views of the IMF board, its faith in Reeves’s Budget to restore the UK public finances does seem a little misplaced. There are serious question marks over the ability of some of the Chancellor’s tax rises to raise significant – still less sustainable – revenue. Reeves, for example, expects £900 million to flow into the government’s coffers in 2028–29 thanks to the 3 per cent rise in the Energy Profits Levy. That revenue will only be realised, of course, if oil companies continue to commit to the North Sea. With an effective tax rate now of 78 per cent, together with falling oil prices, that is highly uncertain. Likewise, VAT on private school fees – no one really knows how many pupils will be withdrawn from these schools as a result. Jacking up employers’ National Insurance Contributions will certainly bring in a large quantity of extra revenue, but not necessarily quite as much as envisaged if it leads to less employment.
Our own Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) sees lower growth and slightly higher interest rates as a result of Reeves’s budget. Has that entered the IMF’s reckoning? Moreover, Reeves’s plan to balance the books by the middle of this parliament relies on fiddling with the rules on current and investment spending. Take the latter into account and she has no chance whatsoever of balancing the books, given how much she is planning to splurge on the NHS and other public services. The IMF’s intervention is certainly politically helpful to Reeves, but not for the first time it may yet be forced to retract its judgment on Britain.
Will Rachel Reeves hike taxes even higher?
Rachel Reeves has spent the morning out on the media round trying to sell her first Budget to the public. The Chancellor woke to a critical reception from the media – with headlines including ‘Halloween Horror Show’, ‘Nightmare on Downing Street’ and ‘Return of tax and spend’. Meanwhile, she is facing a backlash from the farming community, citing betrayal over the news that inheritance tax relief for farms will be limited to £1 million.
When pressed, Reeves would not rule out further tax rises later down the line
Speaking to the BBC’s Nick Robinson, Reeves was put on the defensive as she was asked to explain why she claimed ‘every Labour policy will be fully-funded and fully costed no ifs, no buts’ only to then jack up taxes to the tune of £40 billion. The Chancellor was also asked how she squared her previous claim that ‘economic growth comes from the success of business’ with her decision to put a ‘£25 billion tax on British business’ through employer national insurance. In her responses, Reeves repeatedly blamed the Tories for the ‘hard choices’ she had been forced to make – despite the OBR casting doubts on her claim to have inherited a £22 billion ‘black hole’ from the Conservative party. Reeves did acknowledge that there would be consequences to her tax rises such as smaller pay rises.
Speaking on Wednesday night at a meeting of the parliamentary Labour party, Reeves at least received a warmer reception. She urged the party to take the fight to the Tories as she made clear the political choice of the budget: ‘If they disagree with our taxes on the wealthiest or on business, they will not be able to protect the incomes of working people.’ It means that despite the criticism in the media and concerns about whether the measures will have the opposite of the intended effect on growth, Reeves’s budget is landing okay with her own party for the time being.
But could this change? It’s notable that when pressed, Reeves would not rule out further tax rises later down the line. She refused to do so nine times on the Sun’s Never Mind The Ballots – though did say she hoped the Budget would be a one-off. According to the IFS’s Paul Johnson she could need to. The head of the fiscal watchdog points out that the additional spending in the Budget is noticeably front loaded – rising over the next two years and then falling sharply. Speaking today Johnson says he is ‘willing to bet a substantial sum that day-to-day public service spending will in fact increase more quickly than supposedly planned after next year’. As I write in this week’s magazine, there are a band of cabinet ministers who would like to see that happen. If growth does not improve quickly enough, the next Labour cabinet debate could be over the manifesto promises made on tax.
