Labour isn't working - Thread 15

[TheNuthatch]

A chat thread for those who don't like this Labour government.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.

Previous thread
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5430868-labour-isnt-working-thread-14?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=share

Thanks.

Last Q, given your background.

Labour promised to allocate the PS VAT revenue to the recruitment of 6,500 new state school teachers.

What’s your view on this please?

Fears that Rachel Reeves will hammer manufacturers with a fresh tax raid have sent factory spending to its lowest levels since the aftermath of the Brexit vote, new figures show.

In a major blow for the Chancellor just weeks before her second Budget, industry body Make UK said spending on plant and machinery by Britain’s manufacturers had dropped from a 10-year high in 2024 to the lowest level since 2017.

The collapse means billions in vital investment required to fuel growth is being delayed, marking a gloomy backdrop for Ms Reeves as she seeks to balance the books ahead of her set piece announcement on November 26.

Make UK said “frequent changes to tax policy” was one reason why spending was lagging and said the industry was at a “critical juncture”.

Businesses are concerned that the Chancellor will hit them with new taxes or remove investment incentives in an attempt to help fill a £30bn hole in the public finances.

Labour risks breaking a manifesto pledge by raising income tax, national insurance or VAT – leaving the Treasury to turn to a string of smaller but more disruptive areas to raise income.

Thank you for this post. Great to hear from other teachers.

They’re falling apart.

Re why Sunak would have been better in answer to @MrsMurphyIWishI don’t think we’d be seeing the hammering of the private sector like this, which in turn affects public sector funds.

Reeve’s next target - the self employed.

The tax advantage of self-employment in Britain has hit a record high, a leading think-tank has said, as it urged Rachel Reeves to take further steps in the Budget to equalise the treatment of freelancers and employees. A self-employed worker with the same earnings as the median UK employee will incur tax at an effective rate of 17 per cent in 2025-26, the second-lowest rate for 50 years, according to the Resolution Foundation. The effective tax rate for the employee will be 27 per cent in the same period, its calculations show, so that the employee job incurs an additional £3,500 in tax. The Foundation said this meant the typical employee would pay a record 55 per cent more tax than the equivalent self-employed worker. The increase in the gap is largely due to Reeves’ decision in her Budget last year to increase national insurance contributions paid by employers, which do not apply to the self-employed. Employees also pay NICs at a slightly higher rate than the self-employed. Even before the NI increase, the tax gap cost the Treasury some £8bn in 2024-25 — a sum that could exceed £10bn a year by the end of the decade. Adam Corlett, principal economist at the Resolution Foundation, said the uneven tax treatment skewed the structure of the economy and pushed people to work in ways that might be less productive.

FT

I didn’t believe they would recruit that many, but I did believe they would recruit because that is what all governments do. The average career life for a teacher is 3-5 years so promises are made of bursaries, good starting salary but those of us who have chosen to stay in teaching are always overlooked so I was ambivalent to that promise. I was looking forward to educational reform and reform of Ofsted - neither have impressed me so far.

And this reminder seems apt

Labour's manifesto is, "fully funded and fully costed - no ifs, no ands, no buts… no additional tax rises."

"I have been very clear that every policy we announce, and every line in our manifesto, will be fully costed and fully funded."

“Nothing in our plans requires any additional tax to be increased.”

“We’ve got the Office for Budget Responsibility now… You don’t need to win an election to find out [about the public finances].”

“I don’t believe that fiddling around with tax rates is the best way to grow the economy.”

I think teaching through the austerity years (and the pay freezes) had an impact on my voting too. I can’t remember a time where I saw any effect of economic growth translated into improvement for education.

Thank you for all the replies - it’s given me some good reflection time this morning (on day 1 of half term where I have time to think!).

I'll lay out my sliding doors '24 moment

I don't think we'd have a government showing signs that they are willing to subvert the supreme court ruling on sex segregated spaces

We had begun to show signs of growth under Sunak and Hunt: I'd like to have seen where that would of went if Reeves hadn't chopped it off at the knees with minimum wage and NI hikes.

We wouldn't have fuelled inflation to the level we have now because we wouldn't have done the above.

We wouldn't be putting through a growth sabotaging, employment killing employer's bill.

We would have used the Rwanda deterrent. It had shown signs of the desired effect of making the country less attractive before it was pulled in the election run up and before the smash the gangs farce.

We wouldn't have put vat on private education, putting yet more pressure on state schools.

Breakfast club bollocks

Not paying a massive bribe to unions post election and not being soft with the doctors unions - believing they wouldn't be back for more a year later.

That's off the top of my head, there'll be more.

I struggle to see how - those who voted for Labour in the last GE - are anything but disillusioned, betrayed and let down by the deceit and incompetence from Starmer’s government.

Yes well said. This is a good overview.

I’d bet we wouldn’t be seeing the social disharmony we are too. All the making enemies of people just gets everyone more angry, and no non manifesto digital ID.

https://www.gatsby.org.uk/app/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/released-teacher-recruitment-and-retention-in-2025-002-1.pdf

This interview with Arthur Laffer is well worth a watch. 30-40mins.

You may agree with much of it, maybe not all.

He made me smile because he gives hope to the UK. Sadly well, we have the Bollard.

Maybe Reeves might listen to his sage words.. one never knows!!

Some great quotes from him in there, but with my 50yr old memory, only a few I can recall clearly…

Well what do we think happens if you tax people who work and you pay people who don’t work?

