David Coldrick retweeted
"A total disaster for food security and for nature. Farmers deserve better"
READ MORE: farminguk.com/news/farm-grou…
6
17
942
David Coldrick retweeted
Labour conference will be suffused with the imagery of class politics. Most of the speeches will refer to “working people”, and imply that the party represents the poor and middle-income majority against the rich.
It has been untrue for years. This year, it is less true than ever. Labour voters are richer, better-educated and more middle-class than Conservative and Reform supporters.
Peter Kellner, the polling guru, reports a new survey from Norstat. The company interviewed 5,500 people after the 2024 election, and then again this month. The results show that 57% of Labour supporters were middle class (social grades ABC1) two years ago, which has now risen to 63%. The proportions of graduates and of those earning more than £40,000 a year have also risen sharply.
The study confirms that the Great Class Inversion in British politics, after the Brexit vote 10 years ago, was no temporary blip but a long-run trend that is still happening. All the pollsters consistently report now that Labour voters are the most middle class, Reform voters the most working class (social grades C2DE), and the Conservatives somewhere in between, leaning towards the working class. Greens and Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, tend to be middle class, but not as much as Labour supporters.
This is going to make Labour’s annual conference one long exercise in cognitive dissonance. When Andy Burnham promises breathing space on the cost of living, he is offering respite to people who do not intend to vote for him, on the whole. Labour supporters tend to be the ones who can afford the rent or the mortgage.
When delegate after delegate comes to the lectern to talk about the class struggle, they will be talking about someone else’s class, most of whose members think that Labour does not represent them. If they urge solidarity with the workers, they may mean public sector workers in secure jobs with good pensions rather than the low-paid who feel more of an affinity with Nigel Farage.
The Labour movement has always had middle-class leaders, and it has long been an alliance between intellectuals and organised labour, but this is something different. This is now a party of well-off graduates, with a tiny outhouse of the genuinely disadvantaged attached at the back.
The class inversion has unexpected implications. It may explain why Labour members and supporters are more concerned about issues such as Gaza rather than immigration, which is what bothers the working class. Perhaps it is why Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer misjudged the pensioners’ winter fuel payment – if most pensioners they know give it to Greenpeace or spend it on wine.
It makes Burnham’s northern working-class appeal seem like a form of historical re-enactment. When he talks about “reindustrialisation” or reversing 40 years of Thatcherism, this feels like an attempt to identify with a mythical working-class past idealised by many middle-class people with working-class origins. It may reflect the tendency of people who are objectively middle class to describe themselves as working class. The self-described working class has expanded since 1948, while the number of people in actual working-class jobs has declined.
Equally, however, Burnham’s provincial working-class ham act could be the key to the electoral coalition that Labour needs. The other important finding of Norstat’s research highlighted by Kellner is that since the last election, Labour has lost more votes to the right – to Reform and the Tories – than to the left, to the Greens and the Lib Dems.
This could mean that Burnham’s working-class pitch is exactly what Labour needs to win back those voters who have defected from the party of the middle class to one of the working-class parties. Especially as the battleground for the next election will overwhelmingly be seats fought between Labour on one side and either the Tories or Reform. There are not many Labour-Green or Labour-Lib Dem marginals.
In Liverpool, expect a lot of middle-class people play-acting as working class.
independent.co.uk/voices/lab…
55
138
401
58,897
David Coldrick retweeted
But if you go away for a year, perhaps for work, you don’t dare let your house out because the govt’s Renters’ Reform Act makes it impossible to ensure you can ever regain possession.
So let’s face it: the govt doesn’t just hate empty properties - it hates property-ownership.
14
41
305
5,451
David Coldrick retweeted
Chancellor Healey has trotted out some misleading figures, which suggest he is planning to hike CGT. He claimed that the UK enjoys the lowest capital gains tax rate of any major European economy. In truth:
The UK top CGT rate is: 24%
The 2026 EU average: 17.7%
The 2026 wider-European average: 16.7%
Thus UK's 24% rate is 36% higher than the EU average and 44% higher than the wider European average.
