CharlesLeonard

This is economic illiteracy of a high order. After separation Scotland would still use sterling. So it would have to borrow in £s to cover its massive budget deficit and promise lenders it would pay back in £s (or they won’t lend). But after an unspecified transition it would move to a Scottish currency. But all the borrowing done during the transition would have to be paid back in sterling. If the Scottish currency plummeted v sterling (likely given the size of the deficit, lack of credit track record etc) that could become an unmanageable burden given the likely poor exchange rate. Scotland would have to borrow billions in its own currency just to convert to sterling to pay back lenders. Devaluing the Scottish currency further. What a shambles that would be. He has no idea what he’s talking about.

I didn’t cherry pick. I chose Europe’s three biggest economies to compare with UK. We grew faster than them all. But let’s take your metric — the whole EU. Since 2021 we’ve grown 17%, EU 13%. I guess there’s a reason you have ‘thick’ in your anonymous moniker. We will never communicate again.

A Burnham claimed yesterday that the 2016 vote for Brexit ushered in a decade of low growth. He’s right that there’s been low growth, though not just in Britain, which suggests Brexit is not quite the explanation he thinks it is. I think Brexiteers hard pressed to show that Brexit has been good for growth. But Remainers lack evidence it has crippled or undermined growth. In the decade from mid-2016 til mid-2026, the UK had the 3rd biggest growth in real GDP (13%) of the G7. Well behind the US (27%) and Canada (20%) but ahead of France (12%), Italy 10%, Germany 8%, and Japan (6%). I think we can all agree Japan made a big mistake leaving the EU.

This is such a disingenuous comment as to suggest (not for the first time) you’re not to be taken seriously on such matters. The Scottish Government accounts for only a part of public spending in Scotland, as you well know. Of course ‘London’ could always cut £25 billion from its ‘deficit’ by ending the £25 billion it bungs Scotland to make up the huge difference — 11% Scottish GDP — between what is spent in Scotland and what Scotland pays in taxes. Then you’d be in no doubt Scotland runs a deficit (biggest In Europe, as it happens).

0.4% UK growth in Q2 is down from 0.6% in Q1 but in the circumstances (above all Trump’s war on Iran) it’s a pretty decent performance, especially by mediocre G7 standards. And Q2 finished with a strong June after a weak May. So hope of summer growth to come. The bad news — construction is in terrible shape. The good news — tech sector contributed a fair chunk of the growth, one sector to be doing well from Brexit (freed of Brussels’ tech destroying rules).

Perhaps the most disturbing element in the fantasy world of (ex)-Professor Jason Arday is not his proclivity to embellish his achievements (or lack thereof) in absurd ways that were easily exposed or Cambridge University’s facile complicity in his whole scam but that a reporter at Times Higher Education, who was looking into anomalies in Mr Arday’s dodgy CV, was subjected to a four-month police investigation for allegedly harassing him. The police need to be held to account for this abuse of police power to thwart a journalist from doing his job.

She didn’t ’crash the economy’. That’s a Labour propaganda meme. She did discombobulate the financial markets with a reckless budget, including unfunded tax cuts, which saw yields on UK debt spike. But she wasn’t in power long enough to crash the economy. GDP was untouched by her thankfully brief tenure. And, of course, yields on 10-year gilts are now even higher than when they peaked during the ClusterTruss.

I didn’t say it would. But there are other strong reasons for doing it — more jobs, investment, security of supply, balance of payments, tax revenues etc etc. As for cheaper energy bills ‘in the long run’, one, there is no evidence for this, two, as Keynes said, in the long run we’re all dead. Like most UK manufacturing, killed on the alter of the highest energy costs in the world.

Keir Starmer — ever a man of his word til the end. In June 2023 he explicitly ruled out ever indulging in a resignation honours list (BBC Radio 4 Today). Today he’s marked his resignation with 21 peerages, overwhelmingly public-sector/legal jobsworths. Barely a single wealth creator among them. Classic line up of the New Establishment which has run the country under Labour and Tory governments for the past three decades and is now firmly in control. Largely (if not entirely) with the following characteristics: *Career almost entirely in public sector, often taking salaries from several sinecures at once as they work up the greasy taxpayer-funded pole. *Associated with various ‘right-on’ causes. *Largely middle class, London chattering class, Oxbridge well represented (of course). *Fashionable left but not too left. Good mainstream Labour links. Thus is the antediluvian House of Lords perpetuated by the Left as well as the Right as a comfortable state-funded retirement home for the well-connected ‘good and great’ past their sell-by date — when it should simply be abolished.

Well who wudda thunk it?! The Starmer-Reeves defence spending plan assumes £10 billion in defence ‘efficiencies’/savings — and leaves Andy Burnham to find a further £5 billion for defence in the next Budget for the figures to add up. Starmer-Reeves — shysters til the very end.