Revealed: Reeves’s tax rises expose Labour’s misleading manifesto claims
Casting his mind back to the election, Mr S recalls a heated debate about which party would raise taxes most. In the final televised debate before the national poll, Sir Keir Starmer was quick to accuse then-PM Rishi Sunak of ‘repeating a lie’ – that Labour were going to raise taxes by £2,000 per person. And, to be fair, he had a point: on Sunak’s own maths the Tories would have raised taxes by, er, £3,000 per person. Awkward…
Mr S’s friends at The Spectator’s DataHub have crunched all the manifestos put out at the time to see just who really would be responsible for the greatest tax hikes – with some rather interesting results. After removing the Green eco-zealots (who planned to raise the tax burden off the scale of any graph), the Lib Dems were in the lead. Sir Ed Davey’s lot would have taken the tax burden to a staggering 38 per cent of GDP – matching a post-war high. And Labour? Starmer’s lefty lot wouldn’t be anywhere near that, voters were repeatedly reassured.
However Mr S has plotted the figures after Rachel Reeves’s big Budget announcement yesterday. They present a rather damning conclusion for Sir Keir’s crowd. It now transpires that taxes are heading for a record high by modern standards – and make even Ed Davey’s tax plans look austere. Crikey. Ticket to Bermuda, anyone?
Sturgeon paid £25,000 for election night punditry
The SNP’s Dear Leader has not had the smoothest 18 months since her resignation last year – what with the police probe into SNP finances, the exodus of members from her party and the nationalists’ staggering loss of support in the general election. But it’s not all bad news for Nicola Sturgeon. It has now emerged that Scotland’s former first minister was paid a whopping £25,000 for playing pundit back in July, after Sturgeon controversially appeared on Channel 4’s election night special. Alright for some…
The rather generous payment was logged by the SNP politician on the Scottish parliament’s register of interests’, which was published today. Sturgeon declared that her company ‘Nicola Sturgeon Limited’ received a £25,000 payment plus VAT from ITN Limited, ‘in respect of my appearance on the channel’s general election results programme’. More than that, the former FM logged ‘accommodation and car travel’, racking up an extravagant £2,800 on her hotel stay. Blimey.
Sturgeon’s media appearance has long been a source of controversy – with critics blasting the Queen of the Nats for accepting the gig after her party had slammed former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson for appearing on a similar election night show back in 2019. Mr S reckons Davidson must be doubly annoyed about that now – she only received £7,500 for the slot!
Not that it was exactly a win-win scenario for the SNP’s Dear Leader. She was caught looking more than a little uncomfortable in camera close-ups during a rather humiliating exit poll – which rightly predicted the decimation of her Westminster group. There’s always a silver lining…
Is Ofcom guilty of double standards over GB News fine?
GB News has dealt with a number of Ofcom complaints in its time, but now things have become a little more serious. The media regulator has today announced that it plans to impose a whopping £100,000 fine on Gbeebies for ‘breaking due impartiality rules’ after it aired a pre-election interview with outgoing Tory leader and former prime minister Rishi Sunak. Crikey.
The programme with which Ofcom took issue – titled People’s Forum: The Prime Minister – was, according to the media watchdog, ‘in breach of Rules 5.11 and 5.12 of the Broadcasting Code’ after Sunak was given ‘a mostly uncontested platform’ to big up the work of the government. The regulator explains that ‘given the seriousness and repeated nature of this breach’, a six-figure fine is necessary. It’s not quite the end of the matter for GB News yet, however, as the broadcaster will challenge the breach decision via judicial review – meaning that the sanction imposed by Ofcom will not be enforced until this process has concluded.
In retaliation to the media watchdog’s notice, GB News has issued a furious response. Slamming Ofcom’s decision as a ‘direct attack on free speech and journalism in the UK’, the broadcaster insists that the sanctions are ‘unnecessary, unfair and unlawful’. Going on, the channel rages:
The plan to sanction GB News flies in the face of Ofcom’s duty to act fairly, lawfully and proportionately to safeguard free speech, particularly political speech and on matters of public interest. We have believed from the very start the People’s Forum was an important piece of public interest programming, and that appropriate steps were taken to ensure due impartiality and compliance with the Broadcasting Code. It was designed to allow members of the public to put their own questions directly to leading politicians.
At the People’s Channel we will continue to fearlessly champion freedom; for our viewers, for our listeners, and for everyone in the United Kingdom. As we have all seen, this is needed more than ever.
