Labour are going to crash the economy/jobs market.

[Batmanisaplaceinturkey]

Just a few of the changes
-Making it harder to dismiss a bad hire.
-SSP a percentage of earnings, available from day one of sickness.

And now plans to raise employers NI.

All very well if the employer is Amazon or Google but not so much the independent coffee shop down the road, the plumbers merchant, the cobblers, the florist etc. More expenses and red tape for them but who cares eh. Even if they do survive their costs will have to rise.

Labours plans will have unintended consequences.

But at least 2 tier, new gear, no idea Keir will have snuffed £130,000 of freebies, billionaire Taylor Swift got £150,000 of unnecessary police protection and Sue Gray has a seat in the House of Lords.

Exactly the same arguments were spread by Tories when the Blair government introduced the National Minimum Wage. The opposite happened. Economy thrived.

"Labour are going to crash the economy/jobs market."

Nope.

The Tories did that when they caused the 20 odd percent inflation by their "dash for growth" budget in the early 70s.

The Tories did that by trashing the economy in the early 80s deliberately to destroy town and communities.

The Tories did that withe Lawson's reckless budget in 87/88 that caused double digit inflation

The Tories did that when they followed that up with a huge slump in 91/92/93 - their second recession of that administration.

The Tories did they when they humiliatingly had to crash sterling out of the ERM in 93.

The Tories did that with their pointless and harmful "austerity" under Osborne and Cameron after Brown and Darling had lead the world in recovery and mitigation of the GFC - caused by the Tories' friends in banking and finance ofc.

The Tories did that when the clown Truss did what she did when those idiots voted her in for those 40 odd days.

And the Tories did that when they wasted billions and billions of £ on covid and the contracts with their mates and the shambolic administration of recovery loans and the covid app.

That's a quick and incomplete list just off the top of my head of why your perspective and original point is completely wrong.

The Tories are clueless on the economy as experienced by ordinary people and have repeatedly demonstrated that - see above. The Labour Party are trying to fix the mess we're in.

So what did you make of Liz actually crashing the economy? This is just factless speculation.. employees have enough rights? You are so out of touch with the reality for a lot of working people ..

Contractors already have less rights, so the distinction between employees & contractors remains the same as it does in places like Norway. Which doesn't have less rights for employees but rather the opposite.

I can see this is descending into the same pathetic Labour vs Tories nonsense again. The Conservatives were a disaster and wrecked what was left of the economy after the GFC and ever since. That doesn't justify Labour also ignoring all of the big issues that need resolving to have a hope in hell of improving things.

Measuring what Labour are doing by what the insane Tories did is a very low bar. Most countries demand more from their leaders than choosing between two sets of incompetent idiots.

Should we not be holding our politicians to account and comparing them to the standards of leadership in other countries where things actually work and the state generally acts in the best interests of its citizens?

@Batmanisaplaceinturkey
Do you have direct experience of running an independent coffee shop, a plumbers merchant, a cobblers, or a florist? Or is this just opinion based on what you think about Labour in general?

It's a published Bill, the detail is yet to be hashed out through the Parliamentary process. There will be Amendments.

Establishing employment rights for new hires may well stabilise the labour market for small businesses. Many small businesses in retail and hospitality struggle to recruit because the work is so insecure. Many B2C service businesses have long established workarounds to avoid giving anyone employment rights - most hairdressing and beauty businesses, for example.

If only Liz Truss were back to give us more of that strong, steady, informed leadership we experienced all too briefly.

Or Boris Johnson and the others who, as we know, would never accept a freebie.

These type of comments are exactly what I was referring to. So, we should accept having incompetent idiots in charge now because we can compare them to incompetent idiots in charge previously and say these ones haven't yet shown themselves to be quite as bad? Even though they are ignoring all of the obvious things they could and should be doing to improve things for citizens of the UK in the long term?

So depressing.

Labour have yet to prove their incompetence levels to be at at the stratospheric levels of tories .. do you look at facts or does your ideology blind you ?

Of course they will. In a small business with 3 employees, if one employee is useless and/or takes the piss with their sick days or general absences, they make up 25% of the work force. The other employees and owner have to pick up the slack, lose business and the business owner will still have to pay them sick pay (if they are ill) and can’t get rid of them (if they are just crap). Most small business owners don’t have that sort of money. A good business owner will always make sure his staff and any creditors are paid first and take his wage second - sometimes this isn’t even minimum wage depending on how well the business has done that month.

