John Healey began his first speech as Chancellor by making four big claims.

He said:

fiscal control is the first duty of any Chancellor,
fiscal credibility delivers economic stability,
fiscal credibility creates growth, and
growth delivers national security.
Those ideas sound reassuring, but what if every one of them is wrong?

In this video, I explain why those four assumptions have already failed Britain before and why, if John Healey governs on the basis of them, he is likely to fail as Chancellor as well.

I argue that:

putting fiscal control ahead of outcomes means confusing accounting with economic management.

The whole point of MMT is that it uses fiscal control over inflation, not monetary policy. Yet leading MMT Guru insists fiscal control is a bad idea.

The post Weird, innit? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

A British woman who accused a banker of rape in Hong Kong has been jailed for six years for blackmail and perverting the course of public justice.
Isabel Rose, a 26-year-old events manager from south-east London, accused a fellow Briton of rape after visiting him in January 2024.
But the accused was released without charge, while Rose was arrested and charged before being found guilty by a district court in March.

Reading what is reported well, make up your own mind. But this:

Rose was accused of demanding money from the banker, who cannot be named for legal reasons, after she accused him of raping her.

Cannot be named. Quite right too. Anonymity should work for both sides or neither.

The post Well, this part is right at least first appeared on Tim Worstall.

A political lobbying firm founded by the former electoral strategist for David Cameron and Boris Johnson secretly pays journalists to write pieces for British newspapers that are favourable to its clients, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

In a practice that appears to create a backdoor for private companies to influence public opinion, lobbyists for CT Group – co-founded by the campaign strategist Lynton Crosby – told an undercover reporter they had paid journalists to place apparently independent stories in newspapers.

The question is, what happens when the journo is offered? My answer – not from this firm or anything to do with it – was that if caught that would be the end of my ability to write for the British newspapers. So, the payment had to cover that risk to a lifetime of potential income. Shall we say £1 million? Sadly, no, they didn’t.

Sure, everyone’s got their price and mine is high.

There’s an ettiquette around this too. Paying a journo to write an article is just fine. They’re writing for money, that’s cool. But the editor that’s publishing it must know that the journo has been paid to write. And therefore does not pay the journo through the newspaper. They’ve already been paid, by the people commissioning the article.

The naughty is a journo being paid by the commissioner of the piece and then presenting it to the editor as being unpaid so far. That’s the Tsk.

An editor can make their own decision about running a piece commissioned by someone else. That’s fine. But they must know so they can make up their own mind.

Thus, in this story here:

Stollar led the journalist to understand that while they would be paid by the newspaper for apparently independent reporting, they would also be paid by CT Group, which has property industry clients.

Nope. Sure, the internal standards of the industry might not pass everyone’s moral sniff test but that’s the issue here.

They said they did not want pieces to appear like advertorials – which are transparently signposted paid-for editorial pieces

Quite.

Also:

They then offered him “£100 for every story that is successfully published (national or trade)

No one actually does want to be a cheap whore.

The post This is not unusual first appeared on Tim Worstall.

A woman in Australia is killed by someone she trusted every 11 days

Can’t he do it to some other bird for a change?

As to the substance:

On Wednesday, senator Pauline Hanson claimed domestic and family violence is “a two-way street”, blamed the cost of living for perpetrators’ actions, and suggested women experiencing abuse should simply “not put up with it”.

These comments are not an aberration. They sit within a broader political project that has, for decades, attempted to build support on the basis of normalising prejudice, particularly against migrants, Muslim communities and communities of colour. That same platform can also risk lending credibility to dangerous myths about domestic and family violence.

We seem top have got to where Hanson is the only feminist left standing – don;t put up with it, leave, do not make excuses for him, leave – and all thsoe calling themselves feminists are making excuses for guys called Mo.

Vile tossers, obviously.

The post Bit harsh first appeared on Tim Worstall.

I have been trying to eat fewer ultra-processed foods with my family for five years, and it has been challenging.

Many experts agree that ultra-processed foods (UPF) pose health risks

They’re all lying to you. It’s a grift.

Anyway, the advice becomes learn to cook, frozen and canned veggies tend to be better than out of season fresh, in sean fresh better than any and, well, that’s about it. So the advice that follows from the grift isn’t all that bad…..

