So what would I have done?

My post on Reeves's budgets (Not such a bad hand but played poorly, 2 Jan) made the bold and foolhardy promise to outline what I would have done in her position as chancellor. Here goes.

• the absolute first priority should have been an increase defence spending in the budget year. Labour has said they will increase defence spending to 3.5% of gdp by 2035, which is not before the parliament after the parliament after this one. Does anybody think that Putin did anything other than smirk when briefed on the UK budget? This really should have been the first priority because i) it's necessary and ii) Reeves could have used this as a smokescreen for having to raise taxes: she could have claimed that the Ukraine situation and concomitant outlook clearly demands it. Of course Ukraine isn't new and Labour knew about it last year but I think she could have spun an argument that previous budgets, mainly those of the Conservatives, had been based on an assessment of the security situation that was now clearly optimistic. There's no need to spend a lot more immediately but planning should be taking place to increase our conventional defence forces, build up supplies of munitions, missiles and drones, ensure the nuclear submarine fleet is fully operational (apparently it's availablity is poor, though that is nothing new in my limited experience) and improve resilience to the many Russian hybrid war threats. A sensible plan would entail ramping up spending over this parliament, starting now. There is no higher priority. Some spending on resilience in other areas e.g. cyber security of infrastructure, could reasonably have been branded as "defence" in this scenario
• scrap stamp duty on shares. The government has consistently said it wants growth, while taking many steps that kill it. It says it wants a successful stock market in London and wants more of us to invest more of our savings there. But it charges stamp duty on shares bought in Britain: £3.2bn was taken from investors trading on the London exchange last year. It's a small amount on each trade, surely no-one really notices? But they do as they wouldn't have had to pay if the deals had been done in America, Germany or Japan. So, because there was also a threat of new dividend taxes, £7.3 bn was withdrawn from British funds and shares during the four months to the end of October.  Reeves responded to the declining number of London share flotations by introducing a three year stamp duty holiday for new IPOs (Initial Public Offerings on the market) but I don't expect that to help much. There is a danger that one of the unique advantages Britain has - being in between the American and Far East market time zones and so able to deal with both in a normal day - is being wasted. The London Stock Exchange is on a long term downward glide path in terms of number of companies quoted and the amount of liquidity available. Stamp duty on shares is a bad tax and it should have been scrapped.
• cut costs. This isn't easy when we can all see the potholes in the road and the "planned overloading" that occurs in the NHS every winter. (I say planned because the concern about NHS capacity in the mid winter has been annually recurring for a long time) but it is absolutely necessary. Tougher targets for spending departments are needed backed up by an expenditure ceiling whih, surprisingly, we don't have. David Smith points out that, while Reeves's fiscal rules are as good as any used by recent chancellors, Denmark, Sweden and Finland have expenditure ceilings their governments are expected to live within and, as a result, lower debt relative to GDP than the UK. He says Spain, Austria and "even Italy" have used expenditure rules to better control public spending and get a grip on debt. I must admit that's what I thought "cash limits" were meant to do, as introduced by Labour in the 1970s but it seems we aren't tight enough on actual, rather than planned, spend. Unless we do get tighter controlthings will continue to slide. Reeves's plans - which get tougher as the parliament progresses, what her back benchers will say when we get there is pretty obvious - would still only have us stabilising debt at 96% of gdp at the end of the decade. That would leave us with a debt to gdp ratio around twice the average for advanced economies and we'll still be devoting more of national income to paying debt interest than at almost any time in post war history
• The toughest target should probably be for the benefits system which is clearly being exploited when we read that 50,000 people a day are being approved for sickness benefit (it was 2,000 under the Tories).  We seem to have lost the plot entirely on what constitutes a significant disability, or at least one that merits PIP. A new version of the universal credit benefit reforms introduced by the coalition government based on concepts from the Centre for Social Justice think tank is urgently needed. As chancellor I'd set targets for future spend rather than picking up whatever tab lands. We can't go on like this.

