Wow! What a Budget! Over £40 billion in new taxes and guaranteed growth. Simple. There’s only one slight fly in the ointment. I have yet to meet anyone, who thinks it will work. In fact, quite the reverse. Some fear we could end up in recession. Raising Employers’ National Insurance contributions means there’ll be a reduction in earnings for companies of all sizes. Business owners I have met are counting the extra money to be found in tens of thousands for small businesses and hundreds of thousands for larger enterprises.
In opposition, all major political parties taunt any government of the day which has the temerity to increase NI contributions as being “anti-business.” NI is characterised as a “tax on jobs”. There’s some truth in this. For cash is the “petrol” of business. Cut off or reduce the cash and the business falters. To take the mixed metaphor further, it’s as if Max Verstappen is nicely lined up on the F1 grid just as the lights are going green, only for someone to reduce his tyre pressures. He’ll still get round, but the others will surely overtake him. It's the same with business, only the “others” will be our competitors overseas who have less taxation to bear.
“But our public services need more funding.” Probably, but they also need reform, particularly when it comes to doing things more efficiently. For public sector productivity has stood still for decades. Not surprising, really, when you consider how few incentives there are in the public sector to be productive. People I talk to are still fuming about a railway workers settlement which offered a large pay rise with no productivity strings attached. Whisper it quietly, but there now similar mutterings about that organisation which can do no wrong, the NHS. If waiting lists don’t come down significantly those mutterings will turn into a roar.
Not that it’s all bad news. Our local GP practice spans Whitchurch and St Mary Bourne where it still operates out of Hampshire’s first ever purpose-built rural clinic, established in the 1960’s by the visionary GP who once lived in the house we now occupy. Today they increasingly embrace technology to get more from their scarce resources. You can email them with symptoms. They respond quickly. Combined with the NHS app, which gets better by the month, you can see test results and reorder preventative, health preserving drugs quickly and efficiently.
The recent combined Covid and flu jab appointment system where you were in and out within a couple minutes was like something out of the Third Reich in its efficiency, but with a marginally more congenial bedside manner. Yet, a few miles up the road at Kingsclere some friends, newly moved back to Hampshire, have struggled for over a year to get on a GP’s register. They can afford to go to the rapidly growing cohort of private GPs, but it shouldn’t be like that.
“But we need our workforce healthy, and they need to be able to get to work.” In reality, the inexorable demand for working from home might mean less demand for the railwaymen’s services. In any event there still remain the same union imposed bureaucratic rules which dog any innovation aimed at getting more for less.
“Never mind the productivity, feel the growth.” Well, let’s give that a try. One of the most surprising post Budget statistics was the revelation that, since Covid, US growth has been 9.5% a year, while in Britain we’re almost at the bottom of developed country growth - just 1.5%. Why?
At least the UK Budget is behind us. Not yet so the US election. As I write it looks like Kamala might just edge it. Trump, meanwhile, is sounding ever more bonkers. By the time you read this on Thursday we still might not know the result. Chin up, it’s all going really well!
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