The post Well, yes Honey, but first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The opening claim was that fiscal control is the first duty of a Chancellor. The obvious question to ask is, why? That is not a rhetorical question. Instead, it is because I think that a Chancellor’s first responsibility is to create a prosperous, resilient and fair economy.

After all, why should controlling the government’s finances be considered more important than maintaining full employment? Or ensuring the delivery of decent public services? Or tackling climate change? Or investing in the country’s future?

Managing the public finances is one of the tools available to achieve those objectives, but it cannot be the objective itself. Confusing an instrument of delivery with the purpose of activity has become one of the defining characteristics of Treasury thinking. And that confusion has consequences, because once fiscal control becomes the goal rather than the means, every other ambition the government might have is subordinated to it. To open your description of the job you plan to do with a category error is quite something, but Healey managed it.

So the Minister specifically there to do the fiscal bit – other ministers deliver public services etc – is not to do the fiscal bit job?

Seems odd.

Note that under MMT the Chancellor is still there to do the fiscal bit. Sure, spend away, then tax back to prevent the inflation. OK, someone still has to do that fiscal bit, right? The Chancellor…..

The post It’s a glorious idea, no? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

What sort of longshot candidate do we reckon is going to run for US president in 2028? The Rock? Kim Kardashian? Kermit the Frog? US politics has become so debased that being rich, famous and a natural-born citizen (sorry, Zohran Mamdani) now seem to be the only qualifications required for a job in the White House.

Which is why you shouldn’t entirely write off murmurings that Hunter Biden might be interested in following in his daddy’s presidential footsteps.

Respected international businessman with a vibrant social life. Just the thing, eh?

The post Why not? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The Dubai airline has ordered a total of 270 new 777X planes from Boeing at $440m (£330m) apiece, with the first jet built in 2019. But repeated delays stemming from design modifications has meant Emirates is still waiting for the planes seven years later.
Sir Tim Clark, the president of Emirates, said the initial batch of 10 of the jets required such a patchwork of changes to update them that they were not fit for purpose.
“We’re not taking that batch and that’s it,” he told The Telegraph at the Farnborough International Airshow. “As far as we’re concerned, what they do with them is up to them.”
Sir Tim said he understood that Boeing had been trying to find a home for the aircraft, before adding: “Heinz would be interested – baked bean cans.”

Except planes are made of aluminium and carbon fibre, baked bean cans of steel…..coke cans possibly, but not beans

The post Well, maybe first appeared on Tim Worstall.

And in the age of AI, stolen images of children matter. Taken in real life or scraped from the internet, they’re the raw material for generating realistic-looking child abuse material of the most extreme and disturbing kind. (If that sounds like a grim but ultimately fairly victimless crime, the Internet Watch Foundation warned in a recent report that AI-generated material risks fuelling sexual interest in children, normalising violence and increasing the risk of real-life offending.)

That some will be inflamed by piccies into doing is clearly true. That others will wank themselves into a stupor over piccies and not do is also, obviously, true. What we want to know is what is the balance? Does more piccies mean less action and more stupor?

Yes. We know this. Overall porn acts sa a substitute, not a complement. Therefore we don’t actually want to stop people AIing porn at all, rather encourage it.

Not that that’s an argument that’s likely to fly in political circles…..

The post Nope, wrong first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Nicaragua’s long-serving president, Daniel Ortega, has said the country will hold no further elections to prevent the opposition from coming to power.

The 80-year-old authoritarian leader, who has been in office since 2007, also said he would work with the congress he controls to pass new laws that would “build a wall” against the opposition.

Is he still a lefty hero? Or has all that passed?

The post Oh, right first appeared on Tim Worstall.

No one needs to play around to find £16 billion of potential spending capacity in UK fiscal rules. They just need to highlight the folly of such rules when the UK also has around £8 trillion of supposed financial wealth (and maybe more), most of whih is used for financial speculation. It could instead be used to fund constructive investment in ways I have outlined, many times.

You’ve got what I want to spend. Gimme.

The post Fairly naked demand first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Heat pump households face winter warmth rationing as the drive to net zero raises increasing fears of blackouts.
By the end of next year, electricity suppliers will be able to remotely turn down heat pump central heating to help Britain’s energy system cope with high demand.
Suppliers are expected to do so on the instructions of the quango responsible for coordinating the grid, which is overseen by Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ).

How long before someone starts to use it to punish BadThink?

