[The Weeping Angel]

Most of the responses are claiming they're doing it because of the threat of Zack Polanski.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Yeah, old Zack, doing the hard yards on tax and spend.

What happened to "Dodgy Reeves trying to weasel her way out of removing the two child cap in full"?

Which we might of course still get. But perhaps we'd be better if everyone waited. I can't remember budgets in the old days being like this.

[davidjay]

Yeah, old Zack, doing the hard yards on tax and spend.

What happened to "Dodgy Reeves trying to weasel her way out of removing the two child cap in full"?

Which we might of course still get. But perhaps we'd be better if everyone waited. I can't remember budgets in the old days being like this.

Chancellors used to resign if so much as a sniff of a rumour got out.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The Speaker tells the Government off for that every year, but there's nothing he can do about it. The Government gets it in the neck on everything and understandably wants to get its message out.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Some bad employment figures. Hopefully his will work itself out but the Government have made big changes. Martin Wolf wrote a column this week suggesting that Labour had chucked out some of the New Labour stuff that worked eg on the labour market. (As an aside, he fell for all the Gove education stuff, which I suppose isn't surprising seeing his daughter was so involved in it, but a bit depressing all the same).

I guess we'll see.

[The Weeping Angel]

Some bad employment figures. Hopefully his will work itself out but the Government have made big changes. Martin Wolf wrote a column this week suggesting that Labour had chucked out some of the New Labour stuff that worked eg on the labour market. (As an aside, he fell for all the Gove education stuff, which I suppose isn't surprising seeing his daughter was so involved in it, but a bit depressing all the same).

I guess we'll see.

I saw Stephen Bush bigging that up on Bluesky.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The Martin Wolf column? I see that Wolf thinks there should have been much more social house building, which makes sense as an anti-poverty measure instead and I expect he strongly supports tax credits, alongside his Brown-Sunak labour market.

Virtually nobody sticks up for this system, because it seems to go against "common sense". Why not raise the minimum wage a lot, so less tax credits, and you're not subsidizing terrible employers paying poverty wages? The trouble with seeing it wages in terms of good and bad employers is that wages depend a lot on how much money is in the local economy. Same problem as seeing rents in terms of predatory and non-predatory landlords. It's surely implausible that London has the best employers and the worst landlords, and eg Neath has the worst employers and the best landlords, seeing that we'll be talking about some of the same people in each place.

I think it's good that the limits of the Brown-Sunak labour market are being acknowledged by the government, because they were shit for lots of people at the sharp end. But it is possible that New Labour's approach was based on what they thought worked best for employment and wages together, rather than just being a moral failure. I hope the employment figures improve.