Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[HVC]

Fun little factoid to mark American Independence Day I read today. On average there is a nation celebrating independence from England once every seven days

[mongers]

Fun little factoid to mark American Independence Day I read today. On average there is a nation celebrating independence from England once every seven days

 

Lets just hope in some possible future there isn't a similar stat for countries celebrating independence from the legacy of trumpist America? 

[Sheilbh]

So More in Common did word clouds of people's one word/thought response on what Labour have accomplished/what their biggest failures are after one year in office. This seems sub-optimal

Labour's biggest failure:


And Labour's biggest achievement:


Part of the problem is I'd be hard-pressed to dispute that. There's some small changes around the edges of things and still lots of plans and reviews and consultations on the go - particularly around planning - that I think could be important. But in terms of what they've done, there's not really been very much so far.

I dismissed those concerns at the time but I think they really didn't have any ideas on what to do if they actually won power. I think a lot of Labour (including Starmer and Reeves) were just very complacent and don't really have an analysis. I really think a lot of it basically went no deeper than the Tories are bad and doing populism which causes all the country's problems, therefore because we are not Tories, are good and will not do populism the country's problems will be solved (or as Reeves put it "stability will be the change").

I flagged it at the time but perhaps, in retrospect, Starmer appointing the definition of an inside man as Cabinet Secretary was a sign of how government would go.

Some interesting pieces by Patrick Maguire - who is very much the best connected commentator on this government - on what's coming/what to expect. And from Lewis Goodall on what Labour need to do to try and fix things.

[crazy canuck]

In a word or two describe...


average UK citizen - I am going to use three words dammit!

[Tamas]

Immigration? 

We talk about what Farage tells us to talk about.

[Tamas]

This a random reddit post in a thread about the new corbyn party, I kinda agree with it:

Sometimes I worry that on the left we assume consensus on our positions rather than ensure it.

Do we know that left wing positions aren't being put in place because a few rich people disagree, or actually is it just that they're not as popular as we think? Taxing the rich sounds good in theory but when we knuckle down and try and means test winter fuel allowance, tax farmers land, or increase taxes on people earning 100,000 suddenly those people aren't the rich were talking about.

Same with Israel - is it true that the government is in the pocket of Israel? Our government openly criticize them, have suspended arms sales, coordinated with allies to pressure Israel - maybe you think it's not far enough, but these aren't things Israel want us to do. Maybe it's actually that people aren't as radical about Palestine as the protests and social media posts suggest - they likely want an end to the war, but not the destruction or dismantling of Israel or for us to completely cut ties with them.

[Sheilbh]

I actually kind of agree on the point. But I think those examples are a sign of another problem in my view that I don't think they're particularly connected to reality. That reads to me like spin, or cope by a kindly Labour supporter/voter.

Winter fuel allowance, for example, the "means test" the government adopted was whether or not pensioners received Pension Credit which is a benefit for low income pensioners. Practically that means people with a pension income (state and private combined) of less than £12,000 per year (single pensioners) or £18,000 per year (couples) - and for context someone who receives ONLY their state pension will get £11,973 per year. They didn't means test to exclude a few rich people. WFA used to be a universal benefit and they removed it from 90% of the elderly. I think the issue with it - as with the benefits cuts - is that it wasn't about "reform" which requires thought, laying the groundwork, building the argument and then a set of changes. It was driven by the Treasury needing to find x billion of cuts so the OBR could make their sums add up - combined with the Treasury's institutional hatred of universal benefits (which is why they've suggested the same policy to Gordon Brown in 1997 and George Osborne in 2010, they were just politically smart enough to say the policy upside of £1.5 billion is not worth the political pain of taking money away from 10 million pensioners). There were pensioners who are receiving housing benefit and other benefits who had the WFA taken away. The idea this is "taxing the rich" is bullshit.

On the farmer's land point there is a huge discrepancy between the Treasury and DEFRA's statistics. I think it's basically because they're looking at different things so the Treasury are looking at claims within inheritance tax last year, while DEFRA are looking at farm size and value. There's no doubt that it's an inheitance tax loophole (see Jeremy Clarkson) - but the Treasury estimate that basically on 25% of farms will be impacted, DEFRA's estimate is that it's about two thirds. I think whether it's 25% or two thirds will have a big impact on how "fair" it is perceived to be and, indeed, whether it's only affecting a few rich people.

