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One thing that shows how governments in general miss the point. She says that she will appoint thousands of new house planning officers to help build new homes. doesn't she realise that housing planning officers function is to stop house building? She would get far better results by sacking...

Look on the bright side. If employees' NIC had been increased, it would have affected private sector and public sector employees alike. By putting on employer's NIC, only private sector employees will suffer; public sector workers will be unaffected.

Not so unusual. Gore did that too. (And Bush claimed defeat!) :)

It's not as easy as we might think. Yes, Israel has far better ability to hit their targets than the WW2 bombers, but on the other hand when the enemy is hiding troops in a hospital, it's hard to hit the troops but not the hospital. (It's also against the Geneva Convention to station troops in...

How many employees do you have? And don't you think that when the next pay review comes round, you'll be likely to restrict their pay rise because of the extra NIC you will be paying? Or are you going to take the hit in full out of your profits?

I suspect the average electric car driver is richer than the average ICE car driver. The two biggest reasons not to have an electric car are that you can't afford the capital cost, and that you don't have a drive. Either reason applies more to the less well-off. Increasing fuel duty would...

Assuming the million pound cap is abolished as per expectation, then Starmer will surely have to repeal his own personal statutory instrument. It applies to him and him alone, so it would be trivial to do. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/2588/contents/made The question is whether he...

Which is where Reform would say, and with some justification, that paying people as much to stop at home as they would pay them to work, is a sure way to collapse the economy. The obvious first step is to reduce the cost of childcare, as (I think) Johnson proposed, but too many people's incomes...

Obviously there are two ways of interpreting the manifesto. Many people understood "we will not increase National Insurance" to mean that they would not increase National Insurance, which (if a manifesto was a contract) would certainly be the legal interpretation. But as a manifesto is not a...

We don't need a million new workers every year. (OK, I get that only 300,000 of them are workers and the others are non-working people, mostly members of their families.) But we have over 5 million people on out-of-work benefits. Many of them want jobs but can't (apparently) find them...

Well, it's obviously a breach of a manifesto promise, which isn't a good start. Perhaps that's why the budget is so long after the election, because it's easier to tear up the manifesto after 4 months rather than 4 weeks. It's an oversimplification to say it will apply to the private sector...

Unless you're Welsh or Cornish, you won't get much. Most of our ancestors were Angles, Saxons, and Vikings, and they were post-Roman. On the other hand, the Welsh especially are quids in. They can collect from Italy for the Romans, from Germany for the Anglo-Saxons, from Norway and Denmark...

To be fair, he said before the general election that people who could write a cheque when something goes wrong were not working people. That pretty much covers everyone with say £10,000 in savings, if we take as a guide that "something going wrong" is perhaps the cost of replacing a roof. It's...

I'm not sure that dictating whether Barbados can be in the Commonwealth or not, is a good way of demonstrating how anti-colonial we are. Wouldn't it be a better gesture top let them make their own mind up?

Perhaps even worse is that some people (including teachers) do appear to believe that "we" established the slave trade in the first place. I'm actually quite proud (not that any credit is due to me, of course!) that since Roman times, slavery has been in theory illegal in this country, and...

36 teams are playing 144 games to eliminate 12 of them. It's bound to be boring. And teams will only need (per simulations) 9 points to qualify, from 8 games, so the richest clubs could play the reserves for all 8 games and still qualify with something to spare.

These graphs and figures are all meaningless. The true debt is about (I'm told) two and a half times that figure, but official figures are never produced. Any limited company that produced figures for total debt that excluded finance leases and unfunded pension liabilities, would be prosecuted...

The idea of reaching agreement with the colonised nations is impossible. Let's face it, 200 years ago the UK freed the slaves throughout the Empire and spent fortunes not just stopping slavery in the Empire, but also stopping (contrary to international law!) the international slave trade...

I agree. Even if the UK spent close to 2% of the gross national income on ending slavery throughout the world. the people whose distant ancestors were slaves would still be demanding more. We know that, because that's what the British Empire did in the first half of the 19th century, not only...

I presume you aren't going to mention the difference between Employees' and Employer's NIC either? ;)