Do they think we are stupid?

There's been lots of talk about defence budgets, ministers resigning over them etc in the last few weeks. The default answer is there needs to be cuts to the welfare bill - yes that would help but it's not enough. The numbers simply don't add up.  Most people, except Rachel and Kier, know that money out needs to be less than money in order to not get into debt. So here's money in for the UK: Income tax          £330 Billion National Ins.     £204 Billion VAT                         £183 Billion Corp Tax               £103 Billion Fuel Duty               £24 Billion CGT                         £13 Billion IHT                          £8 Billion TOTAL  ...

 Whilst the UK, France and Germany are suffering weak GDP growth rates, Spain is experiencing a bit of a growth boom. Why is that? Having just returned from a road trip around France and Spain, I think I have some of the answers. Fuel prices at the pumps in the UK are high but France is very high.  I was typically paying around EU2.2 per litre yet in Spain the rates were a surprising EU1.6 per litre  - significantly cheaper than the UK. Germany has a large chemical industry sector which relies heavily on gas as an input material and lots of energy.  Ever since Merkel decided to turn off Germany's nuclear power following the Japan Fukushima disaster, Germany has been exposed to very volatile energy prices.  It is heavily reliant on Russian gas. Therefore the Germany chemical industry is suffering.  Likewise there are reports that the UK's chemical industry could lose 250k jobs due to the very high cost of energy.  My daughter is qualified as a chemical ...

 It's no surprise that AI is disruptive. One area where it is definitely causing waves is the software industry.  Historically developing software was "linear".  If it was a big project then you needed more people to deliver the code. Sadly with all things human - the more people you add to the mix the less productive they became.  Choice of software language could yield some gains  eg the Erlang/Elixir programming language can deliver equivalent functionality to Java with approximately 1/10th of the lines of code.  The holy gain of software has always been abstraction - allowing more and more detail to be hidden.  I always say "abstraction is evil" - the further you get away from understanding how things work, the more likely you are to have catastrophic failure events.  eg AWS outages taking out half the internet. For software consultancy businesses - to double revenues, it usually means doubling the number of software developers. Growth was lin...

 The US and JD Vance have commented about the murder of Henry Nowak. Clearly the UK police are more scared of being considered racist than they are about doing their jobs. That is quite evident and therefore Vance's comments seem justified. JD Vance's comments come from a place of concern that equality and fairness - the bastians of Britishness - are being eroded.  However Starmer's response is that this is political interference.  I certainly don't consider this political interference.  If it is then Starmer is a hypocrite. On the 3 June 2020 he said that  George Floyd's  murder exposed racism in the USA and he was surprised Boris had not confronted Trump on it. Later in June 2020, Starmer and Rayner said "We are appalled by the response of President Trump and the failure of our own government to condemn his actions in the wake of George Floyd’s killing". So therefore Starmer must have been politically interfering in the USA in 2020. Certainly in 2024 Sta...

With all the talk from Andy Burham and Wes Streeting of re-joining the EU against the democratic will of the people, it's reassuring to see that some French still love the British. Marine Le Pen has stated that she would oppose Britain joining the EU without Britain holding a referendum.  Merci madame ! At least some politicians respect due process and have integrity. I suspect part of the reason is, is that she still has a bitter taste in her mouth from Jacques Chirac.  France held a referendum in 2005 where the population voted against the EU constitution.  Rather than accept the voice of the people - he stealthy (we need a new adjective to describe the sleazy behaviour of politicians) went ahead and agreed and signed up to it anyway. 

 Although Wes Streetling has pretty close to zero chance of being Prime Minister, that hasnt stopped him opening his mouth.  Today he has proposed a "wealth tax that works" and said he estimated the reform could raise £12bn a year. Hmmm. So basically he wants to equalise capital gains tax with income tax. Currently  capital gains tax is complicated.   If you are selling property then it is 18% if you are a 20% tax payer and 24% for higher rate tax payers.  If you are selling some other asset then it's 10% for basic rate tax payers and 20% for higher rate tax payers. If you're selling a business (ie an entrepreneur then it's now 18% but was much lower). Last tax year I had some experience with the capital gains tax process.  I ended up being taxed on money I had spent/invested because I couldn't find the receipts from 20 years ago.  That's unfair.  There is no longer any inflation relief (used to be called indexation relief) so I paid tax...