Anyone who has ever read Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield is likely to remember this basic piece of economic advice from Mr. Micawber. Micawber was a financial disaster himself, but he understood something that seems to be beyond the Government:
“My other piece of advice, Copperfield,” said Mr. Micawber, “you know. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20 pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and — and in short you are forever floored. As I am!”
The U.K. Government, and that means this one and previous ones, is now stuck in the Dickensian misery of expenditure vastly exceeding income. The present Government has opted for tax rises to plug the gap and ignored the consequences for growth and employment.
Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph can only foresee a jobs bloodbath, and it’s starting at the retailer Next:
The trouble is, that is just the start of it. In reality the Rachel Reeves jobs bloodbath has only just begun – and it is about to get far worse over the next few months.
If the Chancellor thought companies could easily absorb the extra £24 billion in NI charges she is about to find out she was very much mistaken. The Retail Gazette reports today that Next is looking at automated scanners to replace till staff.
According to [Next’s] Chief Executive Simon Wolfson it is one of the few ways it can deal with the extra £67 million it will soon have to pay in higher employment taxes. “As we get natural turnover in our staff, where we introduce efficiencies, we will take on less new people rather than lose existing people,” he told the paper, explaining that Next would inevitably have to reduce its staffing numbers.
No one should kid themselves the company is doing that to improve customer service. The technology has been around for a decade or more, but most clothes retailers have ignored it, for the simple reason that customers don’t like self-scanners. Especially for buying clothes, we would rather deal with an actual person, and even the supermarkets have been getting rid of them.
Automation will lead to a collapse in employment and customer service:
A survey of the U.K. services sector last week by S&P Global found that firms were cutting back on staff numbers at the fastest rate in four years, while KPMG reported before Christmas that the number of vacancies is now falling at the fastest rate since the height of the pandemic.
As the new year unfolds, that will surely accelerate. Faced with a big rise in the tax they have to pay for each member of staff, firms will have no choice but to figure out ways of automating tasks that used to require actual people. Self-scanning will just be one part of it.
Worst of all, and this is where Mr. Micawber could step in with some handy pointers, the effect isn’t going to help Government spending either. It might increase it, while tax revenues remorselessly drop:
Every time a job is lost, the Government loses the NI, the income tax, the VAT on the money that person would have spent, and it may well have to start paying benefits as well.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: As if it couldn’t get worse, the Government is having to borrow more, so the pound has plunged. Still at least that means our exports will be cheaper. Hold on to your hats – it seems another tax raid could be looming:
The Treasury has held the biggest sale of five-year bonds in more than a decade as Rachel Reeves faces increasing pressure from rising borrowing costs.
The U.K. Debt Management Office (DMO) auctioned £4.25 billion of new debt a day after long-term Government borrowing costs surged to the highest level since 1998.
Five-year gilt yields have risen almost 35 basis points since the beginning of last month to around 4.45%, while 30-year yields are the highest in more than a quarter of a century.
The five-year gilts were sold by the DMO today with a yield of 4.49% – the return the Treasury promises to buyers of its debt.
Economists have warned that the Chancellor is on the brink of breaking her fiscal rules and being forced into another tax raid as bond yields rise.
You can read that story in full here.
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I’ve just got banned from the Telegraph comments for pointing out their disgraceful science reporting and pointing to articles like this one. They simply cannot allow the truth.
Keep it up Igor.
In truth I’m quite pleased in a way, because continuing to pay them money (albeit at a reduced rate due to previous threats to leave on my part anyway) has been running counter to my principles. I’ve unsubscribed of course.
I was banned on a number of occasions at the DT but they relented when I appealled to the moderators. They eventually brought in a one strike and you’re out policy which has prevented me from commenting since, they must run checks on IP addresses as I opened a new account using a different email address but was banned within a week for something innocuous.
If you want a Qatari model of free speech, look no further than the DT BTL comments policy.
The Guardian and the BBC are even worse than the DT.
I was banned for commenting “below the line” years and years ago.
The Guardian- check
The Times- check
Youtube comments- check
Disqus- Check
Daily Mail- check
Twitter (pre and post Elon)- check
BBC-check
Daily Telegraph-check
Why?