On tax more broadly - this is where I think people see Tory and think Republican but what they did is very different and why I'd be a dreadful politiician

So the Tories left (and we still have) tax at its highest share of GDP since the war (because we're not America and low growth since 2005-8, plus the crash, then covid and energy price cap has had a big impact on our debt position). But on a very narrow base - a large part of that is because the Tories big tax reform over the last 14 years was steadily increasing the personal allowance - so it went from around 25% of average earnings all the way through the 90s and 2000s to peaking at 45% of average earnings in 2019-20. They didn't focus on tax cuts for the rich but massively narrowing the tax base (or as they put it "removing the lowest earning from tax").

To that Redditer's post - people earning over £100k a year get their personal allowance clawed back by HMRC, so every £2 you earn over £100k you lose £1 of your personal allowance. I'd also add that for people with kids who earn over £50k start to lose child benefit. People on over £100k lose the childcare subsidy - and this isn't clawed back it is just taken away. This all looks crazy when you see marginal rates - especially with the 9% student loan repayments. All of these can mean that people are having marginal tax rates of 60-70% on good but relatively standard salaries like £50-60k (headteacher not hedge funder). The system is a mess because it's just so many little changes over time adding up to something that really makes no sense.

The effect of all of this (often policies introduced by the Tories which is noticeably not helping people on over £100k a year) is that the UK has Northern European average tax on property, VAT, corporations and high earners. But very low takes on social security and income tax on low and middle income earners. So most people on low, moderate or reasonably high earnings (up to £100k) pay less tax on their wages than in basically any other large developed country, except for the US. People earning over £100k, businesses - and our property and sales tax - are at European levels. That's why Reeves pledge to not raise taxes on working people is such a challenge is because it removes two thirds of the revenue base - but also it removes the bit of the revenue base that is most undertaxed, instead focusing any new tax rises on the bit that is arguably overtaxed (or at least taxed at a significantly higher level).

And this is why I'd be a dreadful politician because I'd basically be saying we need to increase taxes for most people and have fiscal drag by freezing the personal allowance until it's back to about 25% of average earning Basically aiming for all of our tax income to be at the lower end of the Northern Europe average rather than two thirds of the tax base being American and one third being Belgian.  But I also think people should pay tax - I believe in a universal welfare state, I think that means a broad tax base where everyone pays in and everyone takes out. But even absent that I think there's a really strong case for comprehensive tax reform (as with welfare) but it requires thought, planning, rolling the pitch and then doing and it can't just be driven by the need to find £X billion because you've outsourced your decision making to the OBR.

On Israel - it's not true. So the UK has I would say rather tepidly criticised Israel. That poster can make the argument that the UK suspended arms sales, but that's not the government's position. David Lammy suspended about 30 licenses but said in the Commons that it was "not a blanket ban or an arms embargo [...] the point of the process is in no way to punish Israel but to make sure that our export licensing regime remains among the most robust in the world." We are also still exporting arms where we're part of a global supply chain, like the F35. I'd add that RAF spy planes have flown over 500 missions from Cyprus over Israel in support of Israel's wars and that whenever Iran has been flinging missiles at Israel, the RAF (supporting the USAF) have been flying sorties over Israel to shoot those missiles down. I agree the government's not in the pocket but it's position is uncomfortable and ambiguous and quite possibly defensible. Though personally in characterising it, I'd argue spy planes and RAF sorties and F35s matter more than statements or the £45 million bilateral UK-Israel arms exports.

[Josquius]

Kind of good news re: reform.
2 local council bi-elections. One where the reform councillor decided he didn't want to be a councillor after all and one where he was ineligible to be a councilor...
The one down south was a tory win, the local one saw the lib dems win with a close run 3 way contest.

Reforms recent success does seem to have frightened people into turning out.


The trouble with the winter fuel allowance is they made it so all or nothing. A hard wall at which you suddenly no longer get it. This doesn't make sense to me. Why couldn't they have made it a gradual phasing out?


If they want to raise tax revenue I'm still available to brief them on my council tax reforms that take into account local values and encourage density and green land use.
Or. You know.  I guess they could just leave everything as it is but update the values. If they're lazy.

A smaller fix but they really need to stop the silliness of forcing people on larger salaries to pay back their child benefit the next year (or the one after rather) . Check their earnings and only pay them the amount they're due in the first place...

[Sheilbh]

Yeah the child benefit thing is bad - as Dan Neidle has explained if you have kids you're basically better off earning either £99,999 or about £145,000 but literally nothing in between because of the impact of losing child benefit (plus the personal allowance being clawed back).

