Who remembers when Chancellor Rachel Reeves promised that the £40bn worth of tax rises she had just imposed on Britain’s struggling bus drivers, shopkeepers, lorry drivers, business owners, self employed, and even schoolchildren in her car crash October 2024 budget, was a one off?
“This is not the sort of Budget we would want to repeat,”
She honked while demonstrating all the relatability, charm, and humanity usually associated with the subject of a Channel 5 documentary on teenage serial killers.
“But this is the Budget that is needed to wipe the slate clean and to put our public finances on a firm trajectory.”
Five months later and that ‘firm trajectory’ is an economic death spiral, a no growth, low productivity, doom loop.
The proximity alarms are screaming ‘Terrain! Terrain! Terrain!’ and our nation is hurtling, full pelt and flaming, towards the mountainside.
Now it’s Spring Statement time and it looks like Rachel from Accounts is coming back for more.
Of course she is.
The ever unreliable OBR has already halved its growth forecasts for the year. Which shows what geniuses these pen pushing statisticians really are, because I seem to remember being taught at school that it’s impossible to divide zero, by two.
The economy might be bombing worse than Disney’s live action remake of Snow White but don’t blame Rachel Reeves. She’s only the Chancellor of Exchequer. So ‘nothing to do with me Guv’ she says.
It’s all Donald Trump’s fault.
Of course it is. Who can forget that one time when The Donald forced Ed Miliband to destroy Britain’s energy sector, made Keir Starmer chuck £11bn of our hard earned wages into a fiery pit marked ‘Foreign Climate Aid’, and compelled Reeves herself to close down thousands of British businesses by hiking up everyone’s National Insurance contributions?
Damn you to Hell you orange monster!
Britain’s lack of cash is becoming a real problem for Labour. Especially if it ever wants to accomplish it’s much heralded, ‘Five missions to rebuild Britain’ including
‘Build an NHS fit for the future
that is there when people need it; with fewer lives lost to the biggest killers;’
Biggest killers? I’m no Amanda Pritchard, but I’m guessing that would be a combination of inadequate cancer screening, a seven and half million long waiting list, and Lucy Letby.
Labour is also dedicated to
Achieving Net Zero by 2030.
(Don’t get me started. Or Substack will send me one of those ‘This post is too long for e mail’ warnings).
And declares it wants to
Take back the streets
(When your government is compelled to share its headline policies with murder capital of the world, El Salvador, you know your country really is in trouble).
Labour also pledges
Every straight white male to be guaranteed a prison place by 2027.
Only joking.
Maybe.
And
A firm commitment to start World War Three.
Not joking.
Worryingly.
Because now that someone, (I’m guessing Lord Alli, or that nice voice coach lady) has told Colonel Sir Keir how dashing and handsome he looks in camo, he’s gone full Action Man.
This one time Trotskyite has swapped Jarrow for Jingoism. Flitting off to a military base in Estonia (any excuse to wear this totes gorge jacket Babes) just so he ‘can remind everyone’ that Russia is now, has been, and always will be, ‘a constant threat’.
Though sadly the effect of Sargent Sir Starmer’s doom laden warmongering was somewhat undermined by his nasal monotone.
Instead of terrifying listeners with the prospect of an inevitable and impending Russian invasion, he sounded instead like a middle ranking primary school teacher, reminding a class of seven year olds to update the hamster rota.
The full video here.
Yet for people of my age, there was something warmly familiar, nostalgic, and even reassuringly cosy about watching a Labour Prime Minister warning that the country is facing imminent, unavoidable, and almost wholly imaginary annihilation, at the hands of a scary foreign despot.
Remember when Saddam Hussein was just forty five minutes away from wiping out London?
Yeah. Turned out that was nonsense too.
And we’ve since discovered you don’t need a bunker full of non existent WMD to turn our nation’s capital into an uninhabitable wasteland.
Sadiq Khan is perfectly happy to do the job for just £160 grand a year.
Of course World Wars don’t come cheap.
So where is General Starmer going to get the money to pretend to fight this one?
Easy. He’s going to steal it from the disabled.
At least that’s what both the Labour government, and the enemies of the Labour government, (confusingly many of whom are members of the Labour government), want you to believe.
This week I read how
Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall [has] announced plans to cut Britain’s welfare bill by £5bn as Ms Reeves, the Chancellor, attempts to balance the books during her update on the state of the public finances in next week’s Spring Statement.
I read ‘balance the books’ and genuinely laughed out loud.
The UK’s National Debt is currently festering at a bum squeaky £2.78 trillion.
While the cost of servicing that debt is swallowing up around £110bn of our wages each and every year.
So shaving £5bn from the welfare bill to ‘balance the books’ is like chucking an ice bucket overboard, in an attempt to save Titanic.
This is a fantasy saving. A chimera summoned from the ether to ferment confected outrage. The ensuing ‘backbench rebellion’ concocted to give the impression that actually yes, Labour really is serious about taking those ‘tough decisions’.
It isn’t.
Even the BBC can’t currently point to exactly where the axe will fall.
And that’s because it seems that what Kendall actually plans to do is tighten up the eligibility criteria for some benefits. While any actual cut to sickness benefit looks set to be largely offset by a general uplift to Universal Credit.
And let’s add some perspective.
It is projected that sickness benefit will suck up a quarter of all income tax revenue by 2030, and right now we’re supposed to believe that four million people, that’s one in eight of Britain’s workforce, are literally too ill to do any kind of work whatsoever.
Even if they were, and they aren’t, this level of spending is clearly unsustainable.