The post What glorious joy, eh? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The Odyssey is the first feature movie to be filmed entirely with Imax cameras – a system of very heavy and loud cameras that capture a sharper, brighter and higher-resolution content.

Someone here will be able to eplain the “loud” part to us all?

The post Loud cameras? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

But something else struck me while reading example after example of quoted texts. It was all tawdry, poorly written, poorly argued stuff. You come away not with the sense that this is an august magazine dedicating its formidable intellectual and journalistic resources towards a problematic minority it is concerned about, but with the sense that it isn’t a serious publication.

Its articles are the sort of content you get from GB News, or a bellicose radio phone-in, or a tabloid on a tear.

Nesrine, in The Guardian, says this about The Spectator?

The Spectator and its broader universe constitute what is now mostly a low-brow media attempting to dress up racist audience-baiting as high-end journalism, all of which is met not with alarm and objection by establishment politics, but a “cheers” in the sunshine. It is not that Muslims have turned into a bigger problem for the country, but that the country itself, and its so-called intellectual elites, have become small. In resisting the feeling that this is all just how it is, in not glazing over, we resist becoming small along with them.

Yes, Nesrine, in The G.

The post Snigger first appeared on Tim Worstall.

In the wake of his withdrawal, Democrats are asking themselves many questions, chief among them, who will replace him as their party’s nominee in the marquee Senate race? But the saga has also revived a deeper debate over whose flaws are forgivable – and whose are disqualifying.

“White men get to fail,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits young, progressive candidates to run for office. “Women do not get to make mistakes. People of color do not get to make mistakes.”

So, white bloke gets thrown out of Sentate race for mistakes made. Now this bint says that white folks what?

The post Eh? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The post Works for me first appeared on Tim Worstall.

My starting point is definitional and a departure from conventional framing. A government bond, or, in the UK context, a gilt, is not in any meaningful economic sense a loan that the government takes out and must repay. It is the equivalent of a fixed-term bank deposit account.

But a bank deposit account is the bank borrowing your money from you. And yes, we are all rather keen on banks repaying our deposit accounts.

The post Umm first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Yesterday was a huge moment for the No to Digital ID campaign. Following months of public pressure, incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced that the Digital ID policy will be scrapped.

This is a victory that belongs to every one of you.

From day one, this campaign has been powered by people who refused to stay silent. Together we’ve grown to more than 55,000 supporters, delivered over 100,000 leaflets across the UK, and even secured the backing of former Prime Minister Liz Truss.

Every donation, every leaflet, every share, every conversation, and every message of support helped build the momentum that made this impossible to ignore.

I’d also like to extend a special thank you to Tim Worstall for giving our campaign a platform at a crucial time. Your support helped us reach a wider audience and ensured our concerns about Digital ID were heard.

But we’re not declaring victory just yet.

A promise is only as good as the action that follows. We’ll be watching closely to make sure Andy Burnham keeps his word and that Digital ID doesn’t quietly return under a different name or through the back door.

If you’d like to help us continue holding the government to account and defending privacy, freedom and security, please consider supporting the campaign.

Support the Campaign

Today we can celebrate what we’ve achieved together. Tomorrow, we keep the pressure on.

Thank you for standing with us. The campaign continues.

The post Digital ID first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Outlining plans to axe the digital ID scheme, a spokesman for Mr Burnham said: “One of the first things this government will do is put its focus where people need it right now: creating breathing space and delivering change they can feel in their everyday lives.
“That means all the time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it’s most needed, such as helping with the cost of living.
“This government is determined to bring power back to communities, instead of hoarding it in Whitehall. We will work every day to lift this country back up to where it belongs, with growth in every postcode, and hope in every heart.”

Will anyone using Companies House still have to have one? If so then it’s not really axed, is it?

The post Depends what he axes, no? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The options. Burnham could revisit the idea of tightening eligibility requirements, or he could reduce the value of some benefits. But this seems unlikely given his political instincts and pledge to avoid “crude cuts”. Instead he will probably focus on reducing demand.
Clues. Burnham has already given indications he intends to pursue this path. He has promised a massive programme of council house building and described the growing number of young people not in education, employment or training (Neets) as “deeply concerning”.

He’ll destroy a vast amount of wealth – council houses are worth very much less than it costs to build them – and not kill any part of the benefits bill.

Well done, Andy.

The post So, not going to solve the problem at all then first appeared on Tim Worstall.