Girrrl Poorerrr!!!

Labour’s first budget just doesn’t add up

Who remembers the Pasty Tax? George Osborne’s 2012 budget proposal to simplify taxes by slapping VAT on the price of a hot and nutritious takeaway snack?

Obviously claiming he wanted to ‘simplify taxes’ was just Osborne’s way of saying, ‘I’m putting up taxes’.  And Greggs fans were quick to notice that the price of a steak bake had skyrocketed by 20%.

Humbled and humiliated, a pasty faced Osborne was forced to reverse the move just a week or so later.

Well, imagine George Osborne’s Pasty Tax Budget fell in love with Liz Truss’s 2022 Mini Budget. And they had a baby.

That grotesque progeny, an unholy abomination, combining pernicious penny pinching, with foolhardy profligacy, would probably look a lot like the hideously deformed monstrosity that is Rachel Reeve’s Halloween Horror Show of a Labour Budget.

Kill it. Kill it with fire.

Look. I know a lot has been written about the maths mangling madness that Reeves wheeled out last Wednesday. And as ever, only writing once a week, I’m late to the party.

But the more I read, the more thoughts I had. So here we go.

First off, a quick disclaimer.

I am not, on any level equipped to proffer an informed opinion on this, or any budget. I have no financial qualifications whatsoever. Nor have I ever worked as an economist at the Bank of England.

But then again, neither, it turns out, has Rachel Reeves.

It was recently revealed that despite what it claims on her CV, she only ever worked for the Old Lady of Threadneedle St, as ‘support staff’.

I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds awfully like Rachel Reeves was the person you’d call when the photocopier ran out of toner, or when Mervyn King’s dog needed taking for a ‘walk’. (Don’t forget to take a little bag Rachel).

Maybe I’m being unfair. And Rachel Reeves is actually a financial whiz.

After all, it must take real genius to work out that the best way to to fill an entirely illusionary, £22bn fantasy ‘black hole’ of your own imagination, is to put up actual voters’ real world taxes by £41bn.

To put £41bn into context. That’s more than the entire GDP (£38bn) of Estonia.

So yes. That’s a lot.

Reeves’ first act on Budget Day, was to demand a pat on the back, special praise, and rapturous commendation, not for making wise and balanced financial decisions, which is supposedly her job, but for being a woman.

And fair enough. It’s an impressive qualification, shared only by a vanishingly small, rare as hen’s teeth, 50% of the population.

So well done Rachel!

Still, the news came as quite the revelation to most Labour MPs. Who wondered why, if Reeves was actually a woman, she was here, lecturing them robotically in the House of Commons, and not beating the crap out of another, much smaller woman, in an Olympic boxing ring, or waving her penis about in front of some school girls in the female changing room at her local swimming baths.

Reeves said

‘To girls and young women everywhere, I say let there be no ceiling on your ambitions, your hopes, or your dreams’.

Frankly, it was a bit embarrassing.

I know I’m repeating myself. But if they keep doing it, I’ll keep saying it.

How can Labour sanctimoniously claim to be some kind of progressive powerhouse when it can’t even boast a single female leader, let alone four, (Go Kemi!) and three, (count them three!) lady PMs, like the bigoted, chauvinistic, and reactionary Tories?

Again, I don’t really care. And like a good liberal, and the father of brilliantly talented, strong minded daughters, I absolutely believe in the abilities of women. But how can you put your party on such a moral high horse, and claim that it is a mouldbreaking trailblazer for women’s rights, when a line up of your past leaders looks less diverse than a march for Tommy Robinson?

To girls and young women everywhere, I say, don’t let Wikipedia cribbing Rachel Reeves be your role model. You can do a whole lot better than that. Trust.

Rachel Reeves and the Labour Party spent the entire election campaign and their first three months in office insisting, ad nauseam, that they would not put up taxes on working people.

So it’s no surprise that Reeves’ first actual announcement was to put up taxes on working people.

Hiking up the National Insurance that employers will have to pay on their workers’ salaries.

Now I know YOU know how this works. But many people, including until very recently me, don’t. So let’s have a quick primer.

Imagine I were a boss of a media sized firm, and I wanted to employ someone to fill an important role in my company. So maybe something vital like a Diversity and Inclusion Officer, or a Reparations Accountant.

I’m happy to pay £70,000 a year for such a pivotal role. And so, after a long, equitable and fair interview process, where I discount anyone working class, white, male, or qualified, I eventually pick a recently transitioned, blue haired, graduate called Xanthi.

OK. Now I have to add £70,000 to my annual costs so I can pay xer wages right?

Wrong. I actually have to spend £78,000. Because I have to pay the government £8,000 just for the privilege of employing ze.

It’s not like a tax on jobs. It is literally, a tax on jobs.

It’s nuts. Or in Xanthi’s case. No nuts.

Of course a Kier’s gotta Two Tier. So the new 15% rate for employer NI is only payable in the private sector. The public sector-government departments, and the civil service get a pass. Which means that man of the people Starmer has created not just a Two Tier Justice System. But a Two Tier Tax System as well.

From now on Britain’s ever more impoverished private sector workers will be subsidising the jaw droppingly generous public sector pensions of government workers.

