As another UK prime minister bites the dust, a contradictory tech legacy remains

Long have we known that technology speeds up everything, and it's no different with British prime ministers. In the last ten years, the UK has gone through six prime ministers; it took 34 years to get through the previous six. Nonetheless, Sir Keir Starmer had hoped to make an impact on the UK tech industry and the government's …

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Surely it's not that difficult

All you have to do is appeal to Nazi Reform party members while keeping both the Hampstead labour party (Marxist-Leninist) and Hampstead labour party (Troskiest) happy. Fully support Israel and the USA while keeping Muslim voters.

Give pensioners everything they ask for and more and ensure house prices always go up while letting young people do better than their parents.

Invest to make Britain a powerhouse of global whatsit while reducing the deficit. Embrace next generation technology while building nothing anywhere near anybody

And all the while keep the Daily Mail and backbench MPs happy.

[Dan 55]

Re: Surely it's not that difficult

Don't forget thawing relations with Europe to recover some of the 6% GDP lost to the economy while not crossing Brexit red lines.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Surely it's not that difficult

The government policy on Brexit is perfectly clear. So clear it's so transparent you can't even see it

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Surely it's not that difficult

Hampstead labour party (Marxist-Leninist) and Hampstead labour party (Troskiest) happy.

Worth being precise about what gets nodded through when a Marxist-Leninist group is treated as a respectable dinner-party partner.

Millions died under regimes that called themselves socialist. The part worth dwelling on is that the ideology handed them the grammar to justify it.

Reduce politics to class war. Make law an instrument of class power. Declare the party the voice of historical necessity. Now the victim is no longer a person. He is a kulak. A wrecker. A bourgeois nationalist. A spy. A socially harmful element. Killing him is not killing. It is defence of the revolution.

Lenin set the template. The Red Terror was sold as revolutionary dictatorship against class enemies. The Cheka skipped ordinary law because ordinary law was bourgeois restraint. War Communism declared grain the property of the revolution, so a peasant keeping his own harvest became a hoarder and a kulak agent. Tambov's farmers asked for relief and got hostages, camps and poison gas. The camps started under Lenin. Stalin just inherited them.

Stalin scaled the lot. "Liquidating the kulaks as a class" turned deportation, confiscation, starvation and shooting into historical hygiene. Then the famine came. The regime did not concede the policy had failed. It announced the grain was hidden, the quotas sabotaged, the enemy still resisting. Hunger became evidence of treason.

The national operations ran the same machine with an ethnic coat of paint. Poles, Germans, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Koreans, Chinese. None murdered for their ethnicity, officially. The state did not admit to that. They were recoded as foreign agents, fascist networks, fifth columns. That is the whole trick. The vocabulary let you turn an entire people into political contamination.

The numbers. The Polish Operation shot around 111,000. Roughly four in five of everyone arrested. The 1937 deportation moved about 172,000 Soviet Koreans east. Then the Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Volga Germans, Karachays, Balkars. Whole nations onto trains, because ethnicity had been redefined as disloyalty. Katyn applied the logic to an elite. 22,000 Polish officers, police and intellectuals shot in advance, as a future leadership that might one day object.

The famines fit the pattern. 1932-33 was collectivisation, requisition, sealed borders, and a flat refusal to admit the policy caused the corpses. Ukraine got blamed on kulak resistance and bourgeois nationalism. Kazakhstan got forced sedentarisation, because a state had decided nomads must be broken into socialist shape. Millions starved to death. The regime read the dead as proof the enemy had not yet surrendered.

Even biology had to comply. Lysenko declared genetics bourgeois and his own quackery proletarian truth. Vavilov died in prison for disagreeing. The same ideological agriculture then crossed to Mao and helped engineer the Great Leap, where politics commanded nature, the peasants and the harvest, and the deaths ran to tens of millions.

The Khmer Rouge stripped it to the bone. Empty the cities. Abolish money. Abolish the family. Restart history at Year Zero. Reality objected. Reality was tortured until it confessed.

