David Harbord

The full UK State Pension is now worth around £12,548 a year. That's less than half the earnings of someone working full-time on the National Minimum Wage, despite many pensioners paying taxes and National Insurance for 40, 50 or even 60 years. Yet every time the Treasury needs money, the same voices appear demanding the Triple Lock be scrapped. Why? State pension spending is forecast at around £154 billion this year, but that supports over 13 million pensioners, many of whom rely on it as their primary income. Meanwhile, billions continue to disappear into failed projects, government waste, bureaucracy, consultants, quangos and policies that deliver little value to ordinary taxpayers. The Triple Lock isn't some gold-plated luxury. It exists because politicians allowed the State Pension to fall behind for decades. Even today, a full State Pension is barely above the poverty line and is nowhere near a typical working wage. If politicians want to save money, start with waste, inefficiency and failed spending programmes. Leave pensioners alone. They worked, they paid in, they built this country and they deserve dignity in retirement, not another raid on their income.

On the idiocy of austerity, and so much more. I’ve spent the last few months, when I wasn’t looking after my newborn daughter (!), profiling economist Mariana Mazzucato. Her ideas influence how millions of people are governed: Starmer’s Missions, Biden’s CHIPS Act, Trump’s stake in Intel. It’s all Mazzonomics. For nearly two decades the Western centre left has existed in an oddly depleted intellectual condition. The old neoliberal settlement lost legitimacy after the 2008 financial crisis, but no consensus ever fully arrived to replace it. A politics once organised around redistribution increasingly found itself reduced to management: fiscal rules, institutions, process. This, in part, explains Mazzucato’s rise. She offers something contemporary centre left politics badly craves - not just policies, but a story about what governments are for. She offers a theory of capitalism that is moral, managerial, and patriotic. Radical enough to sound transformative, pragmatic enough to sit comfortably within state institutions. Whether that synthesis can survive contact with increasingly volatile politics, a worsening economy, and human self-interest is an open question. She also fed me wine at 11am. Listen to our conversation on The Exchange now, link below.

🔥 Nigel Huddleston Just Delivered A Masterclass In Economic Reality And Labour’s Bridget Phillipson Didn’t Like It In a heated exchange, Shadow Treasury Minister Nigel Huddleston cut through the spin with blunt truth about tax: “It’s not government’s money. It’s not your money. It’s the public’s money.” When Labour’s Bridget Phillipson snidely shot back with “Thanks for the lecture, Nigel,” Huddleston fired right back, visibly frustrated: “It’s not a lecture, it’s economic reality. All government expenditure comes through raising taxes, taking money out of people’s pockets, and then you’re choosing to give it to other people. Do you understand how angry people are that you are taking from hard-working families who are struggling as well?” Spot on, Nigel. Hard-working Brits are being squeezed harder than ever by this Labour government, higher taxes, National Insurance hikes, and endless spending, while many feel the money is being funnelled toward those who aren’t contributing and open-door policies that prioritise illegal migrants over our own struggling households. People are fed up. They’re working longer, paying more, and seeing less in return. Families are cutting back on basics while the government lectures them about “fairness” and reaches deeper into their pockets. Nigel isn’t grandstanding. He’s stating what millions of taxpayers already know in their bones: Government has no money of its own. Every pound it spends is taken from someone, usually the same people already battling bills, rents, and stagnant wages. Well said, Nigel. Keep holding them to account. 🇬🇧

🚨BREAKING -- The Palestine Action defendants have been sentenced for a combined total of more than 25 years. Charlotte Head - 6 years Leona Kamio - 6 years Fatema Zainab - 5 years and 8 months Samuel Corner - 8 years and 8 months

The BBC Has Ruled. Brexit Damaged The Economy. No Further Debate Required. The BBC's editorial complaints unit has decided that the negative economic impact of Brexit is now a settled fact. Not a contested judgement. Not one side of a live debate. A fact, in the same category as man-made climate change, requiring no balancing view. The ruling followed a Radio 4 Today programme segment featuring Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, alongside Liam Byrne and Sir John Gieve, both long-standing advocates of closer EU alignment. All three agreed Brexit had damaged growth. The presenter, Katya Adler, did not challenge the premise or introduce a dissenting voice. A complaint followed. The ECU's response is the revealing part. It acknowledged the segment failed to "acknowledge the alternative case" for pursuing opportunities outside the EU rather than realignment with it. That part of the complaint was upheld. But the central complaint, that three pro-EU voices agreeing with each other on air is not balance, was dismissed. The reasoning given was that this reflected "the consensus among economists" and there was no "significant body of economic opinion" on the other side. This is worth pausing on. The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist. The institution that is legally required to be impartial has ruled itself the arbiter of which questions are still open and which are closed, and Brexit has just been moved into the closed file. The economics itself does not support the certainty on display. The headline figure driving much of this narrative, an 8 per cent hit to GDP since 2016, comes from an NBER paper built on a "synthetic control" model that constructs a hypothetical non-Brexit Britain from a basket of comparator countries. The largest weighting in that basket, over 60 per cent, is the United States, a country currently riding an AI investment boom and a separate fiscal stimulus. The model also weights Estonia and Greece more heavily than France or Germany. On a straightforward per capita basis against France and Germany, the actual comparators, Britain's performance since 2016 sits roughly in line with both. An 8 per cent gap simply isn't visible. This is a model producing a number that then gets reported as "the consensus," which the BBC then cites as the reason no alternative view is required. That loop, model produces number, number becomes consensus, consensus becomes fact, fact requires no balance, is the mechanism. It does not require a conspiracy. It requires an institution that has decided which conclusions are respectable and which are not, and which then treats its own prior decision as evidence. The same posture has been on display all week. A government department can decide its diversity targets are lawful without seeking legal advice to check. A police force can decide a book about dismantling "inner white supremacy" is leadership training. A broadcaster can decide an economic question is closed and that deciding so does not breach its own impartiality rules. In each case, the institution marks its own homework, and the mark is always a pass. None of this requires Brexit to have been a triumph. Britain's economy has genuine problems, most of them unrelated to single market membership. But a state broadcaster, funded by compulsory licence fee under threat of prosecution, has now formally placed one of the most consequential political decisions in modern British history beyond the reach of its own impartiality obligations. Reform's Lee Anderson called it being "blinkered by groupthink." The more precise description is an institution that has stopped being able to tell the difference between its own assumptions and the facts. "The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist."

Announcing £4,500 million for cyclists the day after saying there’s no money to defend the nation is magnificent And rally says it all

It's worse than that. The £4.5b figure is just the amount that the state would have to find to cover the ongoing costs of educating another 500k+ pupils. The state would also lose the tax revenue from the £16.5b generated by independent schools every year. Since about 75% of revenue is paid as salaries to staff, that would be approximately £3.7b if 30% of staff pay is handed over as Income Tax. Very rough figures, but you get the idea. In the short term, you'd also have to add the cost of buying up all of the land and buildings necessary to expand the state sector by 6%. In the long term, there would be substantial additional public sector pension liabilities. Abolishing private education would be a disaster for public finances.

Returning sickness benefit levels to pre-surge levels would release all money needed for defence.