Shots fired! The decision has sparked outrage on social media, with users levelling accusations of hypocrisy at the regulator over other broadcasters not receiving similar fines. Certainly Mr S is rather interested in Ofcom’s decision making here – not least because no such penalty has been issued to ITV’s Good Morning Britain, after it allowed presenter Ed Balls to interview Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who also happens to be his, um, wife. Despite the media watchdog receiving more than 8,000 complaints about the matter, no action has been taken on this issue so far as yet. Will Ofcom turn its guns on ITV in the same way it has GB News? Don’t hold your breath…
Labour’s £2.9bn defence boost doesn’t go nearly far enough
Anyone who is serious about the condition of the armed forces and Britain’s defence policy will not look a gift horse in the mouth. Rachel Reeves’s announcement in yesterday’s Budget that the government will spend an additional £2.9 billion on defence next year is welcome and desperately needed. But while it’s headline-grabbing, in reality it will make little difference to our national security and strategic posture.
It is acknowledged across the political spectrum that we need to spend more on defence
It is hard to think of a time, certainly since the end of the Cold War, when the international situation was so tense and challenging in so many areas. Russia’s brutal war of conquest in Ukraine is grinding towards its third winter, and although the United Kingdom has consistently been among the most unstinting donors of military and financial assistance, the West has pulled its punches. Ukrainian forces are still not allowed to use long-range ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles against all targets in Russia.
In the Middle East, Houthi militants continue to attack maritime commerce in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen. Only the United States and the United Kingdom have provided significant military force to protect shipping and take on the Iranian-backed Islamists. China continues to flex its muscles in the Pacific, especially with regard to menacing Taiwan and asserting bogus territorial rights against Taiwan and the Philippines in the South China Sea. Meanwhile, with the drawing down of the French and American military presence, the African Sahel region is increasingly coming under the influence of Russia’s Africa Corps, created from the Wagner Group’s mercenary activities in the region.
At the same time as these complex security challenges, the United Kingdom’s armed forces are at full stretch and, arguably, beyond. In January, the House of Commons Defence Committee published a damning report entitled Ready for War?, which concluded that the armed forces were ‘consistently overstretched’ and ‘require sustained ongoing investment to be able to fight a sustained, high intensity war, alongside our allies, against a peer adversary’. In March, the Public Accounts Committee revealed that the Ministry of Defence’s equipment plan for 2023-33 contained a black hole, to coin a phrase, of at least £16.9 billion between commitments and resources.
The strains are obvious. Of the Royal Navy’s five Astute-class hunter-killer submarines, none has managed to complete an operational deployment this year, and three have been in dock for more than a year. The submarine HMS Ambush has not left HM Naval Base Clyde at Faslane since August 2022. When the United States conducted air strikes against Houthi positions in Yemen earlier in the year, the United Kingdom also participated, but the Royal Air Force was only able to contribute four Typhoon FGR4 fighter aircraft from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus.
It is acknowledged across the political spectrum that we need to spend more on defence. The previous government had committed to increasing spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030 (although there was scepticism about how realistic this was). The Labour party’s manifesto pledged to match that increase, but, critically, the government has so far refused to set a timescale for this higher level of spending. Even the strategic defence review, launched in July, will not address this; its terms of reference note: ‘As set out in the Labour party’s manifesto, the government “will set out the path to spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence.” This will be dealt with at a future fiscal event’.
This is the gloomy and urgent backdrop against which the Chancellor’s additional £2.9 billion must be set. Reeves noted that it means ‘that the UK comfortably exceeds our Nato commitments’, but that should be taken as a given. The scale of the pressure on the defence budget is suggested by her subsequent remarks that we will provide ‘guaranteed military support to Ukraine of £3 billion per year for as long as it takes’. In effect, then, she has given the Ministry of Defence the equivalent to a year’s contribution to the war in Ukraine, and no more. What does ‘as long as it takes’ mean? What is the long-term plan?
Defence receiving an additional £2.9 billion is better than nothing. The Ministry of Defence’s annual budget, however, is more than £50 billion, and it is still inadequate. Until the government addresses long-term spending levels, at the very least setting a timeline for the otherwise-meaningless commitment to spend 2.5 per cent of GDP, and in truth probably spending substantially more than that, no major problems have been solved. This is a positive gesture, but a gesture is all it is.