Then the alliance nobody brings up. The Comintern's "social fascist" line had German Communists fighting the SPD while Hitler climbed the stairs. Then Molotov-Ribbentrop, 1939. A signed Nazi-Soviet pact, secret protocols, Eastern Europe carved up over dinner. Poland invaded from both sides. The Baltics handed to Stalin. Soviet grain and oil feeding the German war machine right up to Barbarossa. German Communist refugees handed back to the Gestapo. Partners. Until they were not.

The Trotskyist escape hatch fails too. Trotsky did not object to the coercive state on principle. He defended the terror, built the war machine, and signed off on Kronstadt, where sailors who had been heroes of the revolution were shot for asking for free soviets and an end to one-party rule. "Not real socialism" is an alibi. It is not an argument.

So be consistent. One extremist badge empties the room. The hammer and sickle gets called heritage chic. The problem is not that the deaths happened somewhere in the vicinity. Marxist-Leninist rule kept manufacturing the categories that let people be starved, deported, jailed and shot while the men doing it called it progress.

The creed that built its own machinery of class terror, ethnic quotas, famine policy and labour camps, and shook Hitler's hand in 1939, should not get a pass because its slogans go down smoother at dinner.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Surely it's not that difficult

And that's the reason we have green bins on alternative Wednesday except during a full moon and so I'm voting Reform.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Surely it's not that difficult

More like it's peculiar that politicians from all sides share one trait: a fetish for oppression.

The surveillance state Labour is building in cooperation with foreign big corporations (Mussolini had a word for the marriage of state and corporate) will serve Reform very nicely when their turn comes.

The watchers are not watching.

[Dan 55]

Re: Surely it's not that difficult

"We cannot do X because a future evil leader of a evil party might do something with it".

Evil leaders are always going to let themselves be stopped by the rule of law, checks and balances, and political tradition. Evil leaders are also noted for saying things like "if only someone had previously set up X for me then I would have been able to use it, I just can't make an X for myself".

As we can see from the US' example, Trump was stopped dead in his tracks and was also unable to set up the ICE facial recognition database. Biden's plan of doing nothing worked. Starmer was stopped mid-plan, but maybe Burnham will continue doing nothing. In that case when Farage's turn comes he will also be unable to do anything.

There's an alternative theory that leaders who do things and improve people's lives will not get voted out and replaced with evil leaders, but that sounds like crazy talk.

[Paul Herber]

Re: Surely it's not that difficult

"except during a full moon"

That way lies lunacy!

[Dan 55]

Re: Surely it's not that difficult

If I wanted to read slop I'd read Linked-In. Maybe you'd find more success there?

[steelpillow]

Re: Surely it's not that difficult

> Hampstead labour party (Marxist-Leninist)

Funny thing is, they follow all that up by accusing religions as being the cause of it all.

Charman Miaow declared, "Religion is poison". By those lights, rational materialism is nuclear armageddon - uncomfortably like Hampstead on a wet Monday morning, which must explain a lot.

[LionelB]

Re: Surely it's not that difficult

> Millions died under regimes that called themselves socialist ...

.. but who were not, in fact, actually socialist.

> The part worth dwelling on is that the ideology handed them the grammar to justify it.

I guess you might equally say capitalism handed a different "them" (us?) the grammar to justify colonial expropriation, slavery, ..

> Reduce politics to class race war. Make law an instrument of class race power. Declare the party the voice of historical necessity. Now the victim is no longer a person. He is a kulak. A wrecker. A bourgeois nationalist insurrectionist outsider. A spy. A socially harmful element. Killing him is not killing. It is defence of the revolution.

Sound familiar?

Whataboutery, yes; but nobody comes out of this well.

[QuickLuck]

Can't see anything there that can't be done from the chrimbo change freeze.

[wolfetone]

"In the last ten years, the UK has gone through six prime ministers; it took 34 years to get through the previous six."

The difference?