Even excluding the child benefit there are weird lumpy bits of our system. So from Dan Neidle again, the marginal rates for someone who has a student loan with three kids:


I think taxation should be progressive but that just makes no sense The 65%+ marginal rate on £50-60k is someone losing child benefit, the 70% marginal rate from £100-125k is someone's personal allowance being clawed back. As you say add in losing childcare subsidy and it's a big hit for people (on very high salaries) because of how we means test and withdraw benefits and clawback tax etc. It should be more coherent but that would require a more deeper more thoughtful reform.

[Richard Hakluyt]

IIRC this annoying tinkering started with Gordon Brown, who wanted to increase taxes but also wanted to avoid the poltitical downside of increasing the main rates. It was relatively ok at first but the complications and consequences have mounted up over the years.

I am against means-testing, partly from listening to the elders when I was a child and the horrific means-testing imposed in the 1920s and 1930s. But also because when you take a benefit away from the well-off there is a tendency for that benefit to wither on the vine.

So, yes, I want my WFA back 

I suggest that we raise the main rates of income tax but get rid of all the silly rules leading to the "lumpiness"
 shown above. We also need to start taxing residential property properly by a return to the rates. As it stands a Russian oligarch in a £50m mansion in Mayfair pays barely more in property taxes then me in my northern terraced house. Bring the rates back, after all, it is very hard to hide a house or take it abroad.

[Tamas]

  between stuff like this and the MMA fight in the white house, we are truly on fast track for making Idiocracy real.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/05/nigel-farage-reform-uk-teenage-councillors-vital-public-services

[garbon]

It is best when we leave such things in the hands of people who are at least 70 if not preferably in their 80s.

[Sheilbh]

I think you're right - and, ironically, so did the Winter Fuel Allowance because Brown wanted to announce something and to give some money to pensioners but (Brown and the Treasury) did not want to increase pensions. So the Winter Fuel Allowance was born

I think a lot of the complexity in benefits and taxes really start with Brown - and to an extent Osborne - who were very political Chancellors and, as you say, wanted to avoid political downsides.

Totally agree on the benefits point. I used to be a big believer in focusing spending on the people who need it most and really targeting it, which was broadly New Labour's approach. The last 14 years of Tory rule has shown how vulnerable that spending is - because not many people actually get it - and I'm now very much of the view that if you have benefits for the poor they will become poor benefits. Universal ones are really difficult to mess with - plus I think everyone pays in, everyone should benefit.

I flagged it at the time but it looks like Downing Street have buyer's remorse over their choice of Cabinet Secretary. Who among us could possibly have guessed that a "plodding time-server" (as described by Janan Ganesh at the time) might not be the best pick to "completely rewire the British state". It's almost like Starmer chose the most-Starmerlike option

No 10 regrets choice of 'insipid' new cabinet secretary, sources say
Keir Starmer's aides said to be trying to work around Chris Wormald, who was only appointed six months ago
Rowena Mason Whitehall editor
Sat 5 Jul 2025 08.00 BST

Keir Starmer's No 10 increasingly has "buyer's remorse" about the new cabinet secretary, Chris Wormald, who has only been running the civil service for six months, Downing Street and Whitehall sources have told the Guardian.

Wormald, who was the permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care during the Covid pandemic, was chosen by the prime minister from a shortlist of four names.

Starmer made his pick in consultation with the head of the civil service and the first civil service commissioner, saying at the time that Wormald "brings a wealth of experience to this role at a critical moment in the work of change this new government has begun".

However, multiple sources said some people around Starmer were growing to view the choice of Wormald as "disastrous" for the prospects of radical reform of the civil service and had begun to explore options for how to work around him.

One said Wormald was viewed as "insipid" and prone to wringing his hands about problems rather than coming up with solutions, and too entrenched in the status quo.

The Spectator reported on Thursday that Starmer had picked Wormald despite others being looked on more favourably by the expert panel that had shortlisted the candidates. It quoted a cabinet minister as saying: "If you want to do drastic reform of the state, you don't appoint someone whose grandfather and father were both civil servants."

It is understood the panel did not rank the candidates, so there was no preferred choice, but gave four "appointable" names who would do the job well and assessments of each one.

