Matthew Byrne

@alexfmac @SteveBakerFRSA There is a Golden Jubilee reenactment of the 1976 IMF bailout coming…

I like to rewatch this regularly. The circus long predicted by @SteveBakerFRSA is in full swing. I think an IMF bail-out is now on the cards in the near future. I used to lend ~$10m to the UK govt, but I don’t anymore despite the attractive yields…

Please publish your correspondence with HMRC @AngelaRayner

We need to start demanding a General Election at the end of this Tory leadership election. They were all elected on a manifesto promise to level up the North and are all abandoning it.

Reminder: In 2019, Andy Burnham, along with Sadiq Khan, Dan Jarvis and Steve Rotheram, wrote this letter to the then Conservative government, which called for self ID to become law, "to transform the lives of trans people". The letter has now been taken offline

Ambition Before Accountability. The Pattern Burnham Hopes You've Forgotten Andy Burnham is positioning himself as the man who will change Labour for the better. The outsider who understands working people. The mayor who got things done. Before Westminster accepts that narrative it should examine the one thing Burnham has been consistent about throughout his career. When institutional failure has required a reckoning, he has commissioned a review, expressed anger and moved on. The reckoning never comes. Start with Mid Staffordshire. As Health Secretary from 2009 to 2010 Burnham personally recommended the trust for Foundation Trust status on the basis of four lines of information. Between 400 and 1,200 more patients died at Stafford Hospital than would have been expected. He and his predecessor Alan Johnson rejected 81 requests for a full public inquiry sitting in public across their combined tenures. The Francis Inquiry, which Burnham resisted, found systematic failures. David Nicholson, the NHS chief, told that inquiry that the level of detail Burnham required before recommending Foundation Trust status was surprising because usually ministers would expect much more. The HuffPost analysis published at the time concluded that looking at the witness statements it was difficult not to reach the conclusion that Burnham was guilty at best of incompetence, at worst of gross negligence. Burnham's response was to stand before Parliament and accuse the government of failing to respond adequately to the Francis Report. The report he never wanted. About the trust he had recommended. Then comes the Augusta inquiry. Operation Augusta was a Greater Manchester Police investigation into a grooming gang of up to 100 members who abused at least 57 children, some as young as 12. It was closed before Burnham's mayoralty. But when MPs wrote to him challenging him on the failures documented in the subsequent review, his response was described in Hansard as supine. He accepted the lack of resources argument without challenge despite Greater Manchester Police having gained over 1,000 additional officers in the years the operation ran. There was, in the words of MPs who examined his reply, no sense of injustice. The minutes from the GMP meeting where the decision to close Augusta was taken had disappeared. The minutes from Manchester City Council had disappeared at the same time. The IOPC subsequently concluded it could not determine who took the decision or why because records were missing and former employees were unwilling to cooperate. The Rochdale review he commissioned identified 96 men still deemed a potential risk to children who remained at large. Nobody has answered the question of what his mayoralty did to locate and prosecute them. Not Burnham. Not any of the MPs now championing him for Downing Street. The pattern is not accidental. Mid Staffordshire. Augusta. Rochdale. In every case the same structure. Institutional failure. Review commissioned. Parliamentary challenge answered inadequately. Unanswered questions buried under the next announcement. The man presenting himself as the antidote to institutional evasion has spent his entire career practicing it. Now he seeks to represent Makerfield. Reform is ahead in polling for the seat by 46 to 35 percent. Labour lost 20 councillors in Wigan last Thursday while Reform gained 23. The seat being handed to him is no longer the safe Labour fortress it once was. If he loses it his leadership bid ends before it begins. If he wins it the questions above will follow him to Westminster. The political class preparing to crown him has not required him to answer those questions once. It will not start now. Changing the leader without changing the culture of institutional evasion reproduces the problem with a more popular face attached. Britain has been here before. It knows how it ends.

Well, well, well Andy B. There’s always a tweet. I look forward to you calling an election when you replace Starmer.

How on earth has Angela Rayner been "cleared" by HMRC? She didn't pay the extra £40,000 stamp duty that was due. She didn't take the specialist tax advice on her flat purchase that she was advised to take. She failed to pay the extra stamp duty that she, as Housing Secretary, had brought in for second home purchasers. For HMRC not to issue a fine means they judged her decision as "reasonable care" having been taken, or it was possibly "careless", but not a "deliberate" underpayment. She clearly did not take "reasonable care" to ensure her tax was correct. And if it was "careless", it was *deliberate* carelessness. Do you seriously think that if YOU underpaid your taxes by £40,000 as the then Deputy Prime Minister did, that you would get away without a fine? Sorry, but this stinks.

@Anna_Soubry Yes -a lot down to people sadly like you who were determined to stop the will of the people being implemented and helped waste months on supporting Keir Starmer wanting another referendum. Trust in politicians promises was trashed !

