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I approve of this

Sure, he’s not falling off paddleboards any longer, but instead he’s fallen for the latest populist bung – an increase in the personal allowance.

Identical to Reform’s bid for votes, the Lib Dems now want to raise the personal allowance, the starting point of income tax, to £15,000.

Worryingly, this is becoming a frequent refrain all across the political spectrum. Dale Vince, the Labour donor and green energy giant, wants it pushed to £15,570, while Lord Saatchi has been banging the personal allowance drum for decades.

Tim Worstall, a former Ukip candidate and current senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute, a think tank, goes even further. He argued in 2024 that the personal allowance – for National Insurance as well as income tax – should always be at or above the minimum wage.

At a 40-hour work week, that’s £26,436.80.

Reform has predicted the increase to £15,000 would cost around £21bn, while the Lib Dems claim it’ll be more like £15bn or so. The price implicit in Worstall’s policy would be astronomical.

Well, the mention in the Tele, that is. That they disapprove of it is only to be expected.

Twatto dei Tutti Twatti

Workers in Britain and the United States are getting a smaller share of national income than they did decades ago. That is not simply a feeling. The long-run data shows it.

In the UK, labour’s share of national income peaked at around 71% in the mid-1970s and has fallen to around 59%. The United States has experienced a similar long-term decline. The consequence is an enormous shift in income away from wages and towards profits, rents and the owners of capital.

There are four parts to GDP by income. Labour, Capital, Mixed Income and Taxes Upon Consumption and Subsidies to Production.

So, VAT started at 10%, fell to 8, is now 20%. That’s a tax upon consumption and increases one of the “other” components than labour or capital, yes? All those green subsidies…..are there more self-employed, which is mixed income?

Spud’s assuming, claiming, that capital and labour shares are inverses of each other. They’re not.

Bollocks

The first and perhaps most important thing to understand about markets is that they do not occur naturally. They are not the default state of human affairs that governments and regulations disturb. Markets require an institutional infrastructure that only collective action, usually through the state, can provide.

That propensity to truck and barter predates our own species. We find tool making flints hundreds and hundreds of miles from their source. We find it in other species even – funghi have markets trading elements with tree roots.

Oh, that markets might work better with a bit of regulation could be true. But markets predate homo sapiens let alone government.

Seems like an odd statement

As the economist Mariana Mazzucato told me, 80% of British finance now flows back into finance, insurance and real estate.

Not one I’d believe, either.

But Owen Jones’ new book.

When it did, the crash should have finished off this failed economic model. Instead, ordinary people were forced to pay to save it, through shredded social provision.

What shredded social provision?

There is another possibility: the left makes a different case. That it was the endless, unchecked pursuit of wealth and power by western elites, at home and abroad, that brought us here, and that the task is to rebuild what Margaret Thatcher sought to destroy – society – by investing the wealth we collectively produce. Or, as the man who wrote that buried cable put it to me: stop gutting people’s living standards

What gutting?

Prepared to agree that living standards haven’t risen much this past couple of decades. But fallen, let alone shredded, isn’t true now, is it?

Am I going to actually have to buy this book and write a note on his economic statistics?

Has already happened or am I just predicting it?

The EU is going to fine Google, isn’t it?

Google has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews. The change to what was once the gateway to the rest of the internet has been profound, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting.

That’s leveraging search dominance into new market areas. So, the EU is going to fine Google at some future date. Like they did over maps. I predict – if they’ve not done it already that is.

OK, one to not add to my pile

As any novel by Blakemore will be, it’s dazzlingly rich in lexical glamour, and this is likely to be any reader’s lasting impression of the book. Sometimes it feels as if the author is out to use every word in the English language in a startling, aestheticised, puckish way that expands both the word and the world. The result can be joyously silly. Who else would give us slugs that “blurb their elementary forms from out of the undergrowth to begin a dank and toothless festa”, or “lunar-brilliantined mud”? But there is also gravity and passion here, especially when she intimately imagines the lives of the commoners: “they rise, to fry eggs in butter and pork fat; they rise, to whet knives on scarred stone; they rise, to braid the manes of their draught horses; they rise, to count arrows; they rise, setting aside their glitchy dreams of hairy stars and blue-skinned devils; they rise, fearful and powerful, into the bright day.”

Nope, not for me. Hey, might wll be for some others but no, not for me.

Tried reading some Michael Bywater couple of days back. Knew him, vaguely, he was certainly kind to me. Loved him as Bargepole. Liked at least some of his nwspaper columns. But the book (the Big Babies one) just lost me because of the style. Couldn’t get more than a couple of chapters in. And while the word choice was different the style was, sorta, this. I believe it’s even called “literary”.

Hey mark me down as an illiterate pleb, why not, but just doesn’t appeal.

Yes, I am aware that my own style – or lack of it – irritates some to many in the same way. But, you know, there we are.

Well Georgie, there is an interesting question here

I’ve spent my working life covering neglected issues. But few are neglected like the devastating chronic condition ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome). In severe cases, the illness shuts down people’s lives almost entirely, causing an extreme loss of energy and a wide range of physical and cognitive symptoms that can prevent patients from working, socialising and, sometimes, even moving or eating. Yet these people have been more or less airbrushed from our minds.

