If ministers can either adjust their figures for inflation or not, as suits their preference, it deliberately makes impossible proper public understanding of the nation’s finances.
Simply comparing current tax rates with either historic conditions or other countries gives a woefully incomplete picture of the country’s actual taxable capacity.
It highlights a chronic problem with British policymaking: reluctance to confront our actual legal commitments leading to attempts to solve problems indirectly, and often ineffectually.
It is churlish to judge British policymakers by such persnickety standards as whether their policies actually work.
The danger of banning strikes, without undertaking wider reform of the sector, is that it shuts off the pain signal and allows politicians to ignore the other deep-seated problems with how this country currently organises healthcare.
She has purchased unity at the price of perpetuating the irreal politics of hoping to deliver transformational change without having to actually change very much.
Historically, full participation in the political community marked the culmination of someone’s development as an adult citizen. Today, we invert that logic.
Both Labour and the Conservatives seem, for some reason, to have decided to employ the tactics of the 1970s, a decade defined by the continual retreat of government in the face of union power.
Any future government that wishes to actually change this country’s long-term trajectory is going to have to take back control of the state.
Many of them want to return, and may well defect if they don’t see an avenue to do so under Tory colours. Yet party members are unenthusiastic about giving them special treatment in selections.
The Government nonetheless deserves credit for at least attempting to get this ballooning budget under control, which is more than the Conservatives attempted.
Welfare reform is important because it is the easiest target, and a government which can’t even make savings there is dead in the water. But it is only a fraction of the task, and the Conservative Party would find the rest of it far less congenial.
It looks increasingly to have been his one chance to make any serious reductions to public spending, and he missed it.
A new poll reveals that far more voters are antipathetic to Labour or Reform UK than the Conservatives. That could be good news – or the latest evidence of a slide to third-party status.
Reform’s ‘Britannia Card’ would let them pay £250,000 every ten years in lieu of taxes on foreign wealth. It might well raise more revenue than Rachel Reeves’ raid, but if revenue won the argument we’d have left non-dom status alone.