If you are happy with Labours performance related to the cost of living crisis/economy
What did they do that you are happy with.
I ask out of genuine curiosity as from my post in the Farage thread, I think they have vastly underperformed
I did quite a lot of economics as an undergraduate, and worked with economists for much of my career.
Most of what this government has done I'm happy with. There are a few things I'd have done differently, but not much.
There's no magic governmental wand that can be waved to sort issues out instantly. We're still less than a year since Labour came to power and, while I have my own criticisms of the current administration, we could at least give them a bit of time to bed in.
When we'd had a decade plus of Tory maladministration it's ridiculous to expect a government of any colour to sort it out overnight.
I would not use those words, but the new government did have to start with a very large fiscal adjustment to stabilise the public finances. That was going to have a short term hit on the economy however it was done.
It would have been better to have increased income tax to plug the undeniable gap, but Labour had naively promised not to do so.
Don't kid yourself that increasing income tax would have had a significantly different effect. It hits consumers expenditure, and effects many of the same businesses, just in a different way.
I think that the employers national insurance contributions increase was the right way to go, though I might quibble on some of the details. One of the main reasons that the UK has a poor economic growth record is a dysfunctional labour market where too many businesses are reliant on using lots of cheap low productivity labour. That was ok in times of high unemployment, but now that we have a tight labour market it is economically bonkers, and one of the main results is lots of inward migration to meet the demand.
All good governments put high taxes on scarce resources to encourage the market to use them in the most effective way. Right now one of the most scarce resources in the UK is working people. Economically, now is the right time to tax employers more heavily on their use of labour. To be frank the businesses that profit from using lots of low wage labour are now getting a long overdue kick up the posterior. Of course the businesses affected are going to complain, because they are being challenged to do things differently and better. But one of the ways of getting back to economic growth is to get people out of low wage low productivity jobs and into high wage high productivity jobs. That isn't going to happen if the government continues to incentivise employers to horde cheap labour.
I suspect that the employer NI increase will prove inflationary and anti-growth where employers seek to neutralise it.
Combined with the minimum wage and the change to the NIC threshold, the impact was pretty big.
I am the sort of person that listens to budget speeches, and reads some of the supporting documentation on the HM Treasury website.
The thing that struck me at the time of the budget was that the Treasury was underestimating the inflationary impact of the National Insurance increase in combination with the minimum wage increase. I have worked close enough to the budget setting process to have some knowledge of how it works: in the no blame culture I'd say that was the fault of the Treasury economists not the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