Back then you only had Fleet Street telling you who to vote for. Now we have tech firms ran by people with vested interests in creating problems in society who would rather have their own dog in the fight.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

But when you had the proprietor of the Sun and Daily Mail telling you who to vote for they at least had to think of their readership, it was almost democratic

Now you have any country with a defense budget that can afford a few $100k on targeted adspend can buy an election

[pimppetgaeghsr]

People voting to keep murderers on the right side of our borders isn't some tech social media campaign, migration to the UK has kept wages stagnant and productivity terrible whilst our advantage as a tech hub was quietly squandered after the GFC, salaries didn't start climbing until there was actual tech investment, rather than bluechip companies using it as an indian office in a better timezone. Disruptive parties having to bend the knee to Palantir and Musk, otherwise the algorithms flip, pretty much is the story.

[MonkeyJuice]

Do you not think perhaps not taxing Amazon and friends might contribute to stagnant wages rather than migrants? Sure, international obligations are a bit of a money sink, but for decades governments of all colours have looked at the one-way financial valve to America and gone "nothing to see here".

Unexploited tax revenue outweighs basically every other issue. It's no wonder the guilt markets get the jitters every time the government proposes buying office supplies, let alone any serious investments (which inevitably get abandoned within the year as the next sacrificial goat is lined up).

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone still thinks companies pay taxes. I wish there was a word for this condition that could be used in polite company.

[MonkeyJuice]

Did you read my comment? I wonder who you are addressing...

The ease with which one can inspire pure undirected rage on the internet is just marvellous.

Anyway don't forget to smash that downvote button!

[John Sager]

Whoosh!

[MonkeyJuice]

Thanks for playing!

[elsergiovolador]

Of course undertaxing large corporations contributes to stagnation. But that does not make the visa system irrelevant. It just means people are being mugged twice, then encouraged to argue over which pocket was picked.

The clever part is the framing. One side tells workers that migrants took their jobs. The other side tells them that noticing wage pressure makes them vulgar, backward or suspect. Very convenient. Everyone gets a morality play. Nobody has to look at the employer holding the wage down.

The migrant did not design the salary floor. The migrant did not invent the shortage list. The migrant did not decide that a “skilled” salary could sit around the bottom quartile of the occupation. The migrant did not tell employers they could advertise poor rates, watch locals refuse them, then call the refusal a shortage.

Government did that.

Until April 2024, the Skilled Worker route allowed a main salary threshold of £26,200, with occupation rates tied to the 25th percentile. Shortage roles got further discounts. In normal language: employers were given a legal mechanism to recruit below what many British workers would regard as a proper market rate.

Then everyone pretended to be confused when wages stayed flat.

The same trick runs through outsourcing. A sponsor cannot simply say, “Here is a cheap worker, rent him.” Far too crude. So the grown-up version wears a suit. Call it a managed service. Call it a transformation programme. Call it a client delivery workstream. Put the worker on the sponsor’s payroll, place a manager above them, say the sponsor remains responsible for the outputs, and suddenly the same person can sit in the client’s meetings, work on the client’s systems and deliver the client’s roadmap.

The worker gets the sponsored salary. The client buys a respectable commercial service. The middle layer keeps the massive margin. The local worker gets told their rate expectations are unrealistic.

No business for you. Join the big machine or enjoy being priced out by a system your own government helped build.

Dependants matter too, not as a moral accusation, but as basic arithmetic. Many sponsored routes allowed partners and children to come as well, and dependants could often work. That means more people in the labour market, more people needing housing, more people needing GP appointments and school places. Again, the immigrants did not write the policy. Ministers did.

So yes, tax avoidance by large corporations matters (setting aside lack of enforcement by HMRC when it comes to big corporations). But wage suppression through migration policy also matters. Treating those as rival explanations is another neat little psyop. The public gets offered two wrong enemies: the migrant, or the person complaining about migration.

The more useful target sits above both of them.

Employers wanted cheaper labour. Consultancies wanted margin. Governments wanted growth on paper without admitting they were subsidising employers at the expense of British workers. Then, when the public noticed the consequences, the same people acted shocked that anyone was angry.

Very tidy. Very British. Break the labour market, import the pressure, outsource the blame, then call the resentment extremism.

[elsergiovolador]

To add a point about outsourcing - old software-developer sponsorship could start around £27.2k though new rules in 2024 raised the floor, but even £40k-£55k salaries leave a very healthy spread when the service can be sold at £1-£2k+ per person per day.