The shortlist of four also included Antonia Romeo, now permanent secretary at the Home Office, Olly Robbins, the Foreign Office permanent secretary, and Tamara Finkelstein, the permanent secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

A government spokesperson said: "The appointment decision was made in line with the usual procedures for appointing permanent secretaries. Under this process, a panel proposes a shortlist of appointable candidates for a final decision by the prime minister.

"The cabinet secretary is leading the work to rewire the way government operates, driving efficiency and reducing bureaucracy as part of prime minister's plan for change to renew our country."

The doubts about the choice of Wormald as cabinet secretary are not new but it has been a difficult few weeks for Starmer on domestic policy, with questions over why he became distracted by foreign affairs and missed the implications of a looming rebellion on welfare cuts.

The cabinet secretary is the prime minister's most senior policy adviser and also responsible for running the civil service.

In the past, prime ministers have attempted to solve problems with how No 10 and the government is run by splitting the role into a cabinet secretary, a Cabinet Office permanent secretary and a separate head of the civil service, as happened under David Cameron.

These were merged back into a single cabinet secretary in 2014 after a three-year experiment in dividing power.

The Times reported in April that No 10 was considering greater changes to the machinery of government to create more executive power at the centre, with fewer procedural demands on officials' time, a higher bar for public inquiries, and a civil service that better reflects Britain's class diversity.

On his appointment, Wormald told civil servants they would have to "do things differently" and promised a "rewiring of the way the government works".

His position is likely to come under further scrutiny when the next stage of Covid inquiry reports are published in the autumn on core political and administrative decision-making. The first report found there had been "a lack of adequate leadership" in Britain's pandemic preparation, saying the civil service and governments "failed their citizens".

I think the Covid Inquiry report might make his position untenable given that he was Permanent Secretary at DHSC (and the long-serving Permanent Secretary in government). But also I think so far a lot of the focus has been on the politicians which is fair - but I think always reflected the "official" view.

So on 12 March 2020, so a few days before the first lockdown measures started, Lord Sedwill (then cabinet Secretary) Whatsapped Wormald: "I don't think the PM & Co have internalised yet the distinction between minimising mortality and not trying to stop most people getting it. Indeed presumably like chickenpox we want people to get it and develop herd immunity before the next wave. We just want them not to get it all at once and preferably when it's warm and dry etc."

Wormald replied "Exactly right. We make the point every meeting, they don't quite get it." As John Crace's sketch from Wormald's evidence to the Covid Inquiry in 2023 put it:

It turned out that Stevens was just the warmup act. The hors d'oeuvre. The real masterclass in time-wasting came from Christopher Wormald. The permanent secretary of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). The king of the time wasters. Pen pusher extraordinaire. The man who had never come across a form that he didn't want to fill out in triplicate. The Sir Humphrey for whom silence was the Pavlovian response to any question. Quickly followed by a stream of unconsciousness. Time and again, the lead counsel Hugo Keith KC had to beg him to listen to what he was saying.
[...]
On and on this went, until Keith eventually gave up in despair. It was 50-50 whether he'd end up killing himself or Wormald. Imagine what it would be like working with Chris. A lifetime in the hell of a bureaucratic cul-de-sac. Where process trumps outcome every time. But he will get his reward. People pay good money for that kind of futility. Which is why he's tipped to be the next cabinet secretary when Simon Case steps down. Make that Lord Wormald.

[Tamas]

It is best when we leave such things in the hands of people who are at least 70 if not preferably in their 80s.

Surely between 19 and 80, a middle ground must exist where competence might be found.

[Sheilbh]

I think competence can be found in most age groups (and, indeed, most political persuasions). And the reality is a lot of councils are made up of very young people looking at a career in politics where this is the first step into electoral politics and the core of party's activist base, plus a lot of older people who have the time to serve on a council (broadly speaking most councillors are part-time).

There tend to be fewer people in say the 30-50 age range because that's probably when they've got kids and more demanding jobs. The councillors in that range are often people who have not been selected as a candidate for a local constituency.

I instinctively think they're too young and you should be at least in your late twenties. But councils round me have had 22 and 23 year old council leaders before so it's not that uncommon - again just on age, council cabinet positions are full time and paid but the salary isn't great. I think that probably does skew towards the young or the old, not people who might already have a separate career, kids, mortgage etc. And they're not too common but I think the "baby of the house" in the Commons right now was also elected as MP at 22.

Edit: Actually I just looked up the current "baby of the house" and he became a councillor in Cambridge while he was a student in his second year. After graduating he became a cabinet member of the city council and then a year later an MP.