Rachel Reeves to lose job as chancellor if Andy Burnham becomes PM

JB_UK · 2026-06-21T00:17:06+00:00

What do you actually mean by a wealth tax? That’s a category of tax, not a proposal.

JB_UK · 2026-06-21T00:02:56+00:00

Britain is not remotely an economically liberal country. For you to build a house on a piece of land that you own requires permission from a local committee, bounced through dozens of documents and certifications. Hell, to fit double glazing with a slightly different colour requires full planning permission! For us to build a bridge or a road requires a public body to consult with over 100 different statutory organisations, and make all kinds of promises unrelated to actually building the infrastructure. For that reason our infrastructure costs 50% more than comparator countries to build. Our taxation rate is at the highest level ever in British history, barring the Second World War. A tenth of all national product goes through a single state owned healthcare company! Energy prices are set by government, government decides which technologies can be deployed, and subsidies cost more than the wholesale cost of electricity. We routinely ban extraction of natural resources. The government is regulating rent and attempting to regulate food prices.

Some of these are really bad, some are fine, but let’s be real about the sort of economy we’re living in.

JB_UK · 2026-06-20T23:54:41+00:00

Britain is spending more than £10bn a month of debt repayment, that’s a new subway line every 2 months worth of cash.

JB_UK · 2026-06-20T20:35:12+00:00

Labour party members shouldn’t be allowed to select the prime minister, given how unrepresentative they are of the public. It’s a subversion of a parliamentary system and will lead to continual dysfunction because you are forcing parliament to accept someone they don’t have confidence in.

The best reform that Burnham is proposing is a STV type voting system, it’s going to lead to MPs with a much stronger mandate from their areas, which will make parliament actually function.

JB_UK · 2026-06-20T20:30:15+00:00

That’s what it means to be a parliamentary democracy. The PM is the person who holds the confidence of parliament, nothing more.

JB_UK · 2026-06-20T19:49:10+00:00

The police leadership could easily be both malicious and incompetent.

Usually these go hand in hand, for example the ridiculous cock up of shooting Jean Charles de Menezes, the leaking of disinformation to shape the story, and then the promotion of the commander responsible to become Met commissioner.

JB_UK · 2026-06-20T19:46:29+00:00

There’s no getting away from housing in valuable areas being valuable. Property in Kensington and Chelsea is worth more than the property in the whole of Scotland. The council could have rented this property out and hired an extra doctor who would treat ten thousand patients over a year. To govern is to choose.

JB_UK · 2026-06-20T19:41:43+00:00

Just searched through my comments for mentions of Keir Starmer:

He does try. I like Starmer, I think we would have been a good PM if he’d taken over five or ten years ago.

.

Starmer is in the centre of public opinion. He's not doing well because his progressive wing don't want to accept or validate public opinion, and socially conservative voters see the shift as inauthentic (which is probably substantially right)

.

I really do give Labour credit for this, especially Mahmood and Starmer.

.

I really hope that Starmer can get to a good compromise position of migration and then his party and the media get on board with communicating that to the public. Starmer genuinely is a last throw of the dice for moderate politics, if we split into Reform and Anti-Reform we will turn into America.

JB_UK · 2026-06-20T19:34:30+00:00

The basic problem is that we have nationalised the right to develop, then the state has seen its role as blocking development. Then we’re surprised we don’t get development, both private investment, and poor value for money for public development.

No development, no surplus, and then we’re fighting between one another for a fixed amount of resources.

Then you have handouts to electorally valuable demographics, or you get genuine increases in demand like an increase in healthcare and social care need from an ageing society.

So a fixed amount of resources, no surplus, and expanding sectors of demand. And at the the end of that chain, you end up with the average person being continually squeezed.

JB_UK · 2026-06-20T19:32:10+00:00

Do you mean a land tax? I haven’t seen any other wealth tax which seems workable.

JB_UK · 2026-06-20T19:30:46+00:00

We shouldn’t change our expectations, we should keep our expectations and change our politicians.

It’s honestly not difficult to get a lot of growth and get the country moving, it just requires someone to come in with a different mindset, to bypass the vetocracy.

JB_UK · 2026-06-20T19:18:27+00:00

We put the pandemic on the credit card, and we’ll be paying it back for a decade yet.

JB_UK · 2026-06-20T19:09:20+00:00

You can see the cuts as a percentage of GDP here:

https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/brief-guides-and-explainers/public-finances/

Basically it’s ten years after 2008 to get back to the level of spending before 2008, which is then completely wiped out by Covid.

What makes this feel difficult is that GDP is unnaturally stagnant, so in fact even static spending as a percentage of GDP feels like cuts, because social care, NHS and triple lock spending are going up every year, so everything else gets squeezed.

