Funding the Future

If, as expected, Rachel Reeves increases employers’ national insurance next week, and she doesn’t compensate the NHS, education, local authorities and other departments for the cost, then the impact on public services is going to be very big – and in some cases bigger than any budget settlement they might get.

The UK economy is now a mess built on the foundations of everyone sub-contracting everything they can whenever they think that possible. The result is that we have an economy made up of middlemen, all of them raking off their own bit of profit.

Labour ministers have been talking about ‘black holes’ in the government’s finances ever since they got into office, but technically such a thing is an impossibility. Isn’t the most basic thing we should expect of them is that they be competent? So, why aren’t they?

Rachel Reeves wants growth, and it’s thought she’s going to seriously increase employers’ national insurance contributions, which is most likely to stop that happening. Why is she adopting such an absurd approach to the economy?

Keir Starmer is desperate for foreign money to fund British investment,

To pretend that there is almost any similarity between how small and big businesses is absurd. Small businesses have to serve us, or they fail. Big business tries to entrap us in debt to ensure that they keep growing ever bigger. We need to rethink what we think about the private sector – and what parts of it we want to promote.

Starmer wants high-tech investment in the UK that will demand massive new electricity supply and water supplies we simply have not got, and all for not many new jobs. Why doesn’t he grow UK small business instead?

Keir Starmer has said he wants a bonfire of red tape. That is the same goal that ended at Grenfell when David Cameron promoted it. What it actually means is that consumers take the risk in society and those who create the risks don’t and there’s not an iota of sense in that.

Having to clear my late father’s home recently it became very apparent how the material focus of economics is wrong. What he had mattered for little in the end. The memories he left did. So why does economics get this so terribly wrong?

My interview on BBC Radio 5 Live on 18 October