[J.G.Harston]

"perhaps not taxing Amazon and friends might contribute to stagnant wages..."

So, send the gunboats to Seattle and bombard the city until Amazon hands over piles of money? What is it about today's political discourse that people wet their pants demanding a return to the 19th century?

[Bebu sa Ware]

…that people wet their pants demanding a return to the 19th century?

"Wihat is it about today's political discourse that people wet their pants demanding a return to the 19th century?"

Possibly the 20th century and U²³⁵ & Pu²³⁹.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: …that people wet their pants demanding a return to the 19th century?

Steam trains and rickets - what more could you want?

[BurnedOut]

Just imagine how much tax revenue Amazon accounts for in the UK in the forms of VAT, income tax, NI, business rates, etc. And you seriously think that finding some way to extract more Corporation tax from them would be a key to increased economic growth?

[elsergiovolador]

That argument rather proves the problem.

VAT comes from customers. PAYE and employee NI come from workers. Business rates come from occupying property.

The corporation tax question matters because it shapes the whole market. A British competitor cannot build an Amazon rival while paying normal UK tax, normal UK costs and normal UK compliance, then compete against a multinational able to route profit through group charges, IP structures, internal fees, convenient foreign booking arrangements and sympathetic HMRC looking away.

That does not just reduce Treasury receipts. It kills competition before it starts. Local firms stay small or die. Jobs that could have existed never appear. Suppliers get squeezed. Customers get fewer real choices. The market slowly becomes a theme park where British businesses pay full admission and global platforms stroll in through the diplomatic entrance.

The point is restoring a level playing field. Growth comes from competition, local investment and new firms having a chance to scale. A tax system that rewards international accountancy gymnastics over local enterprise gives you exactly what Britain now has: weak productivity, dead high streets, anaemic domestic champions and a government applauding VAT receipts as if customers paid them out of admiration for Jeff Bezos.

[Phil O'Sophical]

The other difference is that 30 years ago a change of government (and thus PM) meant a substantial change in policies, for good or bad. Recently it didn't seem to matter who was PM, or from what party, the policies rarely changed much.

Of course, if Burnham gets selected and does make substantial changes, especially ones outside the manifesto Labour was elected on, there will rightly be calls for a general election. It remains to be seen if he's arrogant enough to think he would win one.

In the meantime we have the leadership contest and Manchester mayoral replacement election to look forward to. Where did I put the popcorn?

[Apocalypso - a cheery end to the world]

Time (geddit!) for a new Reg unit?

> In the last ten years, the UK has gone through six prime ministers; it took 34 years to get through the previous six.

The old joke was that Bolivia measured its history in RPM - revolutions per minute. We're now at the point where prime ministers need to be measured in PPM -- Prime ministers Per Month[1]

Icon: closest thing to a stopped pendulum. Also a sign of the "chaos" that No. 10 said would occur if Andy Burnham were allowed to step down from being mayor

[1] Month conveniently ensures that the lower bound set by Liz Truss[2] is close to one.

[2] A lettuce is a little too short-lived for general purposes use.

[wolfetone]

Re: Time (geddit!) for a new Reg unit?

That lettuce was a better leader than Truss.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: Time (geddit!) for a new Reg unit?

One thing about Truss is how quickly she went full in on the conspiracy-friendly, CPAC/MAGA rabid right in the US after she left office which, ironically, makes it far more shocking only with hindsight that she was ever considered- by her own party if no-one else- fit to be PM in the first place.

Of course, it's arguable that she took off in that direction solely because she could rationalise her personal failure as being due to the "deep state" and find solace amongst similar types who would be inclined to actually believe that.

For all that she shat the bed with her ideological zealotry over fiscal responsibility (*), in hindsight, it's possibly an ironic blessing that she did so. Or rather, that she did so quite so quickly and badly that even her own party had no choice but to get rid of her before she had time to become established and cause more damage.

(*) For all that the likes of Truss worshipped Thatcher, someone noted that even *she* realised that tax cuts et al had to be "earned", which Truss- who doubled down on Thatcherite zealotry at the expense of competence, never did.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Time (geddit!) for a new Reg unit?

