Word reaches Guido that the government intends to publish a green paper on the future of broadcasting in the UK either in the coming week or the week after. More Ofcom expansion and pot shots at right-of-centre outlets incoming…
The main news, however, is set to be a range of measures to force private social media companies to ‘give prominence’ to public service content. Translated, that means giving the BBC preference in search results and on the algorithm of video sites such as YouTube. It’s not as if the BBC already has total dominance of the broadcast market or anything, holding as it does more than 75% of average viewing time…
Other platforms like TikTok will likely be affected. Could the timing have anything to do with the fact that YouTube overtook the total audience reach of the BBC recently?
Forcing British consumers to consume BBC and other public broadcasting content while they browse their phones is yet another government intervention in the free media market. It’s bad for content creators, will only increase antipathy to the BBC, and is an infringement on the freedom of scrollers everywhere. Starmer wants a legacy to justify his two disastrous years in Number 10. This is what it looks like…
Roman Lavrynovych and Stanislav Carpiuc have been jailed at the Old Bailey for seven years and two years respectively for plotting a series of arson attacks targeting the Starmer. Brings an end to that brief chapter…
Starmer has just held a call with Labour staff in a panicked attempt to head off talk of Burnham’s inevitable leadership challenge. He has also been ringing Cabinet ministers to urge them against jumping ship. Desperate…
He added that the party should now “take Reform on” after Burnham’s comfortable Makerfield win:
“The tide is turning on Reform. If you look at the national polling, Reform are now only six or seven points ahead of Labour in the national polls, which two years into a five year parliament is a place that we can make huge advances from
“The next opportunity is the Greater Manchester Mayoralty, which now will follow as a result of the Makerfield by-election. It’s a chance to go and take the fight to Reform
“It’s really important, it’s a huge by-election, one of the biggest by-elections we’ll ever run. It is really important that we maintain that Labour mayoralty, and that we take Reform on
“This is the fight in politics at the moment. We should relish the opportunity to take the fight to Reform and give them a hiding in Manchester, and frankly, expose them for who they are: divisive, inward, wanting to divide our country, the complete opposite values to us.
“When they see problems, they don’t ask how do we fix this problem, they ask how do we exploit this problem. When they see communities, they don’t look at the great strength of our communities, they think, how can we pull this community apart, how can we set people and individuals and groups against each other?
“That is the complete opposite of us in the Labour Party, who believe in our communities, who believe that by coming together we get the best out of everyone. We are the true patriots, they are plastic patriots.
“Let’s pull together as a party and a movement. The one thing we’ve got to avoid doing is plunging our party and our country into chaos by turning on each other and tearing apart our party and our movement. That has never worked. That’s what the last government did. We need to learn that lesson.”
Burnham allies are now briefing that they hope to be in Number 10 by September, with Starmer waving the white flag early to avoid bloodshed. Starmer will have to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the bunker…
Hat-tip: Steven Swinford
Team Burnham briefed Bloomberg and the FT last night that Andy is “being advised” by ex-OBR chairman Richard Hughes, former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane, former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill, and Carys Roberts, the former executive director at the IPPR think tank. This was meant to calm the gilt market…
Co-conspirators may remember Roberts, who spent some time in the No10 policy unit before exiting last year. Her personal mission is to increase taxes on employees and on wealth. She co-wrote a report which advocated for a radical proposal to combine employee NICs and income tax, apply them to all incomes on an annual basis, and apply a gradually rising marginal tax rate as income rises. A massive radical increase on “working people”…
Roberts’ passion is taxation of savers through the abolition of capital gains and dividend taxes in order to tax them as highly as income. Her report also called for the replacement of inheritance tax with a whole-life gift tax with a lifetime allowance of around £125,000 – effectively a gargantuan enlargement of confiscation of family inheritance. She personally supported John McDonnell’s plans to hike wealth taxes as well as to mandatorily reduce working hours. Here are some other policies she supports:
- Introduce an Alternative Minimum Corporation Tax as a backstop levied on multinationals’ UK sales, based on global profit-to-sales ratios.
- Establish a Citizens’ Wealth Fund to pay every young person a £10,000 universal minimum inheritance at age 25.
- Phase out and abolish R&D tax credits (except for SMEs under seven years old) and abolish the patent box.
- Lower the threshold for the public register of people with significant control from 25% to 5% of shares or voting rights.
Zoe Billingham, the chair of IPPR North, is also advising Burnham – they all have the same ideas. Roberts additionally supports replacing business rates with a land value tax on all non-residential land, taxed on optimum use rather than current use. Burnham is a big fan of land value taxes which will hit the economy very hard – here’s an explainer…
Ex-minister Miatta Fahnbulleh led the capitalism-sceptic New Economics Foundation and is designing Burnham’s policies too. Any of these radical tax hikes will fail and Burnham will have to borrow more to fund his inflated spending commitments. Gilty as charged…
Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay up first…
Speaking at his speech on how to achieve “progressive capitalism” Wes Streeting fired a dig and Andy Burnham:
“Bond markets are not bond villains and fiscal rules matter.”