I accept taxes had to rise this time, though I worry that they are at historically high levels in total. I do think Reeves should also have cut some taxes even if they had to go up in total. A fundamental overhaul is needed. Here's my plan:

• refresh and rationalise income tax by completely overhauling the thresholds and, if necessary, rates to remove the ridiculous marginal rates at specific points, in particular in the £100,000 to £125,000 range where marginal rates can be over 60%. This isn't for personal benefit: my income is very modest compared with that! You may think people who earn that much can afford it but this is exactly the sort of income a hospital consultant could earn. We want these people working harder but hit them with silly taxes on their income when many also got hit by punitive taxes on their pensions, some just by working too many extra hours. That specific issue got fixed but without fixing the general problem. I'm convinced if tax was genuinely progressive up the income scale, with no marginal cliff edges, productivity in the economy would improve and our brain drain of talent, including doctors, would be less severe. The tax system is hitting HENRYs (High Earning Not Rich Yet) not the really rich. It seems to be aimed with a laser beam at people with aspiration. David Smith wrote in October that the £100k-£125k cliff edge would be too expensive to fix but by the next month he just said it needed doing. I agree - it's doing a lot of damage
• look harder at taxing the very rich in ways they can't easily avoid, like income tax. A banker on £2 million a year wasn't affected by the higher rate tax threshold freeze being extended; a consultant on £125,000 was. Tax expert Dan Neidle says "the UK's experiment with almost-progressive taxation has run its course. The actually rich have been insulated enough. Time to choose". At the same time the scrapping of the non-dom arrangements is yet another u turn Reeves needs to make. We want these people to stay and pay tax on their UK earnings, not leave because we try to tax their earnings or wealth elsewhere.
• Rethink council tax. Reeves added a tax band (we already had one extra band in Wales) but the bands stop at £5 million so a £100 million house pays the same as a £5 million house. The increase didn't tax the very rich - it taxed the people who happen to live near the very rich, like those who happen to own a £2m family home in London

Pensions are a mess. Osborne in particular started a trend for tinkering which has made the whole system a dysfunctional nightmare. 

• Clearly the triple lock should be abolished. The freezing of personal allowances together with the triple lock increases in the old age pension meant that before long people in receipt of only the modest old age pension would be paying tax on it. As those folk aren't in PAYE and most of them wouldn't be familiar with self assessment it wasn't surprising that Reeves said those people wouldn't have to pay tax on their state pension. This is sensible as the amount collected from people on a very low income would be small and not worth the hassle. However the principle is terrible as it now means that people with even tiny private pensions (who therefore have a tax code) will have to pay tax on their state pension. It offends even basic principles of justice that some pay tax on their state pension and others don't. Good chancellors avoid creating too many losers and therefore too much dissent by clever balancing of giving and taking away. This particular tax problem could have been averted by giving people over state pension age a personal allowance equal to the standard state pension in return for abolishing the triple lock and returning to a just link between the state pension and average earnings. That is the only fair link as it is equitable for the old and the young. 
• Stop victimising private pensions. The government say they want people to save into pensions but then steadily do things to deter it, budget after budget, this time by tightening the rules on salary sacrifice. Meanwhile public sector pay bargaining should take full account of pay packages allowing for pensions which are, after all, just deferred income. A review of how the enormous public sector pension liability can be met in future is desperately overdue.

The government needs to look properly at a huge range of supply side issues which are holding the economy back. 

• One obvious area is the need for investment to genuinely fix key areas of public sector dysfunctionality, especially NHS resourcing. Rishi Sunak claims that the NHS had never had a plan to increase healthcare training places to meet rising demand until 2023. The result is that it either has to hire foreign staff or pay huge fees for agency workers to fill gaps. The Conservatives introduced a long-term workforce plan to ensure we trained enough doctors and nurses but he says the current government has abandoned it. Why would it do that? Matt Goodwin says there is a reason why Britain rejects thousands of its own talented, ambitious young people from becoming doctors every year, while simultaneously importing doctors from the poorest, most medically deprived countries on earth. While doing it they claim that the NHS would collapse without immigration. But this year nearly 26,000 young Brits applied to study medicine. 8,126 state-funded places were available. The numbers on the previous two years were almost identical. The system is designed to need immigrants. Over 40% of NHS doctors were trained overseas and we now import more doctors annually than we train. "WTF?" one might ask. I suspect the answer is simple. Providing extra training places costs money now and Reeves keeps finding black holes, so the Treasury won't allocate money for this purpose. But it would almost certainly save money in the long run and probably improve NHS productivity. Reeves says she is maintaining investment. But is she investing in the right things? She needed to allocate money to significantly increasing medical training places now.

• There are many other areas of spending and taxation that I'd want to look hard at, including energy (which needs a fundamental review of how prices are set), water, road taxes and, potentially, a higher rate of VAT for some items but the main drive needs to be simplification. I'd set a target to get the UK tax code. It's regarded as the largest and most complex in the world, all 22,000 pages of it. Halving it in the parliament would be a good target and then half again by 2035. Let's get individuals and businesses thinking about and hiring advisers to grow their business, not thinking about tax and paying tax advisers to find loopholes.

