If Kemi Badenoch is supposed to be doing the showy stuff, then Stride is the unglamorous details man. Suspend your disbelief and buy in to the science fictional conceit that the Tories can win an election. Their next government would make £47bn worth of cuts. £23bn would come from cutting sickness-related social security support. Stride has decided that people with mental health conditions like depression, ADHD, and anxiety merit deserve no support at all. Presumably, work is the silver bullet that would vanquish these illnesses. Our old friend civil service cuts are back for another tour of duty, sacking 132,000 people and returning the state bureaucracy to the size it was in 2016. You know, when it was so stretched it famously did less planning for Brexit than the Japanese government. This represents an "evolution" of Badenoch's deep thoughts, who last year was merely interested in more efficient admin. This would yield £8bn in "savings", with the rest coming from reducing overseas aid further, tying benefit eligibility to citizenship, cutting environmental commitments, and scrapping hotel accommodation for refugees.
And this hodgepodge pays for what carrots? The reversal of Rachel Reeves's increase in employers' National Insurance contributions is front and centre. Allied to this is a promise to scrap business rates up to a limit of £110k/year for retail, hospitality, and leisure. Taken together I'm sure small independent traders would welcome this so don't be surprised if Labour half-inches some of this, especially nearer to the next general election. And what about young people? The Tories have spent years scratching their heads and wondering how to attract layers of younger people to whom they are repulsive. And their answer is ... a £5,000 cash hand out. This would be a tax rebate for new workers in their first job. What would have been NI payments can be cashed in after five years and spent as they see fit. Don't ask what this could mean for state pension eligibility later on.
At the end of his speech, Stride got a bit overexcited, castigating the doom-mongering of the other parties and claiming the mantle of hope for the Tories. Which was as audacious as it was a waste of time, seeing as no one was watching. While Badenoch and co. have gone off the war on woke deep end, the shadow chancellor has stayed firmly on the ground of traditional Tory economics. A little something here for small business, an eye-catching bribe for a wider constituency - in this case, young people. And all paid for by robbing the futures of the beneficiaries of this policy, stripping out state capacity, and promising to govern like Rishi Sunak. If you remember him. Unfortunately for the Tories, conservatism here means being out of step with political realities. British capital needs a stronger, more reliable state that can do things. And despite the best efforts of Labour to dampen expectations, this is what its diminishing support and expanding former voters want to see. As does the bulk of Reform's support when the racist circus orchestrated by ringmaster Farage isn't at the forefront of their minds. The Conservatives are nowhere near where the punters are.
You could make the case that Stride's speech was as much about consolidating the Tory base as whatever rubbish Badenoch has stored away for her main conference address. But all the same, while the Tories are party to the racist and anti-democratic consensus uniting Labour and Reform on immigration and "social conservatism", they are outsiders on the economic questions of the day. So no, Stride didn't offer any credible salve for his severely wounded party. Compounded by an inability to see how and why the Tories are broken.
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Mel and Kemi's only job right now is to persuade their MPs not to jump ship.
ReplyDeleteIt seems the abolition of stamp duty is the rabbit-from-hat trick of this conference. KB revealed it as if unveiling a new technology that will revolutionize society as we know it. Apparently this will suddenly make housing affordable for everyone - especially the young.
ReplyDeleteBut...it must be an accident that the biggest savers would be those already well up the property ladder who were looking to move up to an even higher rung. If they wanted to help the starters, could they not just increase the limit below which it isn't paid?
One could think that she was just looking after her well-healed SE living pals, if we were cynical...
Undoing the NIC raise is probably a good policy, it's a serious drag on economic growth, it specifically hurts small and medium enterprises and younger or less experienced workers (like people with patchy employment records). The latter two groups are going to be especially hard hit by the new workers rights Labour is aiming to bring in. Those rights increase the risk of employers being stuck with underperforming workers they would previously have weeded out during probationary periods, which means they will be more likely to prioritise experienced versus inexperienced workers (this isn't hateful behaviour, it's just how commercial activities work). The NIC raise has also made the cost of living crisis worse as it has inflated costs in low margin supply chains like groceries, and it has supressed demand for discretionary leisure spending like hospitality (which is also low margin, and often an entry point for less experienced workers).
ReplyDeleteAbolishing Stamp Duty is another good policy, it is one of the worst taxes in terms of it's inefficiencies and disbenefits to the wider economy.
Those two policies would be genuinely pro-growth, unlike anything Labour has so far enacted, which has mainly been an attempt to prop-up subsidising unproductivity. Which leads neatly to subsidies for things like mental health conditions, there is a serious issue around the growth of subsidies to what might be described as 'mental resilience' i.e. we're not talking about profound disability which is far more stable, but growth in the kind of conditions that have always existed but didn't tend to stop people working until they started getting paid not to work. This isn't sustainable.
Kamo loves reanimated Thatcherite bullshit, and has a list of vapid rationalisations that would do any chatbot (or right wing economic think tank) proud. Who could possibly have foreseen such a thing?
ReplyDeleteIt's always fun to read the justificatory BS that armchair eugenicists like Kamo blurt out. Especially the cursory attempts to sound slighty human: "it specifically hurts...younger or less experienced workers (like people with patchy employment records)". Like he gives sh*t!
ReplyDeleteMore honestly, but still creepily slanted to make it sound vaguely concerned about others, "Those rights increase the risk of employers being stuck with underperforming workers". Yes, the economy went to hell in a handcart when they stopped people just sacking anyone whenever they felt like it. But, seriously Kamo, with zero hours and self-employment, who would bother employing anyone now anyway?
Or does that have a downside after all? Might it be that paying people a decent wage and treating them well is good for a business? Perish the thought.
Then there's the categoric statements of absolute certainty with zero evidence or even attempt to justify them. Like this classic, "Abolishing Stamp Duty is another good policy, it is one of the worst taxes in terms of it's inefficiencies and disbenefits to the wider economy."
I mean , it's convincing, isn't it? It sounds as if he's studied all the taxes and read every detail and looked at the books and followed the research and come to this perfectly founded conclusion. Only he hasn't. He just wants it to be true. But he has no clue if it is or not.
His final para is the reveal. This is what he is really all about. These lily-livered snowflake woke weaklings with their pretend mental problems. It wasn't like that in my day - we just got on with it. Don't talk to me about PTSD - it was shell shock and you either fought on or you died by firing squad. Those pussies whimpering about stress and feeling a bit down. We used to self administer electric shock therapy by biting through a live wire and that soon had us back on our feet - if it didn't kill us. But hey, better dead than on the benefit.
The caring Kamo is a token gesture because lacking any actual empathy it needs to try to fake it, but the effort is too much. It gets that being too Kemi and coming across like a misprogrammed killbot laughing inappropriately and grinning at the thought of all the punishments it can inflict in its longed for work or die world can be off-putting to those they are seeking to use. But they always give themselves away with little tells like "subsidising unproductivity" or "mental resilience" when they really mean "work until you drop or starve, scum".