Labour's own people are telling you everything you need to know.
Wes Streeting: Reeves has no plan for growth.
Pat McFadden: all Labour want to do is tax more to pay more benefits.
John Healey: Starmer won't fund our armed forces.
Jess Phillips: PM only acted to protect women and girls when it needed to save his own skin over Mandelson.
A government turning in on itself.
Complaining about nightlife when you *checks notes* choose to live in Soho is like living in South Kensington and complaining about the museums. Or moving to Hackney and grumbling about creatives. Living in Richmond and hating green space. It's all getting a bit silly, isn't it?
NEW
Chancellor announces new restriction on use of judicial review for “critical infrastructure” clean energy projects - ie wind and nuclear - and time limitation for other projects, roads, rail and reservoirs - this is in addition to the streamlining of the process in the planning law.
Will curb environmental challenges to big infrastructure plans.
Ed Miliband’s Energy Independence Bill includes…
Banning new oil and gas from the North Sea.
He is not making us more independent. He is making us more reliant on foreign imports.
He is utterly deluded. We will fight him every step of the way.
We are about to have our seventh prime minister in a decade. Has Britain become the new Italy? What is going on?
The truth is that we are in denial about what we have done to our economy. We have become poorer through excessive taxation, spending, borrowing, regulation and money-printing. But we don’t like to admit it.
A recent survey by @IEALondon found that we think of ourselves as a wealthy country, comparable to Singapore or Switzerland. In fact, Singaporeans and Swiss are roughly twice as rich as us, and we are about to be overtaken by Poland and Slovenia.
How did it happen? There is no mystery. Under Tony Blair, the state was spending one pound in three; now it is closer to one in two.
We say we want growth, but we don’t want it if it means cutting welfare, allowing more private healthcare, reducing taxes for entrepreneurs, liberalising employment law, raising the state pension age, sacking government employees, admitting skilled immigrants, ending the triple lock or allowing new houses near us. In other words, we don’t really want growth at all.
Rather that acknowledging that contradiction, we blame our politicians. But as long as we make it politically impossible to cut spending (see the attached story as just the most recent example, one of a hundred I might have picked), we condemn ourselves to penury.
It will carry on until we have leaders prepared to deliver growth, as opposed to intoning the word. And that will happen only when we accept that we were living beyond our means even before the lockdown, that we have become utterly bloated since and that, like an obese person who wants to become fit, we face some short-term pain.
https://t.co/N8vBRKRQLx
In the name of public service, and as ex-economics editor of BBC Newsnight, I offer to do a zoom call, tonight, with any Labour MP who wants to understand why bond markets do not "fall into line" with governments. 1/
How can stuff like this get written? Imagine it for any other good! “Affordability is driving the chocolate price spike, not a cocoa bean shortage. We just need to designate some beans as special cheap beans to bring prices down” https://t.co/XCNkYbrOG6
@Keir_Starmer This guff doesn't even work on its own terms... 🙄
BP’s increased profits from global oil and gas trading are not subject to the UK windfall tax.
The Energy Profits Levy applies only to BP's profits from UK oil and gas extraction, thus penalising domestic production.
Mad.
UK tax is going to be the highest since 1945. But public spending won't increase; in fact most of us will experience a decline in public services.
Here's why - in a thread that I'd love to be completely wrong.