I've outlined here plenty of spending increases and tax cuts as well as potential spending cuts. I don't know how they balance out but I don't have a team of Treasury officials at my command and models at my fingertips. The numbers would need to be balanced to bring about a reduction in the deficit from the budget year. If that meant an increase in income tax rates I would advocate that, politically difficult as it is: the basic rate of income tax hasn't gone up since 1975. Reeves could have argued the case for it. Someone will have to one day. She set her stall out as the one to take tough decisions. But she's bottled it big time.

I suspect my budget would rattle a lot of cages and would not be popular. But golly something like it is as needed as was Geoffrey Howe's in 1981. 

Starmer and Reeves theoretically had a strong enough position to do something on the scale that Thatcher and Howe attempted then.

Instead Reeves's effort was a pusillanimous budget aimed at saving her skin and that of her boss, who are repenting at leisure for the hasty and deeply unwise promises they made in their manifesto.

But the incompetence of Reeves and Starmer is nothing new. Politicians have been held in low regard for a very long time: 

“I could not help reflecting in my way upon the singular ill-luck of this my dear country, which as long as I ever remember it, and as far back as I have read, has always been governed by the only two or three people, out of two or three millions, totally incapable of governing and unfit to be trusted.” 

This was Lord Chesterfield -  in 1756.

Our fiscal policy's a mess - now's the time to fix it. David Smith, Sunday Times 21 December 2025

Here's how to cure the NHS and break out of a £20bn doom loop. Rishi Sunak, Sunday Times 7 December 2025

The real problem isn't the higher levies - it's who we're taxing. Dan Neidle Sunday Times 30 November 2025

The hypocrisy of NHS progressives: what morally righteous progressives will never tell you. Matt Goodwin's Substack, 12 December 2025

The £100k tax hurdle holding back Britain. Alice Wright, Sunday Times 2 November 2025

What if we ripped up the tax system and started again? George Nixon, Sunday Times 28 September 2025

Not such a bad hand but definitely played poorly

I thought I'd let the dust settle on Rachel Reeves's budget before commenting. Then she started going back on things again, so I let it settle a bit more. Heavy fare for new year but I can't resist.

Some chancellors, notably George Osborne, have presented budgets which are greeted with plaudits but then fall apart rapidly and spectacularly. Reeves's second budget hasn't fallen apart yet but then her previous year's budget is still unravelling. Unfortunately it probably won't fall apart, but just add more insidious dead weight to hold back the economy and slowly strangle it.

Reeves had promised to take tough decisions and make growth her number one priority. She has done exactly the opposite and for a simple reason. She has played for time to save her skin and that of the PM. Only 18 months into the parliament, she knows that the electorate can't kick Labour out for another three years. So the budget wasn't aimed at the electorate, directly or by improving the economy, it was aimed at the one audience that could cause her early termination - Labour MPs.

There was an interminably long run up to the budget. Historically it has generally been in October so it was a bit of  surprise when the government set 26 November as the date this year. But then, as every accountant knows, bad numbers take longer to add up. 

Bizarrely, in the end the numbers weren't that bad, adding to the feeling that the chancellor doesn't really know which way is up. The delayed schedule gave her too much time to think and she appeared to change her mind on several important calls. I accept that pre-budget 'leaks' are often deliberate, as the Treasury flies a kite or two to either gauge reaction or manage expectation, usually by terrifying the life out of us so a tough budget ends up feeling as if it wasn't so bad. However, Rachel Reeves flew so many kites that they created an air traffic risk. The unprecedented and amateurish leak of the whole budget by the OBR before Reeves stood up to deliver her budget added to a general air of incompetence, indeed slapstick, even if that wasn't her fault.

What Reeves did with the extended timescale and kite flying was to compound the uncertainty she created in the run up to her first budget, when she persistently talked the economy down and threatened tough measures, though on a promise of 'once this parliament'. That uncertainty was only heightened by the government then partly backing down on some of its measures, most notably the pensioners' winter fuel allowance debacle. The dither was then exacerbated by the government announcing it would cut benefits but then backing down to squawks from its left wing, even though the 'cuts' were, as usual, reductions in future increases and the trajectory of the welfare bill is clearly unsustainable.