She needed a job and hadn't done enough for Murdoch to get a Times column.

What's she going to do? Become the Messiah and bring peace to the middle-east?

[R Soul]

Re: Time (geddit!) for a new Reg unit?

Doesn't Donald Trump already have that job?

[Paul Herber]

Re: Time (geddit!) for a new Reg unit?

Hold on! Pope first, or Messiah first?

[Michael Strorm]

Re: Time (geddit!) for a new Reg unit?

Much as I dislike Truss and her swivel-eyed pandering to right-wing nutcases, she doesn't come close to Tony Blair in terms of fitting the position of a former British PM with an obvious messiah complex and a bizarrely inappropriate yet unshakeable delusion that- despite having irredeemably associated himself with the Iraq War debacle and being hated by many for it- he's still, somehow, the man to help bring peace to the Middle East.

[Anonymous Coward]

what consideration for Lettuce Liz?

Truss was never considered for PM. She got the job by default because the other candidate had a foreign name and brown skin.

[BurnedOut]

Re: what consideration for Lettuce Liz?

Seriously? The Conservative party membership chose Kemi Badenoch over Robert Jenrick in 2024.

In 2022 polling suggested that if Badenoch had not been eliminated in the parliamentary party voting rounds, she'd have beaten any of the others when it came to the membership vote. I rather suspect they chose Liz Truss in preference to Rishi Sunak because of discomfort with the way he had planned his campaign and been offered to them as the annointed candidate.

It's worth remembering that in 2001 when William Hague was replaced the first round of voting by MPs gave Michael Portillo the largest share. However yhey went on to eliminate him and gave the membership a toxic choice between Iain Duncan-Smith and Ken Clarke!

All parties have difficulty with selecting leaders.

[LionelB]

Re: what consideration for Lettuce Liz?

> The Conservative party membership chose to hand the poisoned chalice to Kemi Badenoch over Robert Jenrick in 2024.

FTFY

[Jason Bloomberg]

"Burnham has already spoken out against digital ID cards"

I wouldn't trust Burnham any more than any closet or overt Blairite in the Labour party. He has flip-flopped just as all career politicians do, and I find his desperate desire to be t'king o' t'country rather worrisome. I fear we will simply be moving from Starmer to Starmer-Plus-Plus.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, but with added charisma - https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2026/06/19/burnham-same

[theOtherJT]

Re: "Burnham has already spoken out against digital ID cards"

As some wag on reddit put it this morning: "Same shit, different eyebrows"

I fear they were entirely correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Burnham has already spoken out against digital ID cards"

Burnham was a junior Home Office minister responsible for delivering ID cards under Blair and was enthusiastically promoting them back then. He "Consistently voted for introducing ID cards" (https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/10766/andy_burnham/makerfield/votes). When recently asked about Digital ID he could only respond with "not now" which is along way from "no, never". Has he truly had an epiphany or is he pretending he has, opportunistically adopting a short lived anti-Starmer position?

[Michael Strorm]

Re: "Burnham has already spoken out against digital ID cards"

As I posted a month or so back:-

> (From the person I was replying to) "[Burnham] used to be an unapologetic believer in New Labour"

Exactly.

And I clearly remember this because I first became aware of Burnham when he was a member of the New Labour cabinet during their final years in power. In 2008, Shami Chakrabarti (then director of Liberty) had taken the side of the Tory David Davis in opposing Labour's plan to detain terrorist suspects for up to 42 days without charge. In response Burnham attempted a mocking, character-assasinating smear insinuating the two were having an affair.

And since that first impression of Burnham was of him so obviously showing his true colours- a snide, bullying c***, an attack-is-the-best-form-of-defence apologist for New Labour's strongly authoritarian tendencies and a generally nasty piece of work- it's the one that stuck. And it's why I wouldn't piss on his phoney, self-serving "King of the North" good guy peoples' hero act of recent years if it was on fire.

