Unfair Dismissal?

There has never been an extension of workers' rights against which those who were still arguing against even what remained of the Employment Rights Bill have not done so. But it is without the proposed new rights that productivity is to be downgraded again, apparently leaving Rachel Reeves with "a £20 billion black hole".

Yet the annual tax take is more than one trillion pounds. £20 billion would not be a "black hole". That is just an excuse not to do things, although while putting up taxes at the same time. And which taxes? A tax of one to two per cent on assets above £10 million could abolish the two-child benefit cap 17 times over, while merely taxing each of Britain's 173 billionaires down to one billion pounds per head would raise £1.1 trillion, an entire year's tax take. But neither of those is going to happen. Keir Starmer thinks that if anything could be done about child poverty, then it would have been done by now. He has said that.

We ought to be raising Cain and making hay. 10 years ago, ten, the people behind the shambolic birth and infancy of Your Party defeated the entire British Establishment to take Jeremy Corbyn from nowhere to the Leadership of the Labour Party. A year later, they got him re-elected with more votes than before. A year after that, they secured for the party that he led 40 per cent of the vote in a General Election, depriving the Conservatives of their overall majority. Today, the Labour and Conservative Parties do not poll at 40 per cent between them. Food inflation is out of control, as is fuel inflation as we enter the winter. The water companies are permitted to charge whatever they pleased to endanger public health. Yet a decade after the organisational rules of British politics were rewritten, the people who achieved that could not turn on one of those privatised taps and run a bath.