The uncertainty Reeves engendered before her first budget had already created a lot of problems. Businesses were hesitant in the four months period after the general election as they waited to see what Reeves's promise of a tough first budget brought. The increase in employer's NI didn't take effect for another 5 months until the start of the tax year in April but that meant that many businesses kept recruitment plans on hold. Many will already have been in self imposed limbo for most of a year before getting to this year's period of doubt. So the two Reeves budgets have caused a lot of damage just through uncertainty. 

The damage was exacerbated by the air of perma-crisis in the public finances over comparatively small sums. This followed directly from Reeves's poor decision to have an extremely low level of "fiscal headroom" (let's just call it contingency) in her first budget. The £10bn she provided was a ridiculous 0.8% of the £1279bn total public sector spend for 2024-25 as estimated by the OBR. The twice yearly updates of public finances by the OBR almost inevitably meant a "black hole" would open up within six months of the first Reeves budget, leaving a further 6 month period of  "will she raise taxes or cut spending?" before her second. With hindsight it's surprising previous chancellors haven't done what Labour has now and tasked the OBR with annual, not bi-annual, updates. It's almost comical that Reeves created a situation where talk of a black hole opening up was inevitable, having accused the previous government of leaving her with one (which they probably didn't, it's hard to tell through all the obfuscation).

I'm not sure which of her two budgets has been the most damaging. Farming got much of the attention first time round due to the inheritance tax change on passing on agricultural property. It seemed obvious to me that the government's assertion that only a small proportion of farms would be affected was transparent balderdash. On our walks around rural Wales we see many small farms which don't seem at all affluent but a top of the head estimate for the value of the livestock, consumables like feed and the book value of the machinery would add significantly to the value of the land and often take the value of small farm past the IHT threshold. Sure they can pay the bill over 10 years but if they are just about managing then that doesn't help. Then nearly 13 months after making the IHT change, Labour relented. They did it painfully slowly and in as ham-fisted a way as the original tax was introduced. There are good grounds for taxing farms and businesses in general, in particular the agricultural property relief scheme, which proved wide open to abuse (i.e. not really being used for agriculture). But the simplistic way it was originally done and then amended horrified tax expert Dan Neidle, who had been calling for the loophole to be closed. By one count this was the government's ninth U-turn.

The government won't admit that it got its numbers wrong for the number of farms affected but it clearly did. The change helps but it's still a poor tax, badly implemented. The average UK farm income is around £40,000 a year* - and I've read of very much lower regional figures. This is not a lot more than the number needed to support a family, let alone reinvest and one day pay IHT. So I still expect many marginal farms will gradually disappear. Others will be broken up with significant consolidation into mega-farms. The appearance of the countryside will undoubtedly change significantly.

However, farming is the smaller part of the problem. Many family owned businesses across the economy will now have to plan for an IHT bill in the future, which will mean stashing money away instead of investing it in the business. Others will just decide to sell up, even if the business has been in the family for generations. That consolidation will almost always be negative for growth - as a general rule big companies don't grow as quickly. We've never placed as much importance as we should on the small and medium sized enterprises in the economy, in contrast to the recognition given in Germany to the mittelstand, the businesses that are the backbone of that country's economy. In principle a tax on selling the asset, not passing it on as a going concern, would be the answer, though I'm sure there would be many problems in formulating such a tax. 

Reeves's absurd claims to have inherited a truly dire economic situation, which made many wonder what she knew that the rest of us didn't (btw the answer to that was 'not much') made businesses put plans for investment and recruitment on hold. So of course the economy has stayed stagnant. Uncertainty and tax rises cause business to take a breather, wait and assess - wow, who knew? (The answer to that, of course, is nearly everyone but Rachel).

The dampening effect on business was exacerbated by the increase in Employer's NI and the remarkable reduction in the starting point to a salary of only £5,000. Awful for the ostensible number one priority - growth -but required for the actual number one priority i.e. not breaking the manifesto pledge to raise income tax and VAT, which would have been fairer.

Together with promising (and now delivering) damaging and mainly unnecessary changes to employment rights the result is that Labour has done just about everything it possibly could to stifle what it had said was its top priority, growth. As the economy has actually bumped along rather limply but not disastrously it makes one want to weep for how much better things could have been.

So the first Reeves budget was bad enough but what about the second?