To find out what this neglect looks like in practice, this week I put out a call on Bluesky asking people with ME/CFS about their recent experiences of treatment. I was immediately inundated with horrifying testimonies. “I’ve just been completely abandoned”; “a 10-year waiting list for treatment”; “we’ve given up seeking medical support”; “stuck in limbo”; “I just felt utterly unheard, invalidated”. I’ve been sent hundreds of shocking and heart-rending accounts.

OK. So the NHS is shite.

What are we going to do about that is the interesting question, no?

Historically inaccurate

but more significantly, London’s reputation has not recovered since the 2008 financial crisis, which required far bigger bailouts in this country than elsewhere, indicating the scale to which UK finance failed.

Germany’s bailouts were very much larger.

Margaret Thatcher destroyed manufacturing in the UK

Manufacturing output was up higher when Maggie left office than when she entered it.

Thatcher was utterly confused when it came to economics. She thought that a £1 increase in the value of activity undertaken to meet human need was equivalent to a £1 increase in the value of a financial asset, like a property or a share, when that is utterly untrue.

Maggies wasn’t stupid enough to confuse income with wealth.

and inflated the exchange rate to bring hot money into the UK, at a cost to us all in terms of inflation,

A higher exchange rate reduces inflation….

What lovely fun

The restoration of a Georgian building in Bath once frequented by Jane Austen has unexpectedly provided a tantalising glimpse into the life of the city’s Roman suburbanites.

A network of Roman ditches containing pottery, coins, glassware and a fragment of a military helmet has been found beneath Bath Assembly Rooms in the north of the city.

Experts say the finds expand the known extent of Roman occupation in Bath and suggest further remains are likely to lie under neighbouring Georgian buildings and streets.

Like, you know, under the building my flat is in. Which is fun no?

That area of town also has basements, also underbasements in many places. It is said – said – that you can wander around down there all over the place. Need a miner’s lamp and a pick, true, but what fun if the Roman stuff is just under the floor of the underbasement?

Well, yes, true, but….

Ninety per cent of the enslaved Africans transported to America went on British ships,

Comparatively few slaves went to America (here meaning “what would become the US”) anyway. Something like 3 or 4% of the total transatlantic shipments.

No, really…..distasteful as it might be to use an argument from Jefferson Davis “The Great Natural Increase” really was a thing. Cotton slavery – and rice, indigo etc – really was different from sugar. Sugar demanded the constant import of ever more slaves as the extant ones were largely worked to death. Cotton bred up slaves more than imported them. Thus the US – which had v little sugar slavery – had all the vileness of slavery itself without the imports in the same volumes.

That the Brits carried most of the slaves to the US is less of a getcha than we might think.

Gaia hates us

The El Niño currently heating up the planet burst through the highest temperature ever recorded for the phenomenon on Monday, several months before its expected peak. The heat is so much greater than previous events that scientists have called it “mind-blowing” and “Godzilla-level”. El Niños are natural climate events
…
More than 450,000 people are projected to die from the additional heat brought by the super El Niño in the next six months, according to estimates by climate scientists.

Obviously, the planet just hates us. For this is just a natural cycle here. Nowt to do with us, nor any way to stop it.

…….but may be made worse by global heating.

They’re going to try to hang an awful lot on that “bit”, aren’t they?

Show us the incentive

And we’ll show you the outcome:

British mothers who bring their children with them when returning to the UK after fleeing from domestic abuse abroad – which can lead to them being accused of abduction – could be given greater legal protection and support.

The government has agreed to examine how domestic abuse features in international child abduction cases, with a view to giving survivors of domestic abuse more help fighting partners’ demands that they return children to their home countries.

Cue a rise in divorcing mothers insisting they were subject to domesti abuse by dastardly foreigners.

That some really are isn’t the point being made here, it’s that change the incentive to so claim – like, not going to jail for abduction – and you’ll change the number who do claim.

Chicken and egg

The lawsuit was filed against Tesla in February 2022 and alleges that the company did not comply with the law, violating California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act. It alleges that the factory was racially segregated and Black workers were paid less, promoted less and terminated more frequently than their white counterparts.

It is, obviously, necessary to get cause and effect the right way around here. Is the ingoing workforce of the same training and quality across races?

Nope, I’ve no idea either. But it’s one of thsoe important questions when discussing firings and promotions etc. And, sadly, one of those questions unlikely to be even asked…..

Just what did Diddy do?

At first, Combs and his legal team issued blanket denials. The lawsuit, they said, had followed an attempt by Ventura to blackmail Combs, and was “riddled with baseless and outrageous lies”. Despite this, they settled it immediately with a $20m sum, but within days more women came forward. A second lawsuit was filed one week after Ventura’s, by Joi Dickerson-Neal, which alleged that, as a student in 1991, she had been drugged and raped by Combs, who had filmed the alleged assault and shared it with other men. Days later came another. In this, Anna Kane alleged that Combs and two others had gang-raped her in 2003 when she was 17. As the cases piled up, Combs’s team continued the denials – describing the lawsuits as “money grabs”. Then a leaked video forced them to change tack. Security footage from a Los Angeles hotel taken in March 2016 showed Cassie Ventura creeping from a room, pursued by Combs, who is wrapped in just a towel. He beats her, kicks her and drags her back.