If one compares only with three European countries, namely France, Italy, and Germany, then our rate is slightly lower but in doing that Healey is being dishonest and playing with stats.
48
215
640
63,838
Oh dear. 🙁
I came away from Andy Burnham’s pre-conference interview thinking he may well promise to fund his new free system of care for the elderly (at least in part) by reforming the expensive triple lock guarantee for above-inflation increases in the state pension.
Here were the clues in his chat with the bbc.
First he said that the plan would not be implemented in this parliament. It would be in Labour’s next general-election manifesto. And his reason was that he would not break Starmer’s manifesto, which promised to keep the triple lock.
Second, he said everyone would contribute to the funding of social care, but that the funding mechanism would be different from that of the NHS. In other words he would not use general taxation to pay for his new national care service. And to state the obvious, if the rate of increase in the state pension becomes less generous - up-rating by inflation perhaps rather than the higher of inflation or earnings, with a floor of 2.5% - this would have an impact both on current pensioners and future ones. All of us would contribute, either now or in the future.
Third, he has been listening to what I and others have been querying, which is whether he is prepared to take tough decisions that upset and enrage important sections of the community, when he believes doing so is in the national interest. He made a point, in the context of how he would fund social care, in saying he would show his mettle, his backbone. And to state the obvious, opposition parties and some older people will be angry if he abolishes the triple lock.
So why might he choose to make the rate of increase in state pensions less generous?
I’ve rehearsed these arguments before. But here they are again.
It’s hard to find an economist who believes the triple lock is sustainable given all the other competing claims on government resources. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies says, keeping it would add anywhere between £5bn and £40bn a year to public spending by 2050, with the central estimate being £20bn.
This might be fair if there had not been a massive transfer of income and wealth between younger and retired people over the past 20 years. But that transfer is painfully real for working age families struggling to earn enough to pay rent, let alone buy a home.
The clincher, for senior members of this government, is that a new free-at-the-point-of-use care service would disproportionately benefit older people (obviously!). And help all of them. So it would be reasonable, they say, to pay for it by adjusting another part of the state’s universal support for them.
Finally, Burnham said today he and the Chancellor would show the nation’s creditors - some of whom are sceptical - that they are prepared to take unpopular though rational decisions to slow the growth of the national debt and the public sector’s interest bill. Reforming the triple lock would be the most symbolically powerful manifestation of that fiscal resolve.
As I say, Burnham dropped all these hints today. Am I certain that is his plan? Not really. Though he said he would tell us more in his conference speech on Tuesday, and I am struggling to think of another funding plan that is consistent with everything he set out.
1
58
David Coldrick retweeted
No let up on the ‘we must ditch the Triple Lock’ messaging/propaganda, even on a Sunday.
The former Treasury minister, said the Prime Minister was “bold and brave” to want to reform the care system but said it would require honesty with the public.
Find the latest updates from the Labour Party Conference here ⤵️
telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/09…
10
9
47
1,982
Improbably inexpensive new universal health and social care system?
BREAKING: Andy Burnham says he is going to "rip the plaster off" to fix broken social care system.
New system will be universal, free at the point of use, and funded by everybody, he says, and Labour will fight next general election on delivering it.
PM says annual cost is "not as high" as the £18bn a year that has been suggested - and that he will take his time to work out how it will be paid for.
"The challenge in public finances is real so it has to be done carefully to avoid putting pressure on the public purse," he tells @bbclaurak
1
53
David Coldrick retweeted
"Burnham set to revive Help to Buy scheme in bid to boost housebuilding"
Here we go again… 🙄
1⃣ Help to Buy (HTB) is a gimmick that helps only a small number of people onto the housing ladder while driving up house prices for everyone else.
2⃣ HTB is intended to boost housing supply by giving developers greater confidence that homes will sell. However, any benefit is likely to be swamped by rising construction and borrowing costs, planning constraints, and broader economic uncertainty.
3⃣ Independent evaluations of previous HTB schemes found substantial deadweight: half of participants said they could have bought a home without support. The schemes also had little impact on home ownership in areas that were already relatively unaffordable.
