Limited Capability?

What a wicked liar is Pat McFadden. Far from its being a perverse incentive, claimants need reams of medical evidence to apply for Universal Credit Limited Capability for Work-Related Activity, and even then it is routinely turned down, significantly worsening the health of people who were already seriously ill. McFadden is as despicable as the Labour MPs who accepted the halving of LCWRA for new claimants as the “compromise” to save Personal Independence Payment, which is an in-work benefit, whereas those who manage to get onto LCWRA are by definition to ill to work. Next, those MPs will accept the abolition of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court as the “compromise” to save trial by jury in the latter. All four measures, none of which was in the Labour manifesto, should in fact have been rejected out of hand. Yet this is Andy Burnham’s honeymoon period. This is as good as his Government is ever going to be. And as Richard Murphy writes:

A comment was posted on this blog this morning, which hinted that it did not believe Andy Burnham's suggestion that “Manchesterism is the end of neoliberalism”. I responded that Burnham seems more like a member of the Manchester School of Liberalism. This school promoted what we would now call arch-neoliberalism. And what is clear is that Burnham is failing, very badly. Who knows when he actually has to face Parliament next week, as he is already crumbling? This morning we have:

The usual backtracking, then. And then there is this:

If he had not thought this through before reaching Number 10, he should never have got there. And he is wrong, of course, to equate trade unions with single private donors. That shows a distinct lack of analytical ability. And then there is this:

Why is no decision imminent? How much more shit in the water is required before the interests of people who cannot survive without clean water come above those of hedge funds? And recall that he has not responded to calls from 100 or more Labour MPs for immediate reform of the parliamentary voting system. What is more, he has still said nothing about press reform in the light of its lynching of Jason Arday.

I saw Burnham when he was first a minister. I saw him as a failed candidate for the leadership, twice. I thought he would fail badly this time. He already is. And why? Because you cannot be prime minister unless you know your own mind, why you hold your opinions and have the courage to deliver on their basis. He is possessed of none of those things.

But it may be even worse. Burnham may know his own mind, hold his opinions, and be delivering on them, resulting in this:

The UK’s largest rail union RMT called for a cost-of-living levy on the profits of train rolling stock leasing companies (ROSCO’s) as new figures reveal that dividends have more than trebled. Eversholt which owns much of the UK’s rail rolling stock has recently announced that it has paid a dividend of £200 million, up from £60 million the previous year. Combined with the £111 million dividends already announced by another train owner, Angel, the profits could pay for a 2.5 per cent fare cut. A third ROSCO Porterbrook is yet to announce its dividends

RMT general secretary said that Andy Burnham was right to say that we must have greater public control of the essentials in life. “This must mean taking action to rein in the profits of the offshored corporate giants who own our trains. A 100 per cent cost of living levy on this year’s profits would be the equivalent of a 2.5 per cent fare cut and would provide immediate relief for passengers. It would also be a step toward stopping the corporate raiding of our rail system, controlling costs and ultimately nationalising our rolling stock as part of an integrated publicly owned railway. We will be campaigning for this position through amendments to the Great British Railways Bill when the legislation begins in the lords after summer recess and this will be a key union demand in the forthcoming budget,” he said.

And this, by Aaron Morby:

More than 2,000 residential blocks over 11m with unsafe cladding are still waiting for remediation work to start, with the Government’s newer safety funding programmes now accounting for the bulk of the backlog. Latest Government figures up to July show 2,146 of the 4,697 buildings being monitored have yet to start remediation work. That means 46% of identified buildings have yet to start work, compared with 718 under way and 1,833 completed.

The biggest challenge sits with the Cladding Safety Scheme and developer-led remediation delivery routes. Under the CSS, only 127 of 1,438 eligible buildings have completed work and 269 are on site. That leaves 1,042 buildings still waiting to start — nearly three-quarters of the eligible CSS programme. And the workload is still growing, with another 2,253 buildings at pre-eligibility stages, including 1,352 live applications and 901 at pre-application.