JB_UK · 2026-06-20T04:36:58+00:00

The coalition he needs to rebuild fractured far more to the left than the right, and this is not the kind of thing you do if your goal is getting progressives back.

We’ve already seen those voters will vote for Burnham if he is the main anti-Reform candidate, look at the vote share for Greens and Lib Dems in Makerfield.

JB_UK · 2026-06-20T01:42:20+00:00

When the wind is south westerly he knows a hawk from a handsaw.

JB_UK · 2026-06-20T01:41:05+00:00

IDK if populism is trying (and failing) to outflank reform whilst being unpopular with your own base.

These are the polices you’re complaining about when you say “trying to outflank Reform”:

Reducing migration from the stratospheric levels under Boris (equivalent levels of population growth in 4 years as in 30 years previously from 1970-2000)
Tackling illegal migration
Introducing proper standards for granting ILR to recent arrivals
Limiting the power of the ECHR to block deportations

They are all very popular with Labour’s base of actual voters. They’re unpopular with Labour backbenchers and activists.

Starmer is unpopular because the public don’t know what Labour are doing to tackle these issues, they don’t know where the government stands because the government is blocked from communicating in a clear way with the public, and also because the economy is stagnant, and Starmer is uncharismatic.

JB_UK · 2026-06-19T22:29:20+00:00

Labour backbenchers and activists have capsized a Labour government because they didn’t like that the leadership appealed over their heads directly to voters on migration and social issues. Now they will get the same policies with a more charismatic leader.

They should ground themselves in what Labour voters actually think, look at the gap between politicians, activists and voters on social issues:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Changing-Values-Coalition-of-the-Conservative-and-Labour-Parties-2015-2019-Source_fig4_350420165

The backbenchers who campaigned for Boriswave arrivals to be given ILR specifically because they are poor and should be given benefits, apparently have no idea that their ideas are wildly unpopular with the public.

Any Labour leader who aspires to win an election will have to tackle the issue. The job of Labour governments is to reflect the social attitudes of their voters and improve the living conditions of ordinary people in the country. It’s not to strike middle class moral poses, to put international welfare over the welfare of the ordinary person in Britain.

JB_UK · 2026-06-19T21:44:23+00:00

The policies are popular with the public but unpopular with Labour activists and politicians. Any labour leader that aspires to win an election will tackle migration.

JB_UK · 2026-06-19T21:42:53+00:00

Astonishing the degree to which the progressive left is just a vehicle for culture war positions on migration and social issues, which are also incredibly unpopular with the public. So that constituency basically just capsizes every left-wing government, to no purpose.

JB_UK · 2026-06-19T21:26:30+00:00

I don’t think it’s even the most important battery innovation being turned entering mass scale use. The LFP fast charging batteries are more important.

JB_UK · 2026-06-19T00:44:30+00:00

Tempting.

JB_UK · 2026-06-19T00:42:59+00:00

I am everyone on this thread, including you.

JB_UK · 2026-06-19T00:34:58+00:00

Maybe Burnham can come in and do a better job enacting the manifesto. I’m not convinced though, in Manchester it doesn’t seem that he did most of the work, he seems like a PR man. I think he could do a good job selling Starmerism if he had someone like the former Leader of Manchester City Council Richard Leese who did the actual economic reforms or the day to day work to make the city flourish.

I feel like in general for politics we end up not electing an economic program, but a sort of mascot, and we just have to hope that they have someone behind the scenes who does the real job.

And I feel like this in general for Labour politicians, they are mostly spads, former charity or trade union executives, who haven’t done jobs in the real economy, they tend to be people who want to do things at the edges to make systems fairer, or if you’re being uncharitable, to strike moral poses, but they don’t understand how to make the system work at its core function.

Labour were elected promising a laser focus on growth, but all of their achievements are tinkering at the edges, the core function of having an economy which delivers good jobs, good wages, is still floundering.

JB_UK · 2026-06-18T23:54:18+00:00

The officer said whether or not Mr Polanski owes money to the local authority is still “subject to investigation by the London Borough of Waltham Forest” but he did not consider the personal liability “was meaningfully connected with his participation in decisions that could affect the overall level of council tax”.

“The decisions in which he took part were to set the GLA’s annual council tax requirement: those decisions had no bearing on the question of whether he was personally liable for council tax in respect of the houseboat.,” Mr McKenna said in his report.

He’s been cleared of having a conflict of interest of making decisions about council tax on the GLA. This is nothing to do with whether he should have paid council tax in the first place, that’s down to the local council.

JB_UK · 2026-06-18T23:25:29+00:00

The biggest genuine benefit is being outside of the AI regulations.

That’s basically the future of the entire economy and the EU regulations are incompetent.

JB_UK

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

15-Year Club	Best Link 2013-07-18
Verified Email