As the country is still borrowing large amounts of money it was essential she retained the confidence of the bond markets. Only people without a brain - or very far to the left - could possibly espouse the idea that it is possible to "get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond market" as Andy Burnham fatuously pronounced back in September. Andy has traditionally been considered part of the soft left of the Labour party. I had always thought that this terminology distinguished moderates from the hard left but it seems it actually means soft in the head. The kind of people who think others have to lend them money and that they can dictate the rate they'll pay clearly live in a land populated by clouds and cuckoos.

The bond markets reacted positively to the budget so that's a kind of tick. This reaction was mainly because Reeves increased her contingency cushion second time around, but still only to a marginally more credible figure of around £20bn. We're paying far too much on tick - the UK gets charged a higher rate than Germany, France or the USA, on far too big a sum. The only way to reduce both the rate we pay and the total amount is to borrow less. To be fair that is Reeves's target over the parliament. But that's not really soon enough. Because that way it might never actually happen. To borrow less we have to either cut spending, raise taxes, or a mix of both. It's really that simple. 

Nearly all major western countries are borrowing far more (proportionately to their economies, not just in cash) than was the case until the last few decades. It has become a kind of addiction to what Arsene Wenger, in another context, called "financial doping". Like an opioid addict we keep wanting more. France, in an even worse position than us in terms of controlling social spending, has run 50 straight years of financial deficits. Europe has 10% of the world's population, 30% of its economy and 58% of its social spending. Each time things get tough the response of the large democracies is to throw ever more (of other people's) money at the problem. In the seven largest democracies the combined stimulus from governments and central banks rose from 1% of GDP in the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s to 3% in 2001, 12% in 2008 and 35% in 2020. The public, in the form of homeowners, stockholders and bondholders, have come to expect more help in each new crisis and to be insulated from any pain whatsoever. More borrowing, more benefits, more short term fixes (e.g. energy subsidies), more rights (shorter working weeks, work from home, ever greater job security), less responsiblity and no reform. Siren voices tell us it will be ok, growth will magically return, efficiencies will emerge, "waste" will be cut. If there is a bill others will pick it up (large companies, the wealthy) though of course it will mainly be consumers in prices and future taxpayers in the form of debt our children and grandchildren will have to cover. Like an addict we crave the fix, parties promise it to us and we reward them in elections. 

The bleak picture in the above paragraph is a precis and paraphrase of some excellent recent columns by Matthew Syed. (He's better at words than me, which is why he gets paid for it). Bleakly he told us where this trajectory is taking us. It's the pattern of civilisational cycles throughout history from ancien regime France to the Qing dynasty, the Ottoman empire and ancient Maya. Success built on discipline drifts first into enlightenment and then complacency. Syed notes that the historian Will Durant put it this way: "A nation, like a man, is born stoic and dies epicurean." Syed feels that the West relaxed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, thinking it had "won". Peak hubris was followed by unfunded tax cuts and spending and democracies began to falter. To that list I'd add the "peace dividend" that we foolishly cashed by cutting defence spending. To make it worse we've become susceptible to populism. Electorates believed the daft promises we were made and blame those who didn't deliver them but then seem ready to believe even dafter hyperbole.

Syed concludes we need to go cold turkey, understand that short term sacrifice is the price of long term resilience and stop voting for unaffordable promises. He's not sure we can take the withdrawal symptoms.

So: cut costs or raise taxes? Traditionally cutting costs has been the more guaranteed route as tax rates raised or new taxes implemented don't always raise as much money as expected because those pesky taxpayers out there change their behaviour. For example, increasing capital gains tax rates tends to mean that people defer selling assets and so the tax take, at least in the short term, goes down instead of up.

Rachel's problem is that she's already blown it on costs by implementing then partly reversing the cut in OAP's winter fuel allowance and bottling her planned trimming of the burgeoning benefits bill when the left of her party, soft or otherwise, rebelled. This climb down is a double whammy as it has not only emboldened the Labour back benchers to fight any further proposals for "cuts" or "austerity" but made them think they can force increases in expenditure. That's now happened with the lifting of the two child benefit cap which was definitely not in Labour's manifesto.

Labour was on the right track on getting control of the benefits bill, even if the cut they planned but had to withdraw was tiny, £3.4bn in a bill projected to go from £314.7bn in 2024-25 to £406.2bn in 2030-31.Instead they increased it. When a young person living in London and claiming the maximum in health and disability benefits can get the the post-tax equivalent of a £40,000 salary you may wonder why the alarming number of NEETS isn't even higher. This is a can kicked down the road and someone else will have to come back to this problem before too long as the trend is unsustainable.

