Shein On You Crazy Diamond

Rachel Reeves is cannibalising the economy.

There’s a famous short story by Stephen King called Survivor Type. It tells the tale of a surgeon turned drug smuggler who, through an unfortunate chain of events, finds himself marooned on a desert island with little more than the clothes he’s wearing, a sharp knife, and a bumper shipment of heroin.

The island is as barren and empty as Jo Swinson’s diary. There is no game, very little vegetation, and even Deliveroo won’t go there. And so, driven to desperation, the surgeon doses up on drugs, and starts chopping bits off himself. These he cooks, and eats. First a foot, then his ears, and eventually both legs. All go in the pot.

He is cannibalising himself. Consuming more and more of his own body, in a desperate, doomed, attempt, just to stay alive.

The story ends with the surgeon off his nut on smack. Chomping down on one of his hands. He has lost himself, or what was left of himself, to hunger, and madness.

Out of his mind, incoherent, and delirious, his final, self defeating act is to scribble down, in deranged detail, a blueprint for Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ demented tax policies.

I’m joking.

But only a bit.

Because Reeves really is lopping huge slices off the UK economy, and greedily consuming them, in a ruinous, futile, attempt to make it ‘grow’.

She slices and chomps, chomps and slices.

Reeves is gorging herself, on the wealth of our nation.

Charging VAT on children’s education, imposing inheritance tax on family farms, demanding triple council tax on second homes, she ramps up National Insurance rates, and uses fiscal drag to entrap ever more low paid workers in higher tax brackets.

Reeves is literally trying to sustain the nation’s finances. By cannibalising our economy.

With her latest demented cash grab, Reeves has identified an until now, tiny, but tasty, pinky toe of tax raising opportunity, which she plans to gobble up, and swallow down, with gluttonous delight.

Shein is a company which might be unfamiliar to those unpractised in the ways of Tik Tok and Instagram. (I don’t want to pigeonhole my readers but I’m guessing most of you are not big on Doom Scrolling).

Like similar online retailer Temu, Shein is a Chinese company which uses social media as a shop window for its dirt cheap, highly fashionable, disposable clothes, doodas, trinkets and baubles. These it sells direct to British consumers, usually young, cash strapped, teenagers (I declare an interest. I have two) at breathtakingly low prices.

And here’s where Reeves spies a new, tax gouging opportunity.

Currently individually packaged goods entering the country with a value of less than £135 do not incur import duties. UK consumers can buy them tax free. Which means cheaply.

But of course Rachel Reeves simply cannot abide the thought of hard pressed British shoppers getting an untaxed bargain. And so what has up until now been a small, barely noticed benefit for British shoppers, and a boon for hard up youngsters, has been rebranded an unacceptably rapacious ‘tax loophole’ by our joyless, money grabbing, fun police of a chancellor.

Disingenuous as her fake CV would suggest, Rachel Reeves, (the very definition of a ‘lunatic fringe’) is making the preposterous claim that she’s slapping taxes on these mail order goods, not to raise revenue, or to squeeze a tiny bit more cash from the pockets of the hard pressed British public, but to somehow, ‘save the high street’.

The illogic being, that unable to buy a party dress from China for £6, British teenagers will rush down to Westfield, and buy one for £160 from Cos instead.

Her ‘thinking’ genuinely seems to be that people will flock to buy expensive things, if only she can use the tax system to make them poor enough.

It’s utter nonsense. And makes about as much sense as a David Lammy lecture on the female reproductive system.

Look, I’m no fan of companies like Shein and Temu. They sell low quality tat made in Chinese factories using, what has been alleged, is little more than slave labour.

But if British people want low quality tat, then they should be able to buy it at low quality tat prices.

And not have that price inflated by a government which pretends to be acting in British interests, while insisting on taking its own cut of the profits.

Just so it can splurge its share on free weight loss jabs for fatties, gold plated, six figure pensions for thousands of retired civil servants, and expensive legal aid for foreign crooks.

And of course, slave labour is bad. But you already knew that right?

And yet we seem totally relaxed when that same forced labour is building solar panels to blanket our countryside, (while Mad Ed Miliband simultaneously switches off the sun). And making iPhones for the middle classes.

And yes I have an iPhone. Of course I do. Although I have managed to look after mine for over four years. Unlike the nation’s civil servants, who in the first ten months of Labour’s rotten reign have somehow conspired to ‘lose’ a total of 3,166 iPhones, iPads, laptops, and other gadgets.

Where could all these expensive devices have got to? Who knows? It’s a real mystery.

Although I’d suggest these pricey gadgets are still exactly where the light fingered butterfingered civil servants left them.

For sale on ebay.

After all, even disgraced Labour transport minster Louise Haig, couldn’t possibly have nicked all of them.

If Rachel Reeves really wanted to ‘save the High Street’, and it does need saving, the retail sector lost 3,802 businesses last year, why is she enacting a suite of policies which are clearly designed to destroy it?

Sure, the meteoric rise in online shopping certainly hasn’t helped, but ultimately the internet didn’t destroy the British high street.

Government did.

With sky high business rates, (a tax on opening a shop), increases to National Insurance rates (a tax on giving someone a job) and yet another hike on the minimum wage (a tax on giving a young, inexperienced person an opportunity) which all compound to make the British retail sector unviable.

