Labour isn't working - Thread 21

[TheNuthatch]

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

We are bracing for the budget 😬

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

Previous thread
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5445644-labour-isnt-working-thread-20?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=share

I'm the same at night. I start stewing over things that keep me awake. Its horrible.
At least we've got this thread to rant brain storm and maybe help each other out if needed.

I’m so sorry there’s stress abound. Bloody Labour, Reeves and Starmer. They’ve created this toxic environment.

Am I right in thinking that all this briefing before a budget and kite flying started with Alistair Darling?
I hate how its done now. Its so stressful for ordinary people, and really damages business activity.

I had to double check I hadn’t hallucinated the SS cap. It’s a cap on the amount you can sacrifice free of NI, so you can still do it but it won’t be tax efficient any more which will discourage people from doing it leading to more issues with people not saving enough for retirement.

https://broadstone.co.uk/autumn-budget-why-salary-sacrifice-cap-could-undermine-pensions-reform/

So does this mean that plans to charge NI on pension withdrawals have disappeared? They surely can't charge NI twice: once on the way into your pension and again on the way out?

Especially on pension savings! NI being supposedly an insurance premium against unemployment benefit and <ahem> state pension . So they double-tax our personal pension savings... in order to fund our state pension. Well that's one way to sneakily means-test the state pension without anyone noticing!

Give me strength…Reeves says "Offer praise...or be taxed"…this really is
Orwellian. And as for the M card….purlease…

I am beginning to think that she is a sociopath.

On Monday evening Reeves urged Labour MPs to unite behind her Budget and insisted she was determined to carry on in the job in spite of dismal approval ratings. “I will show the media, I will show the Tories, I will not let them beat me,” she told MPs at a private meeting at Westminster. “I will be back next year, I will be back the year after that and the year after that.”

Reeves told Labour MPs there was no one more angry than her about weeks of Budget leaks, describing them as “incredibly destabilising”. But she insisted there were still some surprises in the package that Labour MPs would like. “There’s brilliant stuff in there,” she said. Reeves took aim at critics who said she was not up the job. “I don’t think even I had recognised the misogyny that still exists in public life,” she said.

The UK Treasury has asked banks to make public and prominent endorsements of the Budget this week, as chancellor Rachel Reeves prepares to spare the sector from a tax raid. Officials want lenders to praise new policies and show how they will boost lending to first-time buyers and small businesses, people involved in the discussions said.

The understanding is that banks should refrain from criticising the government’s decisions, one of the people said. Banks had warned the Treasury they would curtail lending if Reeves hit them with higher taxes and have been lobbying for months to avoid such levies.

The effort appears to have been successful, people familiar with the planning for the Budget on Wednesday said. While government officials said there has been no “deal” with the sector, there is an expectation in the Treasury that senior City of London executives will make clear they will carry out their original investment plans.

One leading City figure confirmed Reeves had asked financial services bosses to adopt an optimistic tone. “There was a frustration that the government’s positive messaging about the economy was being undermined by unwelcome commentary,” they said

@TheNuthatch

It all makes more sense now…

Now a debate is bubbling about whether this small department, known as the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) - and staffed mainly by young intellectuals and civil servants - is in fact too powerful, with claims from some that it is essentially half-running the government economic policy.
And indeed whether its chairman, Richard Hughes, a Harvard-educated former Treasury mandarin, has in fact become as important as the real chancellor.

Ahead of Wednesday's Budget, is the OBR really the tail wagging the Treasury dog?

Lou Haigh, a former Labour Cabinet minister, has called the OBR an "unelected institution dictating the limits of government ambition". And just last week the Trades Union Congress accused the "unaccountable OBR" of being a "straitjacket on growth".

So, ahead of Wednesday's Budget, is the OBR really the tail wagging the Treasury dog - and if so, could this partly be at Labour's own hand for having changed the department's role in the first place?

At the end of October, one month before the Budget, the OBR is understood to have lowered its forecast for productivity - a measure of the output of the economy per hour worked - by 0.3 percentage points. Productivity plays a key role in long-term growth prospects and therefore can influence Budget decisions.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank, for every 0.1 percentage point downgrade in the productivity forecast, government borrowing would increase by £7bn in 2029-30 - meaning a 0.3 point cut could add £21bn to Rachel Reeves's Budget black hole.

BBC

Rachel "Respect my authoritah!" Reeves

(No, Rachel, that's not a compliment)

I can relate @Legolava

Sorry I'm late on this but did want to share.

The majority of children in my class had plain pasta for dinner and either sweets or Fanta for breakfast. Parents were using vapes saw them buying alcohol at the shops after school. Friends who lived on the estate pointed out to me which ones went into drug houses (it was around 50% of the parents using drugs at my school).

Funnily enough, we had one volunteer come and help out at the school. A former police officer who was definitely not left leaning...

If anything it will exacerbate the problem because these awful parents will get more money the more kids they have, so they will have more.

Give me strength - apparently she couldn’t simply be a contender for the worst chancellor in history, who has hammered the private sector and is now about to slam dc pensions, she’s a victim.

Rachel Reeves hits back at ‘misogynists’ and tells Labour MPs to unite

www.thetimes.com/article/c6ea6d34-b739-4fbf-abca-c1be96d35242?shareToken=4583990f1174b9c1a93d9f2a8a30e697

The gaslighting is relentless. Just ask why this lie was told, nothing to do with misogyny. From earlier post.

Rachel Reeves was interviewed by Trevor Phillips around the time of last years budget. In that Reeves said: “It’s now on us. We’ve put everything out into the open, we’ve set the spending envelope of this parliament, we don’t need to come back for more, we’ve done that now, we’ve wiped the slate clean.”
www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/nov/03/rachel-reeves-i-was-wrong-to-say-no-big-tax-rises-would-be-needed

Plus that bribe to banks to be positive. It’s too much.

It's not misogyny to say that someone isn't good at their job when they're blatantly not good at their job! Nobody's saying she's shit because she's a woman. She's shit and happens to be a woman. Slight distinction!

She does competent professional women everywhere a massive disservice by taking this stance.

Plus Starmer is worse and even more culpable and he’s not a woman.

Exactly. How does she explain the criticism towards him? It's not like she's alone in taking flak. Barely anyone is safe in government.

(Funny how Labour politicians remember what a woman is when it's convenient for them, isn't it?)

Doesn't she have a master's in economics

One of my own children sent me a video of the PM doing the 6-7 thing with primary school children. He’s just so wooden. The video gives me trauma as a teacher and then I just laugh. He’s just so…stiff. Anyone knows it’s all in the action and tone…

Doesn't mean she can run the country's budget.

Are you planning on returning to the uk in the imminent future @percypiggy200 ?

Hear hear

Now to be fair to reeves we know the labour party is misogynistic and we know starmer has a history of it (Rosie duffield etc ) so in spite of the bad budget she may well be facing it from her colleagues in the labour party !!

Andrew marr on lbc played back her speech the last time how she " won't be coming back for more ".

If led by donkeys werenr left they would be driving around blasting that speech out and getting posters up everywhere with quotes from her speech.

Also he had a commentator on saying budgets themselves are becoming a big issue , all this damaging speculation.

Both of the Labour budgets have been damaging in that regard. Remember Starmer's doom and gloom speech from the rose garden last year too?

speak for yourself

as a professional woman in finance, Reeves has squat all impact on me