The Budget

A few bullet points on the budget:

• We have a second deadline for Rishi to become conservative party leader. First, it was furlough ending in March (when Boris’ govt looked precarious) now it is the down-wind line of tax rises in 2 years, the time he expects another chancellor to have taken up the burden of dispatching essential services,
• Lack of joined up thinking. What caught my eye was the evidence for boosting skills. It claimed that skills above NVQ4 lead to higher gross-value-added. Of course, if you look at the literature it cited…. you get the distinct feeling policy wonks are fiddling with the ‘chicken or egg’ question to their own favour.
• Port barrel politics – obvious. Even Gordon Brown enacted this kind of action.
• Port barrel travel arrangements. With respect to skills, a correlated factor to GVA is transport and access. Funny that most of the newly announced transport links are recent/hopeful convert areas to the conservatives….
• Free Ports. It is common knowledge that they don’t encourage growth, only redirection of existing economic infrastructure. Again, tory gains have benefitted the most in this budget.
• Tax rate freezes. Probably the correct Faustian choice…
  
  Comments:
• It would be good to see low-income individuals with an increasing tax burden due to threshold-freezes be offered to put their taxes into a state-held savings account going towards higher education in STEM+ fields. Most won’t recoup the value, especially if you set a time-limit on the account. But those who do will benefit the UK economy in exactly the areas it requires at thi turning point in history.
• AI. Interestingly lacking from substance, there were no major policy changes from pre-existing arrangements based on the treasury’s 2019 whitepaper on AI and robotics growth.
• Historically, the UK has had to import raw materials for production. It would be recommended that the govt focus on investing in high-value luxury robotics in this view. With the current trade arrangeemnts with the EU, manufacturing is benefitted heavily in NI. It would be a high priority – for the state of the union and economic growth for the govt to invest in NI based high-quality robotics manufacturing.
• And subsequently focus (as is being implemented) on CDT growth with additional funds for AI start-up programmes offering services in analytics and data management in the UK mainland. In particular, remote regions suffering from low growth and access to international trade should be offered low-cost fibre optic connecions that would both attract talent to the UK as a hospitable and scenic place for high-powered AI engineers to work, and in regenerating left behind communities at the heart of Britain.
• Nurses pay. It is quite obvious that (in my running commentary) this is another front on the culture war. An adventurous govt would seek a one of payment paid through public funding through a war-bonds type arrangement. Make it a ‘heroes bond’ you can hang on your wall, and you’ll see a large quantity of low-buying individuals keep their paper over their gold, boosting the financial reserves in the same way that memorabilia coins boost reserves in the BoE. But now we have public vs private sectors, and the unions, witht heir (no judgement on rightness made) talk of 12.5% pay rises have made enemies of private state workers. I’m sure the nurses deserve it. I am also certain that the recently unemployed don’t agree they should pay.
• This is of course compounded by the fact that most still-working people will be hit by regressive taxation in the next 2 years. Good luck telling a plumber only taking home a margin of what they used to that they should pay more for steady-ncome nurses!