Do they think we are stupid?

 As the coronation of Burnham rolls ahead there is lots of speculation about who will be in his cabinet. It seems Rachel will be replaced which is concerning .  The alternatives seem dire and she is the best the Labour party has to offer although I think she's pretty useless.  In the real world candidates would sit exams and be screened on their ability but those rules don't apply in government.   To help Andy I've developed this little exam to screen candidates.  Rachel scored 50%.  Let's see if any of the candidates are clever enough to match Rachel's top score.  Feel free to do the test: Q1:  What is 1+1 ? Q2:  You are taking over an economy that raises £868 Billion / year from taxation and spends £1.2 Trillion / year.  You are borrowing money each month on the gilt markets simply to service the £3 trillion debt and cover the spending shortfall.  Your are forecast to increase the debt to £3.5 Trillion by the election term....

 Wind the clock back to 2024 and Rachel was making a big fuss about financial Blackholes.  She moaned on an almost daily basis that those nasty conservatives had left her with a £20 Billion blackhole in their finances.... So fast forward to June 2026.  In 2024/25 Rachel increased net borrowing by £148 Billion. In 2025/26 she then increased borrowing by £132 Billion and so far in April/May 2026 she has increased borrowing by an additional £46Billion (now £23 Billion per month) That comes to £326 Billion in roughly 24 months which means an average of £13.6 Billion per month.  It's beginning to look like the original £20 Billion blackhole was more a pimple than a blackhole. Where has this money gone?  It's hard to point to any tangible assets.  It looks like it's been spent on NHS pay settlements, welfare spending, education (probably teacher pay rises).  Some has gone onto house building.  So when Labour came to power, the debt pile was £2.7 TR...

 It's not often that UK parliament gives me something to laugh about but this week did. As Burnham was being signed in as a member of Parliament, one of the conservatives quipped that "He's not the messiah", quoting Monty Python Life of Brian. It was quickly followed by the next line from Life of Brian "He's a naughty boy". In the rush to crown Burnham as the next messiah of the Labour party, Starmer's love of due-process seems to have gone out of the window and there seems to be little scrutiny of Burnham. It wouldn't surprise me if indeed he is a naughty boy... Burnham's wife is Marie-France van Heel. She is a director of Be.EV. Manchester Transport awarded Be.EV a £450k EV charging contract in 2024 and there are other related contracts. Of course Burnham was Mayor of Manchester on this date. Conflict of interest??  Back in 2022 Burnham publicly rebuked any connection with his wife for the  Clean Air Zones (CAZ) contracts which were awarded...

 As we inch forward towards the coronation of the King of the North, there has been lots of confused questions about what he stands for and indeed what the Labour party stands for. So I asked ChatGPT.  It replied that the Labour party stands for 1/ Social justice - reducing inequality and ensuring people have fair opportunities 2/ Equality of opportunity - helping people succeed regardless of background 3/ Solidarity and community – people achieve more through collective action than by acting alone. 4/ Support for working people – focus on workers' rights and living standards. 5/ Democracy – both political democracy and a belief that power should be more widely shared. 6/ Fairness – balancing individual responsibility with social support and public services. I don't disagree with these as aims - they are aspects of a fair society but they are far from unique to Labour. So I asked ChatGPT what the Conservative values were and they were broadly similar themes "giving people ...

 It's beginning to look like Burham will be crowned as Prime Minster with little opposition. We don't know much about him but it's looking like he will be far more left wing than Starmer. It looks like his policies will be  1/ Greater public ownership / control of utilities (especially water and energy) 2/ Large-scale public investment in infrastructure and housing He has backed spending £40 Billion on council housing. Is supportive on rent controls.  He wants to reduce bus fare caps back to £2 from £3. So let's look at these. Taking water into public ownership depends on the approach.   The lower end cost to the tax payer would be £60 Billion but is likely to result in legal battles.  A less confrontational  approach would cost in the region of £150 Billion.   Big sums to pay out for a capital intensive low margin business. It's hard to see what we would gain. At least with private ownership you can fine them for pollution breaches...

 Well Starmer has resigned and he's managed to keep the lies going. Here's the speech: Walking up this street two years ago was the proudest moment of my life. A new Labour government. The first in 14 years. A page in our country's history turned after years of disappointment and despair. Actually I'm pretty sure you've done a good job continuing the  disappointment and despair. The chance to change the lives of millions of people for the better. That's what I came into politics for. The journey to that point was not easy. So you're not actually saying you made people's live's better - simply that there was the change to do so and you decided not to do that. Six years ago, I inherited a Labour Party that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt. I was told, time and time again, that my party was finished. Finally some truth.  It was financially bankrupt until you tapped into the huge pot of money from Labour together.  The party is still mor...

 Labour entered government 2 years ago with the promise of building 1.5 Million net new houses during their 5 year term in office. Simple maths - but too challenging for Labour politicians, that's 300,000 per year. Year 1 = 208,600.  Year = 199,500 Now this is advanced maths - way beyond any Labour politician's capabilities - they now need to build 364,000 per year instead of 300,000 as they have failed to meet target in years 1 and 2. So why are Labour failing at this so badly? I begrudgingly have to admit the problem is not entirely Labour's fault.... For a basic standard of house, construction costs are now around £1,800 per square metre. That's roughly 50% on labour and 50% on materials. An affordable home is around 90 square metres so the construction costs are £162,000.  That assumes zero land costs and zero planning bureaucracy. Let's assume Labour planned to build 1.5 Million affordable homes.  They had the land already and planning costs were waived. So we ...

Hot on the success at the Makerfield by-election, Idiot #2 looks set to replace Idiot #1. Idiot #1 had 4 years waiting to take power. He wanted to be the big cheese but despite having 4 years to plan, he didn't know what the job entailed,  he didn't examine the big picture of what needed fixing -  in fact  he didn't plan at all and when he got the big cheese job pretty much said - I'm a safe pair of hands and the adults are back in the room. He hadn't done any analysis of Britain's systemic problems.  He hadn't come up with any ideas or scenario planning to address the problems. His sole plan was to be the big cheese and not be the opposition.  He therefore coasted along not fixing the foundations and Britain in the meantime Britain has sunk deeper into the mire. So in comes Idiot #2. We don't yet know what his plans are but based on his track record, there is unlikely to be any substance to  his plans.  He seems a nice chap unlike morally sanctimoniou...

The reality is Europe has always benefited more from the UK than the UK has from the EU. The UK has always imported more goods from the EU than we have exported.   In 2018 the UK exported £303 Billion but imported £357 Billion. Compare that to today now we have left the EU we export £350 Billion but import a whopping £485 Billion.  Clearly leaving the EU has done little to stop the supply of goods from the EU into the UK. Exports to the EU since 2019 have pretty much kept pace with inflation so leaving has very little impact.  So why rejoin?  It would simply open the floodgates to yet more imports from the EU which is unlikely to benefit the UK economy. It's exports of our products which generate wealth for the UK - not imports. So why is Starmer so keen to create closer trade ties with the EU?  It won't increase our exports - they have in reality not been affected by Brexit.  If we didnt get massive gains from being in the EU when we were in it then w...

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...