But somehow we’re still handing over brand new top of the range cars, practically for free, to people who claim they are feeling ‘anxious’.
(I haven’t got time to go into the absolute scandal of the £7bn (£7bn!!!) Motabilty Scheme here. But I guarantee the details would make your blood boil.
Which is actually great news if you fancy a new car. Because having ‘boiling blood’ can earn you quite a few extra Pip points.)
It’s increasingly obvious that Britain’s welfare system needs to be completely rebuilt from the ground up. To ensure that the genuinely sick, the most vulnerable, and people who are really in need, get all the help they’re entitled to.
While freeloaders, grifters, and cheats are purged from the system.
Labour has also announced it will save £3.2 bn a year by abolishing NHS England. Which has the dubious distinction of being Britain’s biggest quango, with a payroll of over 10,000 civil servants.
While the disability cuts have caused uproar in Labour ranks. We’ve heard not a peep from the backbenches about this one.
Presumably because no one, not even the NHS worshipping Labour Party, has a clue what NHS England was supposed to be doing in the first place.
I suspect this will ultimately turn out to be another fake saving.
Call me a cynic. And maybe I’ll be proved wrong.
But if the NHS workforce is genuinely reduced by 10,000 over the course of this Labour parliament I promise I will buy, and eat, a rainbow lanyard.
Even those 10,000 jobs are a drop in the ocean.
While the public sector has grown by 600,000, since 2022, public sector productivity has actually nosedived by 9%.
Essentially the state is employing more and more people, to do less and less work.
Which I guess is what has prompted Reeves to announce that she plans to ‘slash’ £2bn a year off state spending by demanding that government departments find 15% savings from their budgets.
There is a sleight of hand here. Reeves is not requiring that each department cut £2bn from its budget. This is £2bn combined. From all of them.
To put that in context, the state currently spends £1200bn a year.
£130bn of which it borrows.
So if she really wants to ‘balance the books’, then surely that’s the amount she should be aiming to save. £130bn. Not £2bn.
A big number sure. But cancelling the suicidal dash to Net Zero. Cutting the foreign aid budget. (Both of them) Eliminating DEI. And reducing the number of civil servants by, say, a quarter, would be a good start.
In a woefully inadequate attempt at balance, I have to admit this isn’t just Labour’s fault. The Tories were just as bad, if not worse.
And at least Labour are pretending to tackle waste and overspending.
Which is a win, I guess.
And look. Maybe I am being a bit unfair.
No modern British government has ever been able to shrink the size of the state.
As much as the Left like to demonise her. Even the Milk Snatcher herself, Mrs Thatcher, did not manage to make the British government any smaller.
The only state she managed to prevent expanding, was Argentina.
(Soz Javier!)
Of course when it comes to excessive spending, the elephant in the room is immigration.
There are a million foreign nationals, that is non UK citizens, currently claiming unemployment benefit in Britain.
With over 40% of Congolese, Iraqis, and Afghans claiming benefits.
I’m not being uncharitable, hard hearted, or God forbid ‘racist’, but we have to ask ourselves, why are these people even here?
We’ve been told for years that we need newcomers to ‘do the jobs British people won’t do’. But it’s plain that an increasing number of these low skilled, or more accurately, no-skilled immigrants, won’t do them either.
And if they are not contributing in any way, why can’t we send them home? They can’t all be genuine refugees. Not really.
Britains finances are in a parlous state. Instead of the ‘growth’ we were promised, our economy, and so our nation’s prospects, are actually shrinking.
We cannot keep importing the world’s poor, to sit around our town squares, hang about outside our schools, fill up our hotels, and ride around on Deliveroo bikes, while Rachel Reeves chases from our shores, the productive, the rich, the entrepreneurs, the ambitious, the talented, and the young.
We must stop pretending that we can fix the broken NHS with the odd billion here and there, a new set of reforms, or a shiny new quango. It is an outdated, socialist model, conceived for a smaller, more homogenous society. No amount of extra cash or restructuring will ever make it work.
Likewise we must acknowledge that salami slicing a few quid off the benefits bill at the expense of the unemployed and the disabled, genuine claimants or otherwise, will never ‘balance the books.’
That we cannot afford to guarantee the sovereignty of a far away nation like Ukraine, when our government is incapable, or perhaps more accurately, unwilling, to police our own borders.
And most of all we must wake up to the incontrovertible fact that the British state is too big, bloated, inefficient and unaccountable to ever serve the interests of the British people.
We need to make some radical changes.
This week Chancellor Rachel Reeves will give her Spring Statement. Whether she chooses tax rises, short term cuts, or long term borrowing, Labour will inevitably end up demanding ever more of the nation’s cash.
She would do well to realise, that just as the country has run out of money.
Its people are fast running out of patience.
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A quick note. Of course the proposed cuts to disability benefits are highly emotive. I think they are designed to be. There are many other areas where the government could cut spending without raising any controversy whatsoever, but it wants, like all governments, to make cutting the size of the state seem incredibly difficult and painful, instead of potentially quite simple, at least in the first instance, when there really is so much low hanging fruit.
Anyway, my point is, please feel free to disagree with my analysis. But if you want to accuse me of wanting to cut benefits for the most vulnerable, or starve the poor, then please save your breath, I clearly don’t.
That’s it for this time.
Thanks again for coming. I hope to see you again in a week or two.
ATB
LSO
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Author: Low Status Opinions
Karen O’Blivious – Senior political correspondent who insists she’s neutral but only interviews people who agree with her.