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Reply | The changing income tax landscape
at 00:26 2 Nov 2026
One little irony I came across is that "Uncle Joe" criticised "Leftists" who pushed for wage equalisation. Joseph Stalin argued that wage differentiation was necessary to incentivise workers to undertake the training needed to become skilled.
It seems that Andy and other politicians of recent times are not good Marxists.
"The cause is the wrong structure of wages, the wrong wage scales, the "Leftist" practice of wage equalisation. In a number of factories wage scales are drawn up in such a way as to practically wipe out the difference between skilled and unskilled labour, between heavy and light work. The consequence of wage equalisation is that the unskilled worker lacks the incentive to become a skilled worker and is thus deprived of the prospect of advancement; as a result he feels himself a "visitor" in the factory, working only temporarily so as to "earn a little money" and then go off to "try his luck" in some other place. The consequence of wage equalisation is that the skilled worker is obliged to go from factory to factory until he finds one where his skill is properly appreciated.
(...)
In order to put an end to this evil we must abolish wage equalisation and discard the old wage scales. In order to put an end to this evil we must draw up wage scales that will take into account the difference between skilled and unskilled labour, between heavy and light work. We cannot tolerate a situation where a rolling-mill worker in the iron and steel industry earns no more than a sweeper. We cannot tolerate a situation where a locomotive driver earns only as much as a copying clerk. Marx and Lenin said that the difference between skilled and unskilled labour would exist even under socialism, even after classes had been abolished; that only under communism would this difference disappear and that, consequently, even under socialism "wages" must be paid according to work performed and not according to needs. But the equalitarians among our economic executives and trade-union officials do not agree with this and believe that under our Soviet system this difference has already disappeared. Who is right, Marx and Lenin or the equalitarians? It must be assumed that it is Marx and Lenin who are right. But it follows from this that whoever draws up wage scales on the "principle" of wage equalisation, without taking into account the difference between skilled and unskilled labour, breaks with Marxism, breaks with Leninism."
https://www.marxists.org/refer [Post edited 2 Nov 0:31]
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Thread | Should the British state apologise for slavery?
at 09:38 1 Nov 2026
Andy Burnham, always eager to say something different from Starmer, has said that the UK should apologise to the Caribbean nations for slavery. My own view is that this is a big mistake, both on grounds of what is fair, and because an apology implies an admission of guilt and opens the way for legal claims for financial reparations.
Two commentators who say that no apology is appropriate are Tony Sewell and Nigel Biggar.
Sewell writes:
https://www.thetimes.com/comme
“Britain was the first mover and primary actor in ending the transatlantic slave trade and slavery itself. Incidentally, trans-Sahara and trans-Indian Ocean slave trading went on unabated. So what, many of you may be saying: you stopped a slave trade that you started. I look across the room to many of our west African leaders, who know full well that this awful trade would not have happened without their ancestors selling on their own slaves and war captives. The guilt must run both ways. I have heard it said that Africans and Arabs only indulged in ‘household’ slavery and that the British treated humans worse than animals. There are no degrees of slavery — this was a universal evil.
“Britain passed laws banning slavery across the world and deployed our Royal Navy to fight other European nations who continued with this practice. We held the line until the trade fully ended. Between 1808 and 1860 the West Africa Squadron seized 1,600 slave ships and emancipated 150,000 slaves, while losing more than 1,500 sailors. Historians have described it as the most expensive international humanitarian intervention in modern history.
“The anti-slavery movement became part and parcel of the fabric of British society in the late 18th and 19th centuries. It spread among Quakers and the new evangelical movement, and poor working-class activists like the Chartists, and even upper-class ladies refused to take sugar in protest against the evil trade.
“Those advocating for reparations argue that the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s long-term wealth were fuelled by the income from slavery. In a forthcoming Institute of Economic Affairs paper, Professor Doug Stokes argues, ‘The dynamics of slavery are complex. While it enriched small groups of Britons, it did not enrich the nation. The best evidence from recent work suggests at most a gain of a decade’s worth of income growth per capita, concentrated in places like Lancashire.’
“What seems to disturb many people is that the families of slave traders were compensated for their loss after emancipation while the enslaved got nothing. It is now clear that this payoff was tactical, designed to buy out those interested parties in order to speed up emancipation.
“It is clear to me that ordinary people in the Caribbean realise that the campaign to wrest funds from Britain is driven by their own elite. Young people in Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana are not on the streets burning the British flag and demanding reparations. Nor are they in Lagos, Accra or Delhi. They all ask hard questions of their current leadership, not of a past colonial master.
Biggar puts forward different arguments.
https://www.thetimes.com/comme
However, the argument that Britain should pay recompense for slavery is historically distorted, morally unfair and politically opportunistic. It depends on a cartoonishly simplistic tale of white people exploiting black people.