From what I've heard, he's widely-mocked by many within Labour too, for shifting his principles and beliefs to suit his own career.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: "Burnham has already spoken out against digital ID cards"

>From what I've heard, he's widely-mocked by many within Labour too, for shifting his principles and beliefs to suit his own career.

That's Labour's secret plan. Never have a leader that the Labour party members would allow as a leader.

It's the way in which they are Marxist, just Groucho not Karl.

[Paul Herber]

Re: "Burnham has already spoken out against digital ID cards"

The best Marx speech was by Harpo.

Honk, honk.

Maybe Burham shouldn't join any version of the Labour Part that would have him!

Splitter!

[MonkeyJuice]

Re: "Burnham has already spoken out against digital ID cards"

A Blairite, a Corbynite, and a Socialist walk into a bar.

The bartender looks up.

"Hi Andy, what'll it be?"

[R Soul]

Andy Burnham isn't completely a self-serving arsehole

"From what I've heard, he's widely-mocked by many within Labour too, for shifting his principles and beliefs to suit his own career."

Name one politician who hasn't done that. Just one...

Andy Burnham may well be a nasty piece of work who cannot be trusted. But unlike just about every other politician, he has done at least one good thing and acted on principle for something that didn't benefit himself. He lead a long campaign to get some semblance of justice/closure for the victims of the Hillsborough disaster* when the political establishment tried very hard to suppress the truth. And public opinion didn't give a shit. IMO that puts him head and shoulders above every PM we've had since Attlee.

* OK, none of the lying, incompetent bastards who are responsible ever ended up in jail and only the one of them to face prosecution got off on a technicality.

[BurnedOut]

Re: Andy Burnham isn't completely a self-serving arsehole

OK, I'll bite. Enoch Powell, Frank Field, Michael Foot?

[andy gibson]

Re: Andy Burnham isn't completely a self-serving arsehole

Erm, riding around in a taxi covered in "The Sun" logos says otherwise.

Some "Scouser"

https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2015/jul/13/the-sun-embarrasses-andy-burnham-for-refusing-to-be-interviewed

[EvilDrSmith]

Re: "Burnham has already spoken out against digital ID cards"

Keir today, gone tomorrow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Burnham has already spoken out against digital ID cards"

And from Canada mark-carney-named-next-uk-prime-minister

Notes for people not following news of the empire. Carney is a former bank of England and bank of Canada boss who got parachuted in when everyone got bored of our Blairite nepo-baby, it looked like a Trump-gargling Farage-clone was going to win and the electorate thought "shall we have a grown up in charge for a change?"

[Pete 2]

Squeezing the balloon

The problem with "efficiency improvements" is that this merely means redundancies - since people are the largest component of a company's costs. But that just transfers costs off the government payroll and onto the benefits budget.

British governments are famously inept at provoking growth. When it happens it is generally despite them, rather than because of them. And since few in government have any real world experience, they are in no position to decide what is a workable strategy and what simply looks like a vote-winner. Generally they choose the quick-fux (sorry: fix, on second thoughts ...), headline friendly, sound bite rich solution.

So no. While Burnham seems to have many qualities for a PM, just like Starmer had, he is still bound by the same anti-innovation environment and opponents.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Squeezing the balloon

> headline friendly, sound bite rich solution.

Although the plans for the editor of the Daily Mail and the owner of Mumsnet to cage fight in front of parliament is a popular move.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Squeezing the balloon

They should run it like Thunderdome, but with one fewer people leaving.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Squeezing the balloon

Like the plan for Tory Survivor:

We put Cameron, Boris and Farage on a deserted tropical island.

What and film them doing tasks for food ?

No. We just put ....

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Squeezing the balloon

Redundancy becomes a kind of tax-base avoidance. Treasury has allowed large companies to count employment taxes as part of their “contribution”, as if PAYE and NICs were corporate virtue, not the workers’.

When a large company stops hiring, automates, outsources or cuts staff, it also sheds that bit of “corporate contribution”.

Where does the Treasury look next? Not at the large company. Never there. Large companies are always complex, strategic, important, globally mobile, not to be frightened. The suspicion is reserved for workers, small firms and anyone stupid enough to have a tax base that cannot leave the country.

