Michael O'Connor

Labour market, welfare, legal bits’n’pieces. Sometime ‘expert’, ex Customs & Excise, Treasury, DWP. DMs open. Longer stuff on Medium will restart summer 2026.

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

Something from me on Friday's @UKSupremeCourt Uber judgment https://t.co/FAKzpNLyHq ... @JolyonMaugham

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

@RollingHedge Literally nonsense. Most working-age people pay their own way except while their children are at school. Government deficit at the moment is about the same as spending on state pension.

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

@DuxVul Not this again! Role is basically to oversee IT services for the Treasury's couple of thousand staff, laptops for remote working etc. Nothing to do with tax systems at all. These are run by HMRC - and their CTO was on £250k 20 years ago (then highest earner in the Civil Service)

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

@Frencheconomics Well, inflation will make a difference between NGDP and RGDP, but not between whole economy and per head measures. So which saw UK lose most ground - inflation compared to others or population growth compared to others?

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

@NicholsGarney @JohnRentoul Lolz. The ‘winter of discontent’ resulted from Callaghan imposing a public sector pay cap and fighting the unions 😂

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

@izakaminska As a regular reader of sentencing remarks what’s unusual about this case is there appears to have been no ‘pre-sentencing report’ usually undertaken by psychiatrists that report in detail about the criminal’s person, motivation etc.

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

@izakaminska Indeed. But no sense he was going around looking for people to stab. What was interesting for me was that none of the reportage along the way (or even since) seemed to identify clearly why he attacked his victim. The sentencing remarks make it clear enough.

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

@Michael_For14 @izakaminska Yes most unusual. I imagine ‘flight risk’ would have been invoked.

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

@izakaminska The judge records in the sentencing remarks aggravating and mitigating factors. In this case he notes as a mitigating factor a good record with no previous convictions.

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

@AlanJLSmith Something over 600,000 people die each year. Only about 30,000 estates pay any IHT. In the latest data, fewer than 2,000 of these were worth £3m (as per your example) or more. So maybe complex but affecting hardly anybody.

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

@MonkEmma @astor_charlie This is basically a re-run of Cameron’s ‘new jobs going to EU migrants’ debacle. But the ‘gotcha’ is similarly ill-directed. The point is that a material increase in demand for workers has been met more than entirely by supply from abroad while domestic capacity goes unused.

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

About the only benefit that is exclusively for people out of work is New Style JSA, paid to ~70,000 claimants. So if that’s what ‘out of work benefit’ means then we can celebrate that hardly anyone in the UK is on out of work benefits at all 🥳

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

Seeing such comments very often. Accuracy depends on whether ‘out of work benefit’ means benefit being paid to someone not working or means a benefit only for out-of-work people. If the former then PIP *is* a main out of work benefit as it’s paid to over 3 million not working 🧵

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

And only about a fifth of that number get PIP while working. So it’s mainly a benefit for out-of-work people. Only UC is paid to more people who aren’t working but a much higher proportion are working or looking for work - well over half.

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

@ChristianHeiens The proportion of White Americans (non-Hispanic White in official classification) in USA is rather lower than proportion of White British in UK

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

@GreatBritishTT Less than half of this amount goes to private sector landlords. And fewer than half of private sector rental properties are mortgaged. And btw what’s to be done to fix the housing crisis?

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

@julianHjessop Italy’s per capita rather flattered by population decline of near 3% since 2016.

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

@KnotCorrect Obviously in almost every country population growth is driven by immigration. It’s possible of course that the availability of additional labour reduces incentive for productivity improvement, and lack of labour increases it.

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

Pondering why UK GDP hasn't matched faster-growing EU countries. There's quite a clear correlation here: the less population grows (or the more it shrinks) the more GDP grows. And this is growth in whole economy GDP *not* per capita growth. UK (red) bang in line with trend.

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

It’s easy enough to do but not terribly informative as falling population will increase GDP per capita compositionally (unless GDP goes with them of course).

[Michael O'Connor @StrongerInNos]

@rosemxmi Interesting. One wonders whether @hmrc use the data to check whether people are registered for VAT as it's hard to be below the threshold if you employ even one person, let alone more.