Did Britain benefit “tremendously”? Not according to one of the most eminent living historians of transatlantic slavery, David Eltis, who reckons its contribution to Britain’s industrial economy was “small” and its contribution to the economy of Liverpool — Britain’s biggest slaving port in 1750 — was “trivial”. The winner of the 2025 Nobel prize in economics, Joel Mokyr, agrees.
Transatlantic slavery was, while gravely unjust, not extraordinary. Difficult though it may be to appreciate, until the early 19th century slavery and slave-trading were practices conducted on every continent by people of every skin colour. Even escaped black slaves in Jamaica in the 1700s and freed slaves in the American South up to the 1860s kept slaves of their own.
Africans and Arabs were involved in African slave-trading and slavery for far longer and on a far larger scale. One estimate calculates that at least 34.5 million enslaved Africans were exported over the Atlantic to the Americas, through the Sahara to the Mediterranean and across the Indian Ocean. Since Arabs and Europeans seldom did the slave-raiding themselves, Africans themselves were responsible for the primary enslavement, including, it is said, the ancestors of President Mahama himself. The British share of the trade was about 9 per cent.
In 1804 it’s reckoned there were 45 million chattel slaves in the world — most of them in Asia — of which those in the British West Indies amounted to 1.7 per cent. In about 1850 the Fulani people deployed up to four million slaves on vast plantations in what is now northern Nigeria. So, at that one time there were more slaves in that one part of Africa than all the 3.26 million the British took across the Atlantic in two and a half centuries.
One report in 1797 has it that up to 1,500 people were sacrificed at royal funerals in Asante. Three centuries later, in the 1860s, Sudan was reckoned to furnish the Arab slave trade — annually — with 35,000 prepubescent African boys, to produce about 3,800 eunuchs. In other words, nearly 90 per cent died in the process of being forcibly castrated with a razor.
The argument in favour of British reparations not only distorts the truth about the past but also refuses to take into account the fact that Britain was the first major power in the history of the world to abolish both slave-trading and slavery, permanently. It then led the world in suppressing the practices in Brazil, throughout Africa and in Australasia. To single out the British — of all peoples — for slavery reparations is outrageously unfair.
So, rather than yield to the politically opportunistic exploitation of misplaced white guilt, the King and his government should publicly lament the inhumanity of worldwide slavery and the fact that some Britons ever played a part in it. Then they should point to Britain’s unequalled and sustained commitment to suppressing slavery all over the world from 1807 onwards, and invite Commonwealth members to collaborate in eradicating modern slavery in states such as Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Sudan and Libya. That would free this week’s meeting to constructively attend to the environmental and educational challenges of the present and not be divisively mired in the past.
[Post edited 1 Nov 9:48]
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Reply | The changing income tax landscape
at 08:42 1 Nov 2026
Indeed so. My son started work with a civil engineering consulting firm last year after completing a 4-year M.Eng., and his initial salary was only a little above minimum wage. Fortunately, after he had a job offer from a rival firm, his employer gave him a reasonable rise, but the gap with minimum wage is still not vast. In both teaching and engineering, graduate entrants can expect to progress up a scale as they gain experience, but as the chart shows they don't progress too far before the 40% tax rate cuts in. [Post edited 1 Nov 8:45]
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Reply | Swansea City v Blackburn Rovers : Match Thread
at 17:38 31 Oct 2026
Excellent first half, showing just the right attitude after the reverse at QPR. I know some will say I expect too much, but I always think it is the wrong decision to ease off as we did in the second half. Rather than shutting our opponents out, this actually results in us conceding chances. We were lucky that Rovers didn't get a consolation goal. Stewart delivered with a cracker, but we should have had more than four goals in this game. |
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Reply | Andy Burnham
at 19:09 30 Oct 2026
The scbeme was nipped in the bud. But an interesting question is: how many went to the Republic of Ireland when they heard the policy was coming in? The Irish Government was certainly in a panic. |
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Thread | How to buy defence on tick
at 09:06 30 Oct 2026
The rumoured answer is that the Government will revive the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) model utilised in the Blair/Brown era. And indeed it is rumoured that Gordon Brown is behind the idea to apply it to defence spending. We are in dire straits and it could be argued that there aren't many alternatives, However, some of us will remember what a disaster PFI was the first time around.
Chat GPT says: "The best estimate is that the Blair/Brown-era expansion of PFI brought in approximately £50–55 billion of private capital, but the total contractual payments associated with the PFI programme were projected to reach approximately £310 billion". If this goes ahead let us hope the Government knows how to do things better now. I wouldn't be too confident.