Developers are facing a similarly heavy pipeline. Of 1,833 buildings identified with unsafe cladding under the developer remediation route, 566 are complete and 296 are under way. That leaves 971 (53%) buildings where work has not started. Across the wider developer remediation contract, which also includes other life-critical fire safety defects, developers are facing an estimated £4.3bn remediation bill.

By contrast, the earlier remediation programmes after Grenfell are now largely through their workloads. The ACM programme has completed 478 of 516 buildings, leaving just 14 still to start. The Building Safety Fund has completed 487 of 639 buildings, with 75 under way and 77 yet to begin. Social landlords funding their own remediation are also further ahead, with 474 of 742 buildings complete and another 100 on site. The figures show the cladding clean-up has now shifted into a second phase. The original ACM and high-rise BSF programmes are closing down their remaining workloads, while the much larger CSS and developer pipelines are still trying to convert identified buildings into live construction jobs.

The eventual financial exposure for the industry remains substantial. Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government estimates the total capital cost of dealing with unsafe external wall systems on buildings over 11m at between £11.8bn and £22.7bn, with a central estimate of £15.1bn. Government programmes are expected to fund around £8.9bn, while developers, housing associations and other non-government bodies are expected to meet around £6.1bn. And the known backlog may not yet represent the full scale of the job. MHCLG estimates between 5,800 and 7,300 buildings will ultimately require remediation or mitigation through its programmes. With 4,697 currently being monitored, another 1,100 to 2,600 buildings could still enter the system.

And this, by Hannah Sharland:

A disabled people’s organisation has accused the Labour government of “discrimination by design” over a “roll back” in accessible housing targets in the final version of its new national planning policy. Under plans put forward by the last Conservative government, 100 per cent of homes would have been built to the M4(2) accessible housing standard. Homes built to the M4(2) standard have 16 accessible or adaptable features, similar to the Lifetime Homes standard developed in the early 1990s to make homes more easily adaptable for lifetime use, while M4(3) homes are those that are supposed to be fully wheelchair-accessible.

But the Labour government has decided to set this target at just 40 per cent. And it has refused to set any target at all for how much housing should be suitable for wheelchair-users. Between 10 December 2025 and March, the Labour government ran a public consultation on its draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). The document set out its plans for requiring local authorities and developers to build an adequate proportion of homes to decent accessible housing standards.

But the framework severely waters down the previous Conservative government target. On 18 March 2024, a Tory housing minister finally promised to introduce new rules that would ensure all new homes were built to the M4(2) standard, except for cases where this was “impractical and unachievable”. Conservative ministers had been considering and consulting on the measure – a long-standing demand of the disabled people’s movement – for at least five years, but the general election came before any further action was taken.

Last December, when the Labour government published its draft NPPF, disabled people accused it of a “horrifying betrayal” when it revealed plans to slash the target to a minimum of only 40 per cent of new homes to be built to the M4(2) standard. Now the government has published its response to the consultation, alongside the final NPPF, and has decided to stick with the lower target. The final NPPF says development plans should include “no less” than 40 per cent of homes built to the M4(2) standard although even this will still be “subject to any appropriate exemptions set out in the development plan”, so it could be even lower in some cases.

The government says in the consultation response: “We consider this strikes the appropriate balance between providing a backstop and boosting provision in areas without clear requirements, while ensuring local authorities have sufficient flexibility to maximise housebuilding overall.” But it accepts that Liverpool, Worthing and the London Plan have all set 100 per cent targets. Results from the consultation, which invited views on the 40 per cent figure, show “mixed views”. Of a total of 745 individuals and organisations that responded to the consultation question, there was nearly an equal split among those who agreed, those who neither agreed nor disagreed, and those who disagreed with the target. In all, 12 per cent strongly agreed, 21 per cent partly agreed, 33 per cent neither agreed nor disagreed, 15 per cent partly disagreed, and 20 per cent strongly disagreed.