OK. All of that so far is consistent with either story. Evil bastard doing evil things and dam breached and claims flooding in.

Now 56, he is serving a 50-month sentence for transporting people across state lines for prostitution.

The Mann Act? That’s what he’s actually been found guilty of?

Hmm.

Sigh

That distinction matters because it changes how we think about profit. A genuine business needs sufficient income to survive, invest and continue its activities. But that does not mean maximising profit is its purpose. Profit can be a means of sustaining a business rather than the reason why the business exists.

That then raises a much bigger question. If human work creates value, why does conventional accounting treat labour as a cost while treating the residual profit as belonging to capital?

Actual economics – you know, the sort of stuff Mirrlees got his Nobel for – agrees that labour is a cost of doing something. On the grounds that it is a cost of doing something. But so also is that normal return to capital a cost of doing something. That normal return being what is required to attract enough capital to surivive, invest and so on.

In excess of the normal return is called economic profit, or even excess profit. Which is why Mirrlees says don’t tax normal profit, do tax economic profit.

It’s also a commonplace that economic profit is the vale added by doing this thing, this here, rather than all the other things that can be done in the economy. It’s a signal more than anything else….this is a valuble thing to be doing, look at the gap between the cost of doing it and the value created…….

Difficult, difficult

In all this, there is a personal challenge. Do I give up, cower in the corner, and admit that I’ve been promoting something that people do not want, even though, by definition, if 30% of people are now supportive of neo-fascism, 70% are not? Alternatively, do I take a risk and continue to fight for what I think is right?

Who rally would send the bully boys around to an end terrace in Ely?

So, err, what risk?

And then I wonder just who those economists the Telegraph is talking to might be. The claim in the related article is that HMRC’s own data shows equalising capital gains tax rates will reduce yield, but those are Treasury numbers, and they got us into this mess, so I put little weight on their belief in the Laffer curve.

Empirical reality might send ’em ’round, true.

No, I don’t like this at all

Thin end of the wedge stuff:

Specialist courtrooms prioritising cases of rape and other serious sex offences are to be introduced across England and Wales, with campaigners welcoming the move as potentially transformative.

The rooms, well. But we can see how this will transform into specialist courts. With their own judges, rules of evidence and so on. Which is what the feminazis have been calling for for decades of course. Rape is not to be judged on the facts, as with other crimes.

As to the delays in cases being heard. That’s across the board, not just rape. And not providing the tolerable administration of justice is violating one of those prime duties of government. If they’d not nationalised British Steel they could have fixed the entire court system…..

Isn’t this just a joyous proposal

An extra 2.7 million lives could be saved in the next pandemic if countries share vaccines in a less selfish way, a new study has found – although the death toll in richer countries would rise.

Researchers modelling a hypothetical global outbreak of flu found that fast-tracking vaccine development could cut deaths from 58.5m to 23.9m.

If the vaccines were then distributed equitably, according to population size rather than purchasing power, a further 2.7m lives could be saved overall.

However, in high-income countries, that solidarity-based approach would see deaths rise from 2.4m to 3.9m.

We get to pay for it all but we don’t get the jabs we’ve paid for.

Hmm…..Granny dies so we can send vaccines to Africa. Gonna be a tough political sell when it actually happens, isn’t it?

Perhaps it wouldn’t

Labour is considering raising capital gains tax (CGT) to fund a £20bn handout for the lowest earners.
The Prime Minister and Chancellor are understood to be reviewing proposals to raise CGT to as high as 45pc to increase the income tax personal allowance.
The idea is laid out in a Budget submission from the Labour donor Dale Vince, warning that wealth is being “taxed more lightly than work”.
Equalising CGT with income tax would generate £14bn towards the giveaway, the submission claims.

The standard estimate – best guess, you know, guesstimate – is that the peak of the Laffer for CGT is 18%. Therefore a 45% rate isn’t going to fund anything, is it?

In May, Louise Haigh, the Prime Minister’s second-in-command, called for CGT to be brought closer in line with income tax, saying this would “shift the tax burden away from punishing work and towards unproductive capital accumulation”.

Investing in stuff is now unproductive capital accumulation? Jeebus, we’re screwed, right? But then put a convicted fraudster into government and what happens next, eh?

And there’s this little joy too:

His £14bn figure is based on a previous report from think tank CenTax, which called for a wider overhaul of the duty to mitigate avoidance. This included both an additional rate and a higher rate of 45pc and 40pc, as is the case for income tax, as well as scrapping the rule which says CGT bills are wiped on death.

We shouldn’t take recommendations from them because they’re cunts. They are in fact insisting that both inheritance tax and also capital gains tax should be paid on each and every asset. You know, cunts.