This budget was a disaster for people who aren't on benefits or a pension. One could parody the old Labour campaign slogan about not being old, or needing the health service if the Tories got in - don't be an employee working hard to provide for your family under Labour: your student loan payments will go up, you'll get punished with high marginal tax cliff edges if you do well and your child benefit will get filched, even if your family income is lower than that of families who retain their child benefit because their individual incomes don't trigger the claw back. Even worse, you may have a lower income than a family living entirely on benefits - unless you earn over 40 grand. Labour should be a party committed to fairness. It clearly isn't.

Reeves has maintained capital investment, as she was quick to tell us "unlike George Osborne". That is indeed a good thing as public sector investment has usually suffered when chancellors needed to make savings. But that's literally only half the story. Public sector and private sector investment in the economy are both just shy of £140bn a year. The drag on private investment is just as damaging as if she'd made the cut herself to the Treasury spend.

So, while it was greeted with some relief by many, including business, because it was perceived to be not as bad as it could have been, nonethess the second Reeves effort was a poor and damaging budget. Rather than dust settling it has thrown a sticky blanket over the economy. 

It was a missed opportunity, a return to the playbook of Gordon Brown Labour: make more than half the country reliant on benefits and they'll resist "cuts" and side with us. Now an amazing two-thirds of households take more from the state than they pay into it. Households in the sixth income decile, earning £40,800 before tax, now receive £5,000 a year more from the state than they pay in. In 2002 a sixth decile household would have been contributing £3,100 a year. Tom Calver suggests that if the upper and middle classes turn to the private sector for healthcare and education while being asked to foot the bill for poorly run state services the principles of the welfare state could be under threat: a welfare state that leans more heavily on people who use it least goes against the principle of universal solidarity that the welfare state was founded on and could prove fragile.

It was an awful budget for young people, who see taxes going up, university loan repayments going up, rents going up, no houses to buy, poor public services and the goodies going to pensioners and those on benefits. "What's the point?" they must wonder. A budget to throttle ambition, drive and aspiration. A budget that did nothing for the growth that Reeves needs to make her numbers add up in the years beyond the budget year.

Some budgets unravel quickly. It seems that Reeves's unravel in slow motion. However, it took the Blair-Brown governments nearly a decade to completely run out of ideas and resort to a traditional Labour focus on tax and spend with the spend focussed on benefits. In contrast it took Rachel Reeves less than 16 months to do the same as it turns out she didn't have any ideas to start with.

Starmer and Reeves portrayed themselves as serious people, the growns ups in the room. Well they are definitely serious in that they're no fun, but they aren't serious in terms of having vision, resolve and courage.

"All well and good, smart arse, but what would you do?" you may say. Ah, that comes next...

*when I told Mrs H the stat today about what many farms earn in a year and, later, that Everton midfielder James Garner is negotiating hard over a new contract as he "only" earns £30,000 a week and presumably wants to earn more like 3 times that sum like his more experienced and more recently signed team mates, she killed the conversation dead, saying the the similarity of the numbers, one per year and one  per week, made her feel "sick"

The title of this post is a tweak of what Andy Haldane said - that Rachel Reeves has played a "bad hand ...pretty poorly". Reeves once claimed to have worked for the Bank of England for a decade, but it turned out she'd been there about half that time, some of that studying. Haldane was at the Bank for over 3 decades, eventually filling the roles of chief economist and executive director of monetary analysis and statistics.

A brief guide to the public finances. OBR 3 April 2025

Nobody wants a bond crisis but it may be the safest way to wake us up: the debt addicted West risks being trampled by Putin and Xi unless it can wean itself off its excesses. Matthew Syed, Sunday Times 14 September 2025

Numbed by borrowing, we can't see how badly we need to go cold turkey. The triumph of modern democracy looks short-lived: we are destroying it with our aversion to pain. Matthew Syed, Sunday Times 16 November 2025

Another budget that robs the young. No wonder half of them intend to vote Green. Robert Colville, Sunday Times 30 November 2025. This column included the stat about health and disability benefits being equivalent to a £40,000+ salary but I've also seen it elsewhere.

How many households give more than they take from the state? Tom Calver's Go Figure column, Sunday Times 30 November 2025. My concern is simpler than Calver's: it's just very inefficient to take tax off people and give it back to them in benefits and subsidies and so ends up costing more. Calver's figures take account of rail travel subsidies as well as health, education and other public services.