But the document does not reveal how many of those backing the government’s target were from the housebuilding industry. It also asked respondents to say if they would “support an alternative minimum percentage requirement”. The government response notes how the “mixed views” on the question included “some advocating for a higher figure” because they were concerned that the 40 per cent target “could become a default ceiling”. It also says that “others” had “argued for a lower figure” due to what it described as “viability concerns”.

The document does reveal how many “developers” opposed another key demand of the disabled people’s movement, for the NPPF to mandate that at least 10 per cent of new housing should be built to M4(3) wheelchair-user home standards. The NPPF includes no minimum figure for M4(3) homes, despite DPOs warning of a “chronic undersupply” in wheelchair-accessible homes. The consultation document details that “many developers raised concerns about the significant costs and challenges in building homes to this standard”. The government response says only that there were “some calls” to set a “national baseline” for M4(3) homes, failing to specify what proportion of respondents backed this option.

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government had not responded by noon today (Thursday) to a request to justify the 40 per cent target and its failure to set a target for M4(3) homes. Laura Vicinanza, senior policy and stakeholder engagement manager at Inclusion London, told DNS that her organisation “strongly” disagreed with the “decision to roll back the previous government’s commitments”. She said: “This does not reflect the current or projected need for accessible housing. “At a time when the ageing population is steadily increasing and demand for accessible housing is growing, the government’s proposals are dangerous and shortsighted. England’s existing housing stock is overwhelmingly inaccessible and more costly to retrofit – new housing supply should correct this historic failure and future-proof our housing stock rather than encouraging discrimination by design.”

And this, by Paul Knaggs:

Nearly a million young people are NEET: Britain’s youth employment crisis did not fall from the sky. Successive governments helped create it by making education expensive, housing unreachable, secure work scarce and independence something many young people can no longer afford. Now Westminster offers work experience and calls it hope.

Blaming Algorithms Won’t Fix Britain’s Youth Unemployment Crisis

Nearly a million young people are locked out of work, education and training. This week the government offered two explanations: their phones, and a supermarket noticeboard. Neither touches the ledger. On Thursday morning, Pat McFadden sat down on Sky’s Mornings with Ridge and Frost to talk about Meta. The company had just agreed to pay American states up to $17 billion over its role in the youth mental health crisis, and to impose night-time blackouts and daily limits on teenage users. Asked whether Britain would follow suit, the work and pensions secretary said yes, and then went further than he needed to.

“We’ve got to do something about this endless scrolling,” McFadden told the programme, before making the connection himself: his department deals daily with young people out of work, and he sees, in his words, a link between the two. He is not wrong that the phone is doing damage. But watch what the explanation does. It takes a structural crisis, the largest generation of idle young people this country has produced in over a decade, and relocates the blame from the ledger to the pocket. Not the wage. Not the rent. The scroll. This is the oldest trick in government, and Labour did not invent it. Blame the culture, spare the economy. But it will not survive contact with the numbers published on the very same morning McFadden was speaking.

Study hard, get a degree, build a life… the bargain is broken

The Office for National Statistics confirmed on Thursday that 981,000 young people aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment or training, a NEET rate of 13 per cent. It is down 30,000 on the previous quarter. It is still 30,000 higher than a year ago, and the total broke through a million earlier this year for the first time in more than a decade. Chris Goulden of the Youth Futures Foundation called it “a large, long-term problem” behind which young people face real and complex barriers. Algorithms did not do that. Governments did, over three decades, by dismantling the bargain that once made ambition rational. Study hard. Get a trade or a degree. Leave home. Build a life. Do a little better than your parents.