That is the growth problem in miniature.

Government keeps mistaking big company activity for national prosperity. A foreign platform books sales here, employs people here, collects PAYE here, then sends the real margin through whatever structure its advisers have polished this year. Treasury applauds the “investment”. HMRC admires the payroll. Ministers cut a ribbon. Then everyone acts puzzled when the country feels poorer.

Money earned by a local SME mostly stays boringly local. Wages, suppliers, rent, accountants, machine tools, vans, stock, repairs, subcontractors, apprentices, cafés near the workshop. Not glamorous. No global strategy deck. No glossy inward-investment announcement. No wine and steak. Just economic circulation.

But that kind of business gets treated like a compliance risk. More forms. More suspicion. More employment-tax traps. More IR35-style nudging. More “prove you are not dodging something”. Grow a little and the thresholds start biting. Stay small and you survive. Try to scale and the state starts behaving like your silent worst investor.

So people with brains leave, sell early, close their small businesses, join a multinational, or just stop trying. Skills drain away from ownership into employment. Ambitious small firms become subcontractors to larger firms. The margin moves upwards. The risk stays below.

Then the same government wonders why Britain cannot build anything substantial.

Of course it cannot. It keeps protecting the structures that extract value and punishing the ones that might create it. Large corporations get diplomacy. SMEs get enforcement. Multinationals get “engagement”. Small business get suspicion. Foreign capital gets courted. Local capital gets taxed before it can breathe.

No great mystery. If policy rewards scale, mobility and tax engineering, the economy fills with scale, mobility and tax engineering. If policy punishes small domestic enterprise, small domestic enterprise stays small, sells out, or dies.

Then Treasury reaches for workers again, because workers are still there.

[Roj Blake]

Larry

It's Larry the Cat I feel most sorry for. Imagine having to teach yet another PM how to correctly serve Dreamies.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Larry

Larry the cat for PM

[DJV]

Re: Larry the cat for PM

Yeah, at least he knows how to cover his shit up!

[Anonymous Coward]

AI is shit, but..

AI may be shit, but is it really any shittier than thousands of civil servants* led by a cabinet of career politicians and an endless stream of Prime dill-brains?

* Declaration of Interest: I am a Civil Servant, so I should know.

[ecofeco]

Re: AI is shit, but..

A tech douche bro creation vs nepo-politicians?

There is no lesser evil there. It's the same pciture.

[Ozan]

My beloved UK friends, tell me WTF is going on there?

[nobody who matters]

If only we knew :-(

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

>My beloved UK friends, tell me WTF is going on there?

Imagine the USA but any member of congress could impeach the president on any given thursday

[steelpillow]

The UK knows it must become Agile. It is incapable of doing this with IT, so it does it with its national leader instead.

[Tron]

Explanation.

Brexit took Sterling down 25%. Great British Public were promised utopia and Best Nation status but just got poorer. GBP angry and unhappy and voted out Tories.

Labour could only do two things: Fix anything that could be fixed cheaply and offend nobody. Their manifesto was a non-starter post-Brexit, business as usual was a non-starter post-Brexit.

Living in their little bubbles they set to with their manifesto pledges, certain that Brexit and its financial effects had been a little pot hole that everyone had forgotten about, because the media and politicians no longer mentioned it.

Spectacular fail. They fixed nothing and offended everybody.

GBP even angrier and now determined to vote out Labour and vote for whoever is next on the sushi conveyor belt of British politics.

Next will be Reform, who will screw things up in an entirely different way to the last two parties of hapless incompetents, doing damage you can't even imagine.

Reform will get kicked out after one term, or sooner if Reform blocks the borders entirely in a spat over a few small boats migrants with France, and we run out of food.

This will continue until the post-Brexit transition is done, in 10-15 years, and the GBP have come to terms with being a lot poorer, having fewer services and being a lot more third world than they were.

And no, there will be no return to the EU, as we won't get the sweet deal that Thatcher blagged for us.

So, nothing good ahead but badly managed decline.

[Anonymous Coward]

Death by taxes

As one of my friends recently commented:

You can't grow an economy by taxing it to death.