Rachel Reeves’s Budget plan is much worse than you think
‘No plan for the economy’ is the charge being made against the government, as Conservatives take to the airwaves following the Budget.
The problem is that, in this case, the charge is simply untrue. Labour do have a plan for the economy. It is called securonomics: a worldview set out in some detail by the Chancellor herself in the Spring during her Mais Lecture. And as Paul Mason put it earlier in the year in this magazine, securonomics constitutes a ‘coherent, well founded’ plan for the economy, rooted in a ‘clear political philosophy’.
Securonomics will make Britain more lethargic, more risk averse
Securonomics, at its most basic level, is a theory about the relationship between the state and the market. In ‘an age of uncertainty’ and greater complexity, it considers a larger, activist state as a necessary development in the British economy. ‘A modern state must be more active,’ she wrote in a Labour Together paper, and work together in ‘partnership’ with business and trade unions to deliver particular outcomes.
Over the last fourteen years, the Conservatives have been the ostensibly reluctant midwives of a bigger, more interventionist state. But advocates of securonomics genuinely believe in one.
The Autumn Budget was the policy manifestation of this economic worldview, and the first opportunity for Reeves to put securonomics into practice. In concrete terms, what the Chancellor has done this week is instigate a profound transfer of resources away from productive parts of the economy and towards the state.
The Chancellor’s tax rises are in cash terms the largest in history. And while increased investment is the broader theme of her budgetary decisions, that large quantum of extra tax revenue will go towards boosting spending on the day-to-day operations of a larger and more active state.
The Budget has also reinforced a shift in decision-making authority away from households and businesses and into the hands of government. The government will now dictate to a greater extent the conditions under which businesses can take on workers. By ramping up borrowing by £142 billion over the forecast period, the government is also indicating its confidence that it can make superior investment decisions to private enterprises. And this is ultimately why they are changing the debt measure too; to facilitate an expanded role for an active state through increased borrowing.
Labour certainly has a plan, then: a plan for a great deal more planning in our economy – by the National Wealth Fund, by British Energy, by the Industrial Strategy Council, by Rachel Reeves. It’s just that their plan promises to be entirely unconducive to the task of building a more prosperous Britain. Securonomics will make Britain more lethargic, more risk averse, and more reliant on high levels of state spending.
Take regulation. On Monday, the Prime Minister stated that his government would ‘strip out needless regulation’ holding back enterprise and investment. But a greater regulatory burden is and must be the counterpart to greater economic direction from government. ‘Day one’ rights, and ‘fair pay agreements’ sound like pro-worker policies. But they will destroy jobs, stunt real pay growth and lump a £5 billion burden on British businesses.
What about investment? Everyone is agreed on the desperate need for higher levels of investment – both public and private – to support productivity growth. The question is how it should be funded. By doing so through borrowing rather than day-to-day spending restraint while simultaneously increasing Capital Gains tax, the government will, as the Office for Budget Responsibility has forecasted, impair incentives for private investment, offsetting any uptick in public investment.
Across the decisions made during the Budget, the Chancellor has conducted ‘a hands-on rebalancing between market forces and state control, tipping more power towards the latter’. Investment needs to have ‘guardrails’, so that it advances the political ends of the government. Risk taking by businesses needs to be regulated, so that the state can guarantee the security of workers. Money needs to be shifted from businesses to the government, because the latter knows how to spend it better.
This is, of course, but a rearticulation of a very old economic dogma – that in a complex society, the government can make better decisions than you can. That the welfare state can better provide for people’s security than households savings and private investment can. And as surely as night follows day, its practical effects when acted upon will be the same – inflation, higher taxes, and wealth destruction.
Whoever is elected the leader of the Opposition in just a few days’ time may find it very difficult at first to unify the Conservative party around an alternative governing agenda. They might, however, find it comparatively easier to galvanise Conservatives around a critique of securonomics – an economic worldview that is deeply antithetical to a free and enterprising economy, and one which will ultimately prove to be impoverishing.