P.S. We should not forget that the Tories too used this model for public infrastructure projects, and that even the devolved Scottish and Welsh Governments have dabbled with something similar. [Post edited 30 Oct 9:11]
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Reply | Stephen Yaxley
at 18:57 29 Oct 2026
I'm not an admirer of Tommy Robinson, but the nature of the "viictims" in this case (Daily Mail investigative reporters) pretty much writes the story of victimhood for his supporters. Many observers will feel this was an interaction between two unsavory parties who both routinely push the boundaries of legality. |
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Reply | The Budget
at 19:15 28 Oct 2026
On the face of things not too much impact on middle income individuals/families. The worst thing is what we knew about already, the fiscal drag arising from frozen income tax thresholds. Continuing with the £20K annual deposit limit for cash ISAs will help some, but if you don't shelter your savings there is another 2% tax to pay. The £100 gift for band A to D council tax payers doesn't affect me, but I suppose I benefit from continuing VAT relief in a couple of areas. Small businesses have had a few crumbs thrown their way, but these only partially offset other negative developments. Landlords, like Contro, take a slight hit. Did I get anything wrong? [Post edited 28 Oct 19:21]
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Reply | Do you support the arrival of illegal immigrants
at 08:19 28 Oct 2026
Probably broadly correct, although the pro-immigration activists will say they are not illegal because they have a path to legal status. Most will probably be persons who could regularise their position by claiming asylum in France but have not applied. I suspect that some have applied but still want to come to the UK pending the outcome, some have applied and been rejected, and some have applied in other UK countries but moved on. Hard to see that Burnham's proposal will do anything but open the doors wider, and that many of the keenest movers will have a non-EU "heritage". [Post edited 28 Oct 8:38]
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Reply | Anthropic warning
at 11:21 27 Oct 2026
Re that last sentence, I'd say that the claim that freedom of movement meant that culturally-compatible Europeans came to the UK rather than persons from Asia is highly questionable.
1. Even when immigration from the EU into the UK was at its height, almost the same number of arrivals came from outside the EU (remember students as a big part of this).
2. Much of the recent surge in non-EU immigrant numbers can be explained by the 3 special schemes for Ukraine, Hong Kong and Afghanistan, which had nothing to do with Brexiit.
https://migrationobservatory.o
3. In 2025 over 10% of those resident in the EU were born outside its territories - and I'd say these are the very people who are most likely to come our way. For Muslims in particular, the UK is perceieved as more permissive than most EU countries.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/ |
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Reply | RAF Fairford
at 10:58 27 Oct 2026
"British men" according to various media reports. That PC discourse is wearing a bit thin. |
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Reply | Tonights Ballon d'Or
at 23:06 26 Oct 2026
The guy we have seen score at the Liberty got it. |
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Reply | Burnham hints that he is open to free movement within the EU
at 17:54 26 Oct 2026
The stuff about illegal migrant returns being easier before Brexit was a blatant fib, We ended up having to take more in under the Dublin Regulation than we could return to the EU.
Dublin Regulation (In and out)
The figures by year, and with transfers into the UK followed by transfers out of the UK to EU member states.
2015 131 510
2016 558 362
2017 461 314
2018 1215 846
2019 714 263
2020 882 105
For much of this period less than 10% of UK requests for outward transfers were accepted. For example, in 2019 263 transfers were made following 3259 transfer requests. In 2020 as by now a non-member entitled to use the process for an additional year the UK made 8502 requests for outward transfers of which 105 returns occurred. Source AIDA Country Report UK , 2020 p. 30. |
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Reply | More SNP waste
at 07:14 26 Oct 2026
Perhaps you should re-read your comment and edit it so it makes sense? The article says that one employee has been in limbo being paid for a job that doesn't exist for 17 years, so retirements will take a long time to solve the problem. One justification put forward by the SNP for the no redundancies policy was that it was cheaper than the payouts for VER. |
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Reply | Burnham hints that he is open to free movement within the EU
at 18:49 25 Oct 2026
Yes. Just before Brexit, the Oxford Centre on Migration Policy stated quite correctly that it was not possible for the UK government to control the volume of immigration into the UK while freedom of movement within the EU was in effect. Having left the EU, our Tory government failed to use the powers that became available to control entry and we saw the disastrous Boris wave (complete with the future welfare and pension laibilities that this brought). Now we want to go back to a system that did not work (including the Dublin regulation, which ended up allowing more inward transfers to the UK than outward returns). We sit alongside an EU which itself still has highly porous borders and can't agree on the best way to deal with what many see as a huge problem. We see Spain regularising the status of a large number of North Africans, who will then be free to move elsewhere in the bloc, and Greece and Italy still receiving many arrivals from Africa. The cryptic message Burham is trying to get across is that re-joining the EU would replace migrants from ouside Europe with people with greater cultural similarity to us, who would also be less likely to take up permanent residency. I suspect the truth is that we would see fewer arriving from South Asia but a lot more who originate from Africa. [Post edited 26 Oct 7:21]
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