If you feed the dog or beat the dog in the same place one day, where is the dog same time next day?

If you want your kids to be A grade students, do you tax them when they do well? (That made me laugh 😆 )

She seems like a very nice lady. She just doesn’t understand.

It’s not rocket science..

Rwanda was a deterrent and unfortunately due to Labour being elected was not given the chance to be fully implemented. I’m not denying it was expensive but if it continued to work as a deterrent numbers may well have continued to fall.

being reported in the Times and Telegraph today that the Home Office has overpaid billions in migrant hotel costs. The cost of 10 year contracts has tripled from £4.5 billion to £15.3 billion.

Some good Pods to listen to today.

Currently listening to TRIP Leading which is an interview with Michael Gove, but TRIP Money and Political Currency also look topical as always.

It’s such a shame that Sunak went early with the GE. I think that we’d have had more green shoots. And he should, IMO, have pursued Rwanda as hard as possible and challenged his opponents to say how far they could reduce migration - it was already deterring migrants (the Irish were concerned that the migrants were coming to them instead) and the Home Office needed a stronger grip to make it happen. Now, ironically, EU governments are trying to do their own Rwanda style deals with African nations - if he’d just waited 6 months, we’d have gained more stability, the tide would have turned a bit and things would have been hugely better.

I never understood Rishi’s decision. We managed to get Wimbledon tickets for the first day through the ballot for the first year (probably the last!) in 2024 and there were no members of government in the box. I think that he just didn’t get advised properly that there really is a benefit electorally in seeing the PM out there being patriotic, watching wimbledon, going to the Olympics, having time to capitalise on DDay etc. I think that he really didn’t understand that he’d never get better press than commenting on Andy Murray’s retirement and thanking him for his contribution to the nation, or jumping up and down for Keely. It was easily justifiable to wait - he just had to say that he wanted the country to have stability.

He should also have been honest about what hadn’t worked under the tories (net migration too high, insufficient public service reform, needing to return to efficiency after covid) and explained why he was doing things.

rishi sunak was a good sensible man, but poorly advised. is works not nearly so hard, and it shows.

Sadly, I see this in action. Dec 22-Sept 24 there were 7 staff changes in my dept. The current second year ECT is leaving teaching at Dec.

Thanks - kind of where I was heading with respect to Labour’s promised 6,500 teachers (more deceit).

Morning all

I'm going to say something that might surprise people! Which is, I originally lurked on this thread and didn't post because - I think as a whole, politicians suffer from people having a default rush to criticise. To some extent, I think the Conservatives saw that get worse and worse over the years. It's a bit like social media - people used to use it for fun and now it's for rowing and moaning, a lot of the time.

I think the time that Sunak took over was horrendous timing in many respects. However, I also thought Liz Truss was unfairly blamed for "crashing the economy" and if things are that fragile that one budget can do that, then we need a different set up.

But then I probably need a flow diagram to explain how all of that went, I didn't really understand how it went wrong so quickly.

Now we've got what feels like the opposite, it's just going wrong at a slightly slower pace.

@Nolletimiere I'm not sure if I'm remembering this correctly, but when the company and tax set up was altered for self-employed people, I think it was pointed out that it would reduce the tax take, and the Conservatives thiught that most people wouldn't bother doing the company set up unless they employed staff. Obviously, they were wrong - it seems no government understands that people would like to pay less tax and sorting out a bit of paperwork is not a problem to achieve that!

But in that respect, this is one area where Rachel Reeves is possibly being unfairly criticised if she changes it back to what it was. Everyone on PAYE could be considered fairer and no one complained about things before that came in, or maybe they did and I just don't know.

Probably not the time to do it, but I can at least see the mentality behind that one.

I think Sunak was right to call the election when he did. It was an appalling result and I don't know how they could've improved things. And I think a lot of people voted labour because they were desperate for a change. I wasn't one of them.

Yes agree no idea why Sunak decided to go so early, except that many of the conservative MPs seemed to want to get the beating over with.

yes, im very worried the political centre/post war economically liberal consensus is dead or at least edged out by lack of results in the current debt crisis.

Then there's Paying off the national debt of Mauritius and giving them the Chagos Islands, a strategically important base
Recognising Palestine.
Still unable to decide if a woman has a penis.
Starmer's personal backtrack on the pre election promise to remove the tax ringfence from his CPS pension was reversed.
Embedded in personal sleaze and corruption on a scale that would impress the Marcos's.
All, this under a banner of Fairness and morality.
I'll stop there.

Oh God, Chagos, yes that's a huge one! Completely ridiculous. The act itself the staggering scale of lying about how much that was going to cost us was such an act of contempt against the public.

I don’t think a later GE would have shifted the dial that much, unfortunately. The media was happy to whip people up by then, all the nonsense attacks on Sunak and most on here adamant Labour would be great. Any comment otherwise would get the usual.

Now we have Starmer and Reeves and more social disharmony, and all the rest.

Oh and we wouldn't have a Chancellor who cried in Parliament and we wouldn't have a Home Secretary who had laid down in front of a co-op in protest that it sold food from Israel, we wouldn't have made the Ambassador to the U.S the best mate of the most notorious paedophile in the world. And we wouldn't have had a Foreign Secretary who called the American President a Nazi in place for a year.

On of the many things I will never forget or forgive. I'm still of the opinion the Chagos deal was some kind of appeasement to the Chinese. Though we shall never know.