Evil Diaries: Voting intentions
Having time and again emphasised the silliness of political betting where one is not an insider I trust I may be forgiven for offering the background to a bet where I cannot reasonably claim to know what I am talking about. My consolation is that around 200,000 members of the Conservative Party will now express an opinion where comfortably fewer than 1% have any idea as to what they are talking about. My point is that selecting a prime minister can only be done by the selector having experienced close up work with the candidate.
That noted, I blunder on. I have bet £10,000 on Sunak to be the next prime minister since my expert in politics says that he is by far and away the better candidate. Despite yesterday’s voting he thinks Sunak at Evens is still a bet.
Talking of yesterday’s voting an important vote has been omitted. This is what would the votes have been if Mordaunt’s losing faction were free to vote on either of the last two? Well, in this life you can’t have everything.
What strikes me about Truss is her steely gaze to mask her ignorance. Sunak does not have to fake his stance.
Truss criticises Sunak for his “managerialism”. This word means little to me. Its use is intended to be critical. But, if anything, it highlights that Sunak is a competent manager and believes in so being. How could that be a criticism? Does Truss think that the successful candidate should be incompetent?
Sunak knows the gilts market since he learnt all about it when he was at Goldman Sachs. Whereas Truss knows hardly anything by comparison. For decades after WWII the cost of debt thereby incurred hung over Britain. It took a lot to shake it off. (Whereupon, of course, Blair and Brown set about bankrupting the UK.) Accordingly, Sunak knows what he is doing and why. So all this talk of an emergency budget served up by Truss is based on her ignorance or posing. Given that she wishes an emergency budget merely to differentiate herself from Sunak voters have been warned.
I always enjoy the narrative of Evil but I have to say Truss is right in saying the cost of the pandemic should be paid over many years similar to war debt rather than an attempt to pay off the £400 billion in double quick time and in doing so burdening hard pressed tax payers with that pain .it’s all well and good for individuals earning say over £75000 to endure the taxes but if your on a wage just above the benefit levels then your probably going to a food bank and rationing the gas and electric.
It beats me why the govt allowed 25% of the debt to be linked to rpi – far better whilst rates are low to go for long dated gilts at a low fixed rate.- just like the old war loan and console stock
The tax burden has become steadily more onerous under Sunak’s watch,to the point where one strongly suspects that the latest rise in NICs will yield negative returns,as workers lose heart.It is too late for him to blame Boris’s overspending now,the time for that was earlier.
They only talk about if/when tax should be cut. That means less public services. Do we want even deeper cuts to the NHS, police, transport, justice, and the rest? The question should be how to make the country more efficient.
One (very) small example is the cost of road and bridge tolls. They add enormously to the direct and indirect costs of the population, but most of the cost goes on administration. remove the tools, redeploy the staff where they can be productive and the whole country benefits.
i think we already spend the third highest percentage of gdp on the health in the oecd, my friend last week had to wait 5 hours in a and e in a lewisham hospital before they were seen. we use to have a second class health service but at third class costs we now have a second class health service but at first world costs. radical change in how it is provided and probably cuts in doctors salaries now needed urgently, the national insurance rise increases unemployment as labour becomes more expensive and the corporation tax increase would just drive business overseas, inflation looks to be a spike due to chinese lockdown and the war in urkaine, so we deperately need tax cuts, no more government spending more clever efficiency. gordon brown increased nhs spending by 40% with maybe a 5% increase in performance and the rest sucked up in wages they just saw him coming, we have a poor health service so what do doctors do they demand a 30% pay increase! i remeber reading an oecd report on doctors about 10 years ago france had twice as may gps but they were paid half as much as in the uk.
Dear Simon,
UK plc needs to be made more competitive to align with and attract European companies, still our biggest trade partner, this will circumvent tic for tac Brexit red tape costing a fortune as companies will just set up shop here as well. We were going to reduce corporation tax to 15% this got lost on aligning with Europe. I would prefer to adopt more American style monetary policy and spend our way out for recessions, Sunak is out of his depth and his background at Goldmans is not an antidote to being nervous of change.
But surely, of the £ 400 billion or whatever it was that was given out, a fair chunk went straight back to the Treasury in the form of income tax, national insurance, corporation tax, etc.
Yes, the consumers in receipt of the money who were sat at home doing nothing went mad with the plastic much to Amazon’s delight, but even then the Treasury received a fair dollop of VAT income.
The fault that Amazon didn’t pay a reasonable sum of UK tax is the Politician’s and Treasury’s fault, no-one else’s.