Labour has consistently instituted policies which actively prevent growth whilst allowing a massive increase in the welfare budget.

If I had gone sick whenever I felt stressed in the last 45 years I would have almost never have worked (or else I could become a civil servant).

As the owner of a small business, I no longer take people on staff, as it's too difficult to get rid of the dead wood.

Increased business rates now means that virtually everyone works from home (our office business rates increased by 150% so we downsized drastically).

The increased NI means that annual pay rises this year will be minimal as we're in a competitive market.

For information, Burnham isn't a scouser, he's from Culcheth, which is part of Warrington, which is in Cheshire.

Another clown from the same circus.

Be careful what you wish for!

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Death by taxes

You can't say Starmer wasn't efficient though.

To have reversed 14 years of growth, prosperity, low taxes and improved services under the Tories in only 2 years to create the current economic Hellscape shows real power

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Death by taxes

I’m assuming that’s something with metal in it?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Death by taxes

Like Silvery or Goldy you mean ?

[mark l 2]

Lets hope with Starmer gone his bat shit crazy idea of forcing Apple and Google to scan everybody phones for naughty pics to 'protect the kids' gets dropped like a hot potato.

[nobody who matters]

"Lets hope with Starmer gone his bat shit crazy idea ......."

I doubt if it was his idea - more likely that these sort of proposals are put forward by one or more of the advisors surrounding the office of Prime Minister. I would be surprised if very much will change with a new leader of the Labour Government. In fact, I doubt if there would be much change with a different party in Government; they all seem to be tarred from the same brush.

[Dizzy Dwarf]

Surprised, but the BBC is still showing the football ...

... I'd've thought 24/7 rolling coverage of this non-event would've been a better waste of my licence fee.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Surprised, but the BBC is still showing the football ...

Just for entertainment value, they could swap commentators

[steelpillow]

Re: Surprised, but the BBC is still showing the football ...

You caught them in an unguarded moment. They have been shitshowing the shitshovelling all day long:

"Tell me, Mr. talking head, how does it feel to be a talking head with nothing to say but a stream-of-shittyness about how shit the politicians are feeling, for hours on end?"

"Oh, well I was about to ask Ms. Citizen feels to have my cam rammed up her nose to capture how she feels at having to listen to me for hours on end."

So what we all really, really want to know is, how does it feel to you Reg commentards to have to read through all this shit, as you are reading it here and now?

[nobody who matters]

Re: Surprised, but the BBC is still showing the football ...

"Surprised, but the BBC is still showing the football ... "

I'm not. Only something with the enormity of the outbreak of global nuclear war is likely to displace football from the TV schedules.

To be honest, on second thoughts, I am not sure that even global nuclear war would cause televising football to be cancelled or rescheduled.

[Paul Herber]

Re: Surprised, but the BBC is still showing the football ...

HydrationCalcination break.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: Surprised, but the BBC is still showing the football ...

Nuclear war?

There's a cunning plan by the FIFA Gianni Infantino to award FIFA Peace Prizes to war mongering leaders of nations with nuclear arsenals to appease them.

We may yet see the likes of Trump, Putin, Kim Jong Un at FIFA organised retreats with chanting sessions, holistic aromatherapy massages and team bonding wrestling sessions to try to ratchet down the likelihood of these individuals of pressing the button

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Surprised, but the BBC is still showing the football ...

He only got the FIFA Peace prize. That's definitely 2nd place to the FIFA War prize which still goes to Millwall

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Shakespeare

"When Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane"

"When Burnham Brows comes to Downing St"

[ecofeco]

Re: Shakespeare

Well played!

[Winkypop]

Re: Shakespeare

Beat me to it.

[steelpillow]

Re: Shakespeare

"Out! Out! Damned Starmer!"

[Anonymous Coward]

We must all be bonkers......................

Definition of madness: doing the same thing over and over....and expecting a different result.

Yup......six (maybe seven) "leaders" in ten years!

[steelpillow]

Re: We must all be bonkers......................

As I recall, this is the definition of stupidity. Same difference, though.

Constitutional reform, anybody? ... I'll get my coat, then.