UK Politics Thread

Yeah this is a bit multi-dimensional, where 2 sides of the argument are both wrong. The left are screaming bloody murder of betrayal. The Blairite right and some union bosses, want it to be fully rolled back and are kind of gleeful about the whole thing.

So on the face of it, borrowing is loads more expensive. Bond yields were below 2% last year, Truss's fucking idiocy pushed it up to 4.5%, it came back down to around 3% earlier this year and had been trending down, but those core inflation figures from a couple weeks ago shoved it back up to 4.25%. So the cost of borrowing and servicing that debt has shot up again. So for the policy as written to work, either some other part of the budget needed to come down to deal with the increased cost or the policy had to be reduced / phased in more cautiously. Otherwise it'd just be fucking stupid to not react to bond yield changes since this was said in 2021.

The actual fucking stupid thing Reeves/Starmer did though was say "no tax rises of any kind". As they've completely boxed themselves in to have to break one or the other promise based on circumstances out of their control. If they'd said something less specific around taxes like "no income tax increases for working people" <--- define as you will, they could have re-balanced the books by normalising taxes on economic rent against income. E.g. capital gains tax, taxing actual rent etc. But oh no they had to go and say 2 things it was going to be impossible to do both on.