I am never astonished by politicians duplicity, but the idea for the devolving of taxes to various Mayors etc really takes the biscuit. You, Mr. Punter, are going to have even MORE money taken from you. That money will go the the Mayor (or whoever) of your area. Now very sensibly, Mayors who have Conservative principles guiding them have said they will rebate that money to the people within their area. But wait. The Government won’t allow that. You can’t help people. You can only spend it. And we all know how good politicians are at spending our money. And it IS our money, not theirs.
But to achieve this stupendous idiocy, there has to be YET ANOTHER layer of civil servants sitting on growth boards, equalisation formulas worked out, and sign-off processes with oversight thereafter. As anyone with half a brain knows, government always needs another set of people between themselves and the actually work or results so they can escape responsibility. That layer costs money and plenty of it and has no real idea about what is best for a given community. Giving Mayors funds has a logic. That logic requires they can do what they like with it for good or ill, and NOT be simply another way for the Treasury to steal our money and spend it unwisely.
We have reached the point where the entire insanity of what is happening fiscally has boiled over and no one is recognising that things must change. There have been some mutterings by John Healey and Burnham wants to fix social care (read: tax everybody even more - or borrow it) but none of it amounts to a hill of beans.
We have fallen to 18th in the World prosperity league, which is hardly a surprise as less and less of what we earn is being left with us. Nor is it a surprise that literally hundreds of thousands of millionaires have left the UK. But they haven’t left the likes of Norway and Switzerland (numbers 1 and 2 in that league and regularly swapping places). Why? Because your money - YOUR money that you have earned – is not confiscated and wasted.
There are many things wrong with lots of different parts of our economy, but quite possibly the most wrong is Net Zero and the results it is having. Never mind the escalating household and commercial costs. Never mind what we do will make not a jot of difference. Much more important are the macro economic effects. By that I mean, who in their right mind thought it was a great idea to run down our own homemade production and replace it with oil and gas bought overseas, imported at great cost to the UK, and followed by our money going to countries that do not wish us well? Do they really think importing it is a better idea? And why the surprise at BP – that’s BRITISH Petroleum – selling its entire North Sea operation. Why? The announcement enunciated it perfectly. “ We can deploy our resources more profitably elsewhere.” Of course they can and guess what? Rational business people do exactly that.
In case you missed it, 53% of the areas in the UK have a dubious honour. The proportion of workless households ROSE in 53% of UK areas. I can’t help but think the Government have no idea that that means there are fewer and fewer people to tax. Having no economic or business training they are slowly but surely destroying any basis for prosperity.
I was incredibly pleased this week to read Tim Worstall’s article about yet another idea of Burnham’s – The National Care Service. As ever, no real thought has been put to it, just a bland spend the money when in fact that is the exact mistake made all those years ago when the National Health Service was founded. For it to work properly, the difference between ASSURANCE and INSURANCE needs to be remember and acted upon. Insurance is against catastrophe while Assurance is saving towards something that might be a certainty. I doubt anyone would seriously question the fact that the NHS is staggeringly good at emergencies (car crashes, heart attacks and the like). It’s not terribly good at the mundane (GP appointments, annual check-ups etc). If only the latter was properly opened up to the private sector, as Tim says, we would have GP receptionists phoning US at 8am, and then chasing us to remind us because if we don’t turn up we get charged anyway. I did a little digging and discovered at my own surgery, 19% of all GP appointments don’t happen – or are changed. That is an enormous waste of resources that Mr. Market would sort out in a flash.
I can do no better than point you to Tim’s last few sentences of the article. Profit mandates efficiency and competition and lower prices for all. What is being suggested is MORE tax and MORE State direction. I can confidently predict this will merely be another failing State body that will, over the years, have more and more money thrown at it for no discernible benefit to anyone at all. The powers that be should spend less time punishing wealth and more time supporting it. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
As you know I love giving you the latest idiocy from the Treasury and HMRC. I’ve mentioned cigarettes and tobacco before (never mind vapes) which have long since passed the tax-raising point in the Laffer Curve and are heading inexorably towards zero. Despite official protestations that the trade in illegal tobacco is falling, for the last year there were official figures, smokers got through some 28 BILLION cigarettes. According to HMRC only 14 billion were cleared for legal sale in the same period. All the rest went to feed organised crime. UCL did a survey which shows some 23.1% of smokers in 2025 bought illegal cigarettes. Never mind the loss of revenue, never mind feeding crime, that simple fact is a condemnation of the system that makes people break the law with a concomitant drop in people’s law abidingness ( if there is such a word)
In an unrelated happening, the 20 millionth Bitcoin has been mined. When the next halving occurs around April 2028, the DAILY issuance of Bitcoin will be just 225. Assuming the 21million cap remains – and why would it not - there will be another 115 years or so of issuance at steadily reducing quantities. Just remember it started out at 50 BTC every 10 minutes. That’s 300 per hour. Makes you think.
Add that to the headline I saw in the FT which was “Wall Street learns to love Blockchain” and you have a distinct shift in thinking. As I say, makes you think.