I have very successfully defeated BBC HYS moderating censors multiple times by targeting certain subjects in a particular way – proved their bias which they have tacitly acknowledged time after time. Like many here, I consider these MSM organs are self evidently very corrupt, lying woke far left WEF acolytes and my experiences don’t move that dial one millimetre .
I paid £24 for my DT subscription this year. I let my old subscription lapse when they wanted to make it over £100 pa and after about 6 weeks they discounted by over 75%. I keep it going so I can comment BtL and – hopefully – influence others and point them towards sources of information.
I tread a fine line; they’ve not banned me yet.
They banned me for railing against Bill Gates giving them a few million quid during Covid. It is a badge of honour to banned by this rag.
We all seem to be operating in an echo chamber.
We all know what is causing the excess deaths.
It is not until the general public and the main stream media start to wake up to reality that anything will be done.
We are making very slow progress on that front.
Excellent interview in TCW today with Andrew Bridgen, entitled: “The Vaccine Cover Up is Rapidly Unravelling.” It opens “The elephant in the room of excess deaths is trumpeting louder and is stepping on the toes of Big Pharma in Parliament.”
Unfortunately when Andrew stands up in Parliament to make a valuable speech all the other MPs walk out.
This is the level of wilful ignorance we are dealing with.
Great work Mr Chudov
Now I remember why I prefer SQL
Although I do agree with your hypothesis, I have one, simple point to make… I think the official vaccination rates are total BS. In many European countries, individuals are all too used to beating the system and cutting each other private deals and arrangements. I suspect a statistically significant number of jabs went down the sink. And we’ll never, ever know how many. There just isn’t the data.
It’s things like this which remind me of the main message in Friedrich Duerrenmatt’s Das Verpsrechen – some things will never be solved, however much you want and need to solve them, and regardless of how much effort you put into solving them…
But the bastards need hanging for everything they did which we know for sure they did, nevertheless.
Yes, I noticed that former Communist countries had low or negative excess mortality (fewer deaths than expected in plain English!). I would agree that their lower jab rate is due to a history of “beating the system” and overall suspicion of authority and is probably even lower. Sweden’s negative excess mortality rate suggests that a combination of lockdowns and jab adverse effects has caused the excess mortality we’ve seen. In countries with both lockdowns and high high jab rates we see higher excess mortality. Simplistic using one country’s example I know.
They really sucked up the ‘get jabbed to save granny’. in Portugal. 95% jabbed!
Salazar managed to create what is in my honest opinion a very childlike and impressionable population.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-insane-experiment-behind-the-covid-pandemic-and-disease-x-part-three/
Paula Jardine’s excellent expose of the C1984 Scamdemic continues. Here’s part 3.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-joy-of-making-unexpected-new-friends/
Liz Hodgkinson at TCW with a message for all
ScepticsRealists.That’s all great, and I for one believe firmly that correlation does equal causation in this case.
Trouble is, even though he’s probably right on the money on this one, you can’t really present a non-scientist’s evaluation of re-hashed statistics as evidence for the danger of mRNA vaccines.
If a covid vaccine zealot asks me where I got this info, and I go “Igor Chudov’s Substack page”, they’ll say “Well why then were the NHS recommending them to everyone”? The answer to this, of course, is a long story involving the relationship between regulators, Big Pharma and the health services, with no independent assessment of efficacy and safety of vaccines.
But it’s at this point in the the discussion you might as well be conversing with a peanut.
Has anyone any information about how long after vaccination the adverse effects west off, if at all.
We continue to focus on excess deaths, however it would be good to not loose sight of other side-effects.
How many have had their health altered by mRNA products?
Probably an impossible question to answer, but analysis of NHS data or private insurance data may give us some clues?
The best way would be to be tested for spike protein markers, both viral and mRNA induced, Troponin, D Dimer and Ig3/4 levels. Snag is the NHS GPs will not routinely do this – how ironic that this medical “cohort” banged the gong for PCR whilst some banged the pans but they refuse en bloc to pull back the curtain to reveal, at least in part, their collective complicity. I bet their PI insurers have said to these Medics to the effect: “Don’t do these tests as it might invite claims against you – if you do you are no longer covered”