As someone with a worm’s eye view of the legislative process, it really irritates me that Starmer’s spin for the poor local election results is that his Govt hasn’t been moving fast enough. There were 40 bills in the first parliamentary session and there are 37 in the second, as set out in yesterday’s King’s Speech. Starmer has created 96 peers – a higher rate per year than any previous Prime Minister. He could not be going any faster. The fact that the legislation the Govt has rammed through has not delivered growth or reduced the tax burden on working people or lowered the cost of living – delivered the ‘change’ that Labour promised – is because they’re not designed to do that. They’re designed to placate the Party’s ‘stakeholders’ – backbench Labour MPs, trade unions, NGOs, think tanks, lobby groups, allies in the legal profession, cheerleaders in the media, etc. It’s been bleedin’ obvious to everyone on the opposition benches – and probably some on the Govt benches too – that the legislation was introduced in the last parliamentary session – particularly the Employment Rights Act – will impede growth, not accelerate it. We’ve told the Govt’s ministers this in the chamber again and again and everything we’ve predicted would happen has happened – rising unemployment, rising inflation, accelerating borrowing costs, an unmanageable welfare bill, exodus of high income-earners, thereby increasing the tax burden on the rest of us, etc. The idea that if the Govt had been going *even faster* – which is just straightforwardly impossible – the country would be better off, is for the birds. Even as a piece of spin, it’s pathetic. The reason we’re in an economic doom spiral is because this Govt is only interested in pandering to its ‘stakeholders’ and their only motive is to line their own pockets and advance their own narrow sectional interests. Changing the leader will make no difference. We need a Prime Minister and a Govt who are going to prioritise the national interest. I don’t see anyone in the pack of hyenas stalking Starmer who’s going to do that.

Vote Tory, Get Polanski

A terrible look for the Tories.

📽️ This isn't just about Keir Starmer and whether he'll be PM in a few days/weeks. It's about the economic quandary the UK's faced with and whether any future govt can or will confront it. My primer on why markets are quite so fretful about the UK👇

"Suddenly, for once, for the first time in many of our lives, actually Britain looks like a little haven of peace and stability”. Andrew Marr on Labour's General Election victory in 2024. You could write a whole thesis about this level of delusion, the class who embrace it, and how it comes about. Marr has supposedly been one of the leading voices in political journalism in this country for over two decades. He presented this own weekly show on BBC from 2005 to 2021, then became Political Editor of the New Statesman in 2022. He has presented three major documentaries for the BBC: Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain (2007), Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain (2009) and then Andrew Marr's History of the World (2012) He's written 8 books and has received two British Academy Television Awards, one of which was for Best Specialist Factual Programme (for his History of Modern Britain). Take all that in and then watch the video again. These people are treated as wise authorities but, when it comes down to it, aren't half as clever as they believe themselves or as we treat them.

@ArchRose90 Illiberal. Undemocrats.

Ed Davey saying the quiet part out loud. He wants PR to happen just to stop Reform. He sees Reform as a threat to democracy after *checks notes* millions of people voted for Reform to win the local elections. A liberal’s motto is if you can’t beat them, change the system.

The key feature of the King’s speech will be a massive give away of power and money to the EU. This will make us poorer, requiring tax rises to pay the bill. The EU carbon taxes and new carbon tariffs will put up prices. The extra laws will damage business and non EU trade.

Powerful intervention in the House of Commons, from Northern Irish MP Jim Allister: "In NI we have been subjected...to the humiliation of being governed by laws we don't make, and can't change" "You...now seem to want to impose that same denial of democracy on the whole UK"

Picture Ireland in 1987: unemployment at 17%, debt-to-GDP ratio pushing 120%, and young Irish workers fleeing to London and Boston faster than you could say "economic basket case." Finance Minister Ray MacSharry slashed government spending by 3% of GDP while dropping corporate tax rates to 10% for manufacturing (later extending it across sectors). Brussels bureaucrats screamed about "unfair competition," but MacSharry kept cutting. By 1994, something extraordinary happened. GDP growth hit 5.8% annually, then accelerated to over 10% by 1999 (try explaining that with Keynesian multipliers). Foreign direct investment poured in as companies like Intel, Microsoft, and Pfizer set up European headquarters in Dublin, creating actual productive jobs instead of government make-work programs. The Irish called it the Celtic Tiger, and suddenly emigration reversed into immigration. The formula was blindingly simple: slash bureaucracy, cut taxes, get out of entrepreneurs' way. Estonia used the same playbook after leaving the Soviet Union. Hong Kong became an economic powerhouse when it was still a British colony using the same principles. Yet today's politicians act like Ireland's transformation was some mystical accident rather than predictable market forces unleashed by government restraint. Of course, Ireland later screwed it up by joining the euro and letting banks leverage themselves into oblivion during the housing bubble (because politicians can never leave well enough alone). But for one glorious decade, they proved what happens when you stop trying to manage an economy and just let people create wealth.

Over the last quarter century, North Sea oil and gas output has fallen from over four million barrels of oil, to way under a million. That’s partly natural depletion but largely net-zero posturing – by both the Tories and Labour – and a related, entirely prohibitive tax regime. We import other nations’ carbon emissions, using oil and gas they produce, so we can tell ourselves we are virtuous – even though using our own would save huge sums, while generating billions of pounds in extra tax and hundreds of thousands of well-paid blue-collar jobs. For all the talk of renewables, Britain still relies on oil and gas for some 70pc of our primary energy use – and, by 2030, having been an energy exporter little more than a decade ago, we’re now on course to import 70pc-plus of those hydrocarbons. And people wonder why mainstream political parties are increasingly being rejected ... Read me every week in @Telegraph and for more analysis, follow "When The Facts Change – Economics and Politics in a fast-moving world, with Liam Halligan via the link below 🧵5/5 bit.ly/4uholDe

Reform voters are racist apparently. As soon as I saw this insult to millions of British people (one of the least racist nations on earth) I suspected it was from an academic. It’s impossible to exaggerate how western universities became overrun with woke ideology

Sprinting away would also be acceptable.