Good on Kemi!

[MrsBennetsPoorNervesAreBack]

I'm no fan of Kemi Badenoch, but I'm even less of a fan of Robert Jenrick, and I'm rather delighted to see that she has sacked him and withdrawn the whip before he could jump to Reform.

She has definitely had the last laugh here. He must be spitting bullets!!

I thought they talked up building pre GE, that’s how they’d get growth apparently

I did the calculation when Reeves made those changes to NI and NMW, and posted this previously. As you point out, for part time workers, the impact is even more uneven (with HMRC taking even more of the extra money paid by employers... and paid for by employees in jobs)

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Despite them pretending that it wasn't a tax on 'working people', it increased the cost to the employer for a full time NMW worker by 10% - which predictably meant unemployment rose: especially at entry-level, where the reduced threshold bit hardest.

But of that 10% (£2388) extra cost to the employer, the NMW worker only got a a 5.5% raise - £1021

Whereas HMRC got a 34% raise - £1367!!

HMRC got more of the extra money than the employees - not only in percentage terms but even in absolute terms!! And they had the cheek to trumpet that as a win for the NMW employees. Employees who took the hit in job losses, for less than half the reward.

That is fucking Houdini-level dishonesty and gaslighting.

NMW for adults over 21 went up: from £11.44 to £12.21
NI Increased from: from 13.8% to 15%
NI Threshold change: from £9100 to £5000

Full time NMW pre-Reeves: £21,049
Employer NI: £1649
Employer total cost: £22698
Employee gets: £18,674
HMRC gets: £4024

Full time NMW post-Reeves: £22,466
Employer NI: £2620
Employer total cost: £25086
Employee gets: £19,695
HMRC gets: £5391

I think you absolutely can blame some of this on RR. The pandemic, and our demographics were known factors when Labour was campaigning. We elected people to manage these challenges for us.

Now, we cannot expect magic, but when we elect a party that promises to focus on growth and not to tax working people we don’t expect increases in NIC contributions or increases in business rates. These choices make no sense, if she campaigned sincerely. She is either a fool or a knave.

Starmer too if not more so. But yes most in the private sector can see the impact of their policies.

I said we cannot place all the blame on her did I not? While giving people like Farage a free pass who fucked the country over with his massive role in Brexit and suddenly everyone thinks he’s the saviour. Incidentally, the article that it is taken from is two months old, from before the budget when things were uncertain for a lot of industries.

It’s the case that we cannot blame any politician for everything. Of course!

But we do judge them on their choices and actions understanding the context.

As for Farage, I don’t think he is perfect. I don’t like the choices Labour is making, and I prefer Kemi.

Fun fact: all the Reform Councils which got into power at the last local elections did so on the back of promises that they would never raise council tax.

Every Reform Council has raised council tax.

Seriously, why are we supposed to give much of a shit about this in relation to the long list of lies this government has told? The manifesto promises it made to get elected, then immediately broke? And every new policy they've announced then u-turned on since being in power?

And the long list of things the Tories said they'd do, or fix, but didn't and actually made those things worse?

Or the Lib Dems who said, completely outrageously and utterly unacceptably, that if they got into government they would simply cancel Brexit? Whether you agreed with it or not, more people democratically voted to leave the EU in 2016 than have voted for any other single electoral option in British political history and yet they arrogantly thought they could just dismiss it with the wave of a hand and forget it ever happened.

And now 4m people are being denied the right to vote yet again in local elections, for spurious reasons which seem to be hugely convenient for this very unpopular government, while people in local government whose mandates have ended long ago get to hang on to power for yet another year, unelected.

It's not great if Reform-led councils said one thing and did another on council tax, obviously, but clearly no mainstream party has been setting a better example in recent years, have they? They've all treated us with utter contempt. Lies, u-turns and smoke and mirrors economics.

If it's okay for this government to renege on several 'fully costed' policies that turn out to be unaffordable because of 'new information' that has inexplicably (allegedly) suddenly come to light regarding 'black holes' in the public finances after they looked at the public finances, then why on earth do we expect others not to try the same tactics?

Fun Fact: Reeves said her budget last year was fully funded and there wouldn't be any other tax rises. Labour are the biggest liers or incompetents when it comes io tax. Presumably if you don't think Reform should be running councils for this you'll be as delighted as the rest of us to kick Labour out.

£40 billion tax rises in the 2024 budget.
Another £26 billion in the 2025 budget.

Fully funded.... except... her budgets have been 2 of the 10 biggest tax-raising Budgets on record. There hasn't been such a huge increase in tax from any other chancellor for 30 years. So much for fully funded!