While they themselves must look forward to an old age, increasingly defined by misery, cold, penury and want.

Seems fair.

And it’s not like the public sector offers value for money.  I was struck by this tweet from the brilliant Matt Ridley in response to a graph, copied below, showing how productivity in the public sector has flatlined.

‘How in heaven's name is it even possible to achieve zero productivity growth in the public sector in the quarter century that saw the rise of the internet, mobile data, social media, satnav, LEDs etc etc?’

He makes a great point. Imagine a private haulage company that failed to become more efficient after the introduction of mobile phones, computerised inventories, and fleet logistics software. You’d have to imagine it. Because such a company would have gone bust years ago.

Productivity in the NHS for instance has actually dropped by 11% since 2019.

But rather than demand any meaningful reforms. Or god forbid, slowly replace it with a health system which actually works for the people using and paying for it, not just the people running it, Reeves has instead announced a further £22.6bn of funding.

With no strings attached.

The Kings Fund, the leading independent authority on UK Healthcare spending, and where I get all my NHS figures from, says

This is a budget that will help keep the show on the road for health care services and deliver some improvement, but it is unlikely to deliver a step change in access or quality to care.

In other words. It’s not going to make a blind bit of difference. And I bet we won’t have to wait long before health chiefs come back to demand even more.

Oh. Hang on. Here you go.

‘NHS set to receive 4% budget rise but heath care chiefs say it may not be enough.’

Even for greedy NHS money guzzlers, that really was quick.

Labour seems to think that the more money we throw at our public services the better and more efficient they become. That’s clearly not true.

And it’s not just the Health (Out of) Service.

Look, I’m sure there are plenty of hard working, dedicated and efficient people working in the public sector. But as a whole it is an a metastasising money pit, an ever expanding albatross, employing 500,000 more people today than it did ten years ago, and dragging down the British economy by leaching off the productive, private sector’s hard work, application and profits.

I was not surprised this week to hear of a delay riddled rail company which is still, at the insistence of rail unions, using fax machines to organise its work rotas.

And before you tell me that the railways were privatised by John Major in 1993. They weren’t.

If they were, then the government wouldn’t be the one negotiating with capitulating to the rail unions, and awarding them a bumper, backdated 14% pay boost.

Not to worry though. All this waste, torpor and ossification is set to become a thing of the past. Thanks to another one of Reeve’s brilliant wheezes.

She will end snowballing state bureaucracy, ballooning costs and the ever expanding number of new government departments.

By creating a whole new government department.

The Office of Value For Money.

Yup. Rachel Reeve’s plan to stop the government squandering our wages, entails inventing yet another, expensive, unnecessary, and senseless way for the government to squander our wages.

Makes sense.

Still, Reeves is not messing about. The chair of this pointless new sink hole is David Goldstone. Who should know a thing or two about throwing away taxpayer cash on crap we neither want or need, seeing as he is also on the board of HS2.

A transport scheme so wasteful, bent and egregious, it makes Nicola Sturgeon’s caravan look like a fair and honest use of voters’ money.

Next Rachel Reeves announced that she will be borrowing an extra £140 bn over the course of this Parliament. (That’s over 3.5 Estonias fact fans!)

But don’t for a minute think she’s breaking the strict and ‘non negotiable’ fiscal rules set out in the Labour manifesto which dictate that ‘day to day government spending has to be covered by revenues, and that debt as a share of the economy must be falling [at the end of this parliament]’.

She absolutely isn’t.

Because Reeves just ripped up those rules, threw them in the bin, and wrote herself some new ones.

You go girl!! You’re breaking that glass ceiling. By sending public borrowing through the roof.

I want to keep this short, so I’ll leave specific budget measures there. Except to say, a penny off a pint in a pub? I haven’t drunk alcohol since 2008. And even I found that insulting.

When my daughters were young and adorably cute we would sometimes play shops.

The game essentially entailed me slapping a price sticker saying 1p or 2p on stuff, iPads, iPhones, shoes, the TV, various toys, and the cat.

Items which the girls could then purchase, using the ‘money’ I gave them. Actually worthless tokens, I had written out myself on little bits of paper.

Listening to Rachel Reeves’ budget brought it all back.

None of the numbers, the predictions, the forecasts, the fiscal plans, the ‘black holes’, the economic targets, the inflation figures, the government’s projected costs, any of it, bears any relation to reality.

It’s just fantasy economics.

The idea that these measures will create ‘growth’ is mental. It’s unreal. A nonsense. A chimera.

The only thing which looks set to grow under this Labour government is the hardship of poor people, the number of jobless, the amount of businesses going bust, the misery of the middle classes, the national debt, and the number of ambitious, talented, productive girls and young women everywhere, (hopefully mine included ) who refuse to let Rachel Reeves and Labour put a ceiling on their ambitions, hopes and dreams, and so pack up their bags, their aspirations, and their potential, and head out the door.

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Thank you for reading Low Status Opinions.

Last week I wrote about the Tory Leadership Election, which Kemi Badenoch has won. I have to say, with caveats, I think that’s a good result.

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LSO