4⃣ "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results..."
24
132
505
23,717
Government borrows to give loans to increase demand = bond rates rise with yields and taxes but no increase in housing supply = house prices go up = economy bombs = less houses, less confidence = Higher bond rates. Even more of a financial crisis 🙁
We’ve seen too many people priced out of - and giving up on the dream of - ever having a home to call their own.
For those looking for their first home, this is a Labour Government that is on your side and fighting your corner. 🌹1/3
1
58
David Coldrick retweeted
Other work by the Ladybird artists
The English Lakes
British Railways poster
Artist: Ronald Lampitt
5
93
964
8,222
David Coldrick retweeted
Farming here at Osgodby works because we have both the team and a team with the right work ethic. It's vital that we look after every aspect of the job together. Especially at peak work times. Big thanks to Stephen, Tom, Brian, Charley and Molly.
👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
🚜 🇬🇧 💪🏻
6
3
58
2,867
‘Repeats’ on again…
Britain Has Seen This Film Before. It Ends In A Bailout
Denis Healey took working farms and small businesses and taxed them at rates up to 75 per cent through his 1975 Capital Transfer Tax, forcing ministers to build hasty reliefs into the system a year later once it became clear the tax as designed threatened to break up the farms and businesses it touched. At the same time, Iran's oil-funded economy was quietly coming apart, inflation rising, corruption spreading, the last channels for peaceful dissent being shut down by a newly declared one-party state. Nobody in the Treasury connected the two stories at the time. Within three years they had collided with a wider British economic crisis: an oil shock rooted in Iran, a winter of discontent, and a Chancellor forced to turn back at Heathrow as sterling came under pressure, before Britain sought what was then the IMF's largest ever bailout. The terms helped bury the government responsible.
Fifty years on, the pattern has returned with almost mechanical precision. Rachel Reeves ended full inheritance tax relief on farms and businesses, capping combined relief at £1 million before a 20 per cent effective rate applies, using the same language about closing loopholes that ministers used in 1976 to defend the reliefs they were simultaneously admitting were needed because the original tax was too harsh. Farmers have warned it will force family farms to break up in exactly the way the original Capital Transfer Tax threatened to do. And once again, it is Iran supplying the instability nobody in Whitehall wanted to plan around. The Iran conflict has crippled normal traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline, the alternative route built for precisely this scenario, was knocked out by attack and has only now resumed at reduced capacity. Diesel now averages 195.5p a litre, up from 141.65p a year ago, a rise that falls hardest on the hauliers, farmers and rural communities who cannot simply drive less.
The government's own figures make the point better than any critic could. Fuel duty receipts for April to August this year came in £300 million higher than the same months last year, proof that the Treasury is already extracting more from diesel-dependent communities before the scheduled duty rises even begin in January. A freeze bought time. It did not buy protection, and the protection expires exactly when the pressure is worst, in a rural economy already squeezed by the same instinct to tax productive assets that accompanied the economic disorder which ended in the 1976 IMF bailout.
What has not changed across fifty years is the sequencing. A Labour Treasury reaches first for the assets of farmers and small businesses, calls it fairness, and only weeks or months later discovers that the design went too far. Iran builds towards a crisis in plain sight while ministers remain absorbed in their own fiscal arithmetic, until the bill for both arrives at once, in fuel bills, in food prices, in borrowing costs and in a rural economy that was never asked whether it wanted to be tested twice by the same mistake in one lifetime. With gilt yields sitting near multi-decade highs and government borrowing already running above forecast, the markets are beginning to ask a question Whitehall would rather dismiss: whether another call to the IMF is really as unthinkable today as it was assumed to be before Denis Healey turned back at Heathrow.
One small point of interest before closing. The Chancellor navigating this crisis is John Healey, no relation to Denis Healey, though he inherits more than the surname: a Treasury committed to the same kind of tax raid, and another Iran-shaped energy crisis arriving at precisely the wrong moment.
1
54