Beales, an old fashioned department store in Poole, Dorset, not the most cash deprived corner of merry olde England, is finally closing after 140 years of trading.

Sending it to join Debenhams, Woolworths, Mothercare, Rumbelows (who else used to rent their TV?), and most recently, WH Smith on the great High Street in the Sky.

Beales chief executive explicitly blames Rachel Reeves, and her anti business, job destroying, high street wrecking, tax policies for his company’s collapse. Even going so far as putting her on the posters advertising his store’s closing down sale.

Everything Must Go! - Great, lets start with Rachel Reeves.

Although I’m not sure that’s actually such a brilliant marketing strategy. In fact the only company which could feasibly expect an uptick in sales by putting a government minister’s face on their product. Is Andrex.

Of course it’s not all about money.

Maybe the British high street would be a more attractive place to visit if shoppers didn’t have to run a gauntlet of rancid, shuffling drug addicts, scuttling dog-string beggars, (I literally had five come up to me in St Pancras today, one after the other), and hyena packs of feral phone thieves, all of which infest our town centres like vermin around a Birmingham bin pile.

And these days, the only thing genuinely ‘high’ about our high streets is the stench of weed which seems to follow you from every boarded up store front, to suspiciously empty Turkish barbers, to bleak and musty charity shop, like a cloying miasma of decline.

Also, retailers might be more inclined to open new town centre stores if shop owners didn’t have to watch as brazen gangs of shoplifters strolled from their stores, carrying teetering Jenga towers of stock, while the ever absent and uninterested police, keep busy elsewhere, chucking nanas into the back of paddy wagons, for posting spicy tweets.

And perhaps, without ever-expanding ULEZ zones, parking bans, 20 mph speed limits, and a myriad other insane, pernicious, traffic restrictions, families would still do their ‘big shop’ in town, rather than being forced to drive out of town to soulless, but safe, retail parks.

Of course the (Republican) elephant in the room, the thing no one in power deigns to acknowledge, is that Reeves’ new tax policy closely mirrors President Trump’s reforms of the de minimis tax law in the States. Which he has abolished as part of his tariff regime.

It’s the same as our £135 rule, only in America, the value has until now, been $800. About £600.

But why are we copying this policy? I thought that just like everything The Orange Man ever did, said, or thought, Trump’s tariffs were, you know, bad.

That they would surely crash the world economy faster than you can say ‘Liz Truss’.

In fact the pearl clutchers, catastrophisers, and doom mongers warned us that Trump’s, 10% tariffs on UK goods, which are largely still in place despite last week’s, trade deal, were so awful, destructive, and potentially catastrophic, that they would cost the British economy £22bn a year.

Which seems like a lot.

Until you realise it isn’t.

At least not in comparison to the cost of the madcap, ruinous, and expensive schemes enthusiastically initiated by our own, economically illiterate politicians.

After all, £22bn is about the amount we are wilfully borrowing from the bond markets to shovel out the door each year in Foreign Aid and Foreign Climate Aid.

To be snuffled up by the greedy gravy train of parasitic NGOs, ‘charities’, corrupt foreign officials, and cash bloated, mutually onanistic ‘non profit organisations’, which beneficently battle global poverty, injustice, and climate change from the moral high ground of their ivory towers, penthouse suites, and private jets.

And £22bn is nothing compared to the £152 bn our government is currently having to borrow from our grandchildren each year, just to keep the country (barely) afloat.

But most importantly, £22bn is literally insignificant compared to the truly eye watering, nation sinking, costs of Net Zero.

Which even its most ardent proponents accept will cost the British economy, (by which they mean people like us, and our kids), trillions upon trillions of pounds.

Money which won’t ’save the planet’ but will keep people like us poor, while making the elite, subsidy suckling classes, rich.

Whether you agree with them or not, Trump’s tariffs are a component of a larger plan to bring industry and manufacturing back to America.

Part of a genuine ambition to ‘Make America Great Again’.

It might work. It might not.

But at least Trump’s long term goal is not to purposely, expensively, and enthusiastically, send his own country and people, back to a pre industrial Stone Age.

Ultimately, the decline of our high streets mirrors the decline of our nation.

It is not simply the result of ‘outside forces’ and foreign competition.

It is the inevitable result of decades of terrible choices made by stupid people. A series of catastrophic decisions which have compounded, one upon the other, to create an unstoppable cycle of degeneration, deterioration, and decay.

And now, in a futile, kack handed effort to mitigate against their own mistakes, our clueless bosses are cannibalising the economy, condemning our nation to a doom loop of suffocating regulation, weak minded meddling, and punitive, industry crushing taxation.

It will never, can never, work.

And yet these gluttonous, rapacious fools will continue greedily consuming our nation’s wealth, industry, and human potential, until there is literally nothing left.

The ultimate horror of this story isn’t that a ravenous, cannibalistic Rachel Reeves is trapped on a bleak, unwelcoming (unless you are an Afghan sex offender), desolate, island.

It’s that we are all trapped on it with her.

Now if you’ll excuse me.

It’s time for my elevensies. And this morning my big toe is looking particularly succulent.

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