Actually, I Iargely agree with you. My comment was a knee jerk reaction to the posters parroting the 'two tier Kier' idiocy the right wing tabloids are bleating at the moment.

I've read some extracts from the Sam Freeman book, Failed State - Why Nothing Works and How to Fix It and am waiting for it on order. I don't know if you've seen it?

My view is a lot of our problems arise from the combative two party system we have (which is becoming even more partisan) which makes any sensible long term planning impossible on the major issues we face. We need good collaborative, evidence based planning. If you watch the House of Commons set up with two opposing sides facing each other and and the schoolboy jeering we hear at PMQ you realise how far we are away from that. Public school debating societies have a lot to answer for.

Oh me too.

Did Kier Starmer eat your hamster too, OP?

Small business owner with employees so your target audience. I will adsorb these costs because it's the right thing to do. People should have the right to be well treated in the workplace.

Liz Truss et al did FAR more to destabilise my business than Labour are promising. I have far less respect for them. Liz can absolutley get in the bin.

Of course they can get rid of them.
They just won't be able to arbitrarily decide to get rid of them on Monday morning.

What’s your opinion on Brexit ?

Going to be a boom industry this year - if it wasn’t already.

Oh, and similar question to that put to the OP.

What's your direct experience of running a micro business?

Was this aimed at me? If so you are way off the mark. I have nothing but disgust for both sets of incompetent idiots and none of my posts have anything to do with ideology, rather evidence-based economic policy making and have specifically stated that the entire problem is that we have ideologically driven incompetent people in charge in perpetuity as we oscillate from one nonsensical ideology to the other, neither of which address the long-term problems that have led to the significant decline in living standards in the UK and will continue to do so for as long as this continues, with the electorate making facile whataboutery comments justifying this incompetence by comparing the current incompetence to previous incompetence that was even worse that what we're seeing now (so far).

As I said, very depressing that everyone's bar is so low for what they expect our leaders to do, and that they are sucked into such pathetic ideologically driven nonsense that they cannot rationally look at the evidence and economic facts and what will actually work and instead insist on looking at everything through this false Labour/ Conservative lens. And not only that, but try to characterise the comments of others as being part of this and supporting the other incompetent idiots because they don't support the current incompetent idiots, even when I had specifically stated very clearly that they are both incompetent idiots.

The areas of policy that I stated need addressing have been addressed by neither so how you interpreted this as support for the Conservatives is beyond me. Not to mention that I also noted how damaging Brexit has been. But you carry on with your pseudo-left/ right war. And everything else will carry on exactly as it has been too, exactly because of attitudes like yours where people want to engage in an ideological nonsense debate instead of demanding politicians address the UK's economic problems.

DH has one. Although, presumably people that don’t have one can also offer opinions so I’m not sure why it’s relevant.

Labour, by definition are the party of working people.

Employment is high, there are labour shortages and unemployment is low.

Perfect time to protect workers' rights.

YABU. We don't know the rest of the budget yet.

@ForPearlViper I agree. Our political system is completely dysfunctional and encourages exactly this type of adversarial nonsense, political point scoring and complete lack of any rationality or evidence-based long-term policy that requires cross-party working and a jointly agreed long-term plan for things like education, health, infrastructure, industrial strategy, trade.

With the level of economic and political knowledge of the average UK citizen and our dysfunctional system where we never have a Government that behaves rationally and acts in the best interests of the country as a whole, the ongoing decline in our relative wealth and living standards is not remotely surprising and unlikely to be reversed. I mean, this is a place where just a few years ago we had people voting for Brexit while openly stating that they knew would make everyone much poorer and they were happy to do so anyway. Then they complain there's no money for public services. Likewise many of the ideologically driven Labour supporters haven't the faintest grasp of economics or international markets function and how policies impact real-world outcomes. While we have a large proportion of the population so ideologically driven that they will happily vote for insane policies without any analysis of the expected effects (and it's not like we have to forecast this, we can simply look at the large data sets from other countries to see the economic impact of different tax and economic and trade and public service structures in reality) there's little hope of any change for the better.

Our micro business won’t be hiring any staff. Fortunately we can run it like that passive income.