Britain Would Rather Blame the Algorithm Than Build a House 

Higher education was turned from a public investment into personal debt. Housing followed the same road: rents that swallow wages, deposits that belong to another universe, ownership retreating over the horizon for anyone without family money behind them. Independence, for millions, has been reduced to a locked bedroom door in a parent’s house. Ask a young person what exactly they are meant to be striving for and the honest answer is a degree that costs tens of thousands, a job that barely covers rent, or a room in a shared house into their thirties. Call that economic inactivity if the label helps. It is disillusionment, earned the hard way. 

None of this happened for lack of money. Britain has spent the last two decades on procurement failures, ballooning infrastructure schemes and consultancy contracts that would make a Whitehall mandarin blush. HS2 remains the standing monument to the state’s ability to spend enormous sums without delivering what was promised. The problem was never the size of the cheque. It was where the money went, and what it built instead of homes, apprenticeships and secure work. 

Sainsbury’s 10,000 placements… but where are the jobs? 

Into that vacuum this week stepped Sainsbury’s. The supermarket has agreed to provide around 10,000 work experience and skills opportunities over the coming year, split between KickStarter Explore for 14 to 18 year olds, combining school learning with hands-on placements, and KickStarter Insights for 16 to 24 year olds, focused on interview preparation and careers advice. The scheme begins in October and will target areas with high free school meal eligibility, where NEET numbers run highest. Visiting a Sainsbury’s in Nine Elms to launch it, Andy Burnham said access to opportunity and work experience shouldn’t depend on who you know. Read that back once you know what is coming.

There is nothing wrong with work experience done properly. A teenager learning to write a CV, sit an interview or understand a workplace gains something real. But these are not 10,000 jobs. They are workshops, store visits and employability sessions, and the distinction matters, because Britain’s shortage is not of young people who need lessons in CV writing. It is a shortage of believable routes into secure adulthood. There is a bitter irony sitting underneath the announcement too: supermarkets are among the most automated employers in the country, with self-checkouts replacing staffed tills and warehouses increasingly mechanised, so the placements introduce young people to entry-level retail work at precisely the moment that work is disappearing. Reuters reported this week that entry-level opportunities have fallen sharply over the past decade, with employers increasingly pointing to automation and AI as the cause.

Anyone who remembers the Youth Training Scheme of the 1980s will recognise the vocabulary here: skills, opportunity, a foot on the ladder. For some it worked. For others it became low-paid labour dressed up as training. A placement can be worthwhile. It is not a substitute for a job, and a job means little if it never leads to a wage that can build an independent life.

£164,347 from Sainsbury and a Downing Street launch

There is a second story sitting inside this one, and it deserves care rather than either silence or exaggeration. David Sainsbury, Lord Sainsbury of Turville, chaired J Sainsbury plc from 1992 until he left the company in 1997 to become a science minister under Tony Blair. He has not run the business in almost thirty years, and he does not own it now. Sainsbury’s is a public company with no controlling shareholder: the Qatar Investment Authority holds the largest disclosed stake, at around 15 per cent, and the rest is spread across pension funds, index trackers and smaller holders. Nobody, including any Sainsbury, can direct the company by vote.

That is the correction owed to the record. It does not end the story. Bloomberg still describes Sainsbury as a billionaire, and decades of giving away shares to his own charitable foundation have not stopped him being one of Labour’s most consistent individual paymasters, donating millions to the party, to the Remain campaign, and now to Andy Burnham personally. The prime minister’s newly published register of interests shows £164,347 from Sainsbury toward his leadership campaign, by far his largest single donation, within a total of £345,000 registered from a small handful of backers including Gary Lubner, Sacha Lord and the agency Charlie Parsons Creative.

None of that proves the KickStarter scheme was arranged as a favour. There is no evidence of that, and the Tribune will not pretend otherwise. But when the prime minister’s single biggest donor is a former chairman and long-standing shareholder of the company that just received a glowing Downing Street launch event, that is not gossip. That is a fact of legitimate public interest, and it sits uneasily next to a prime minister promising that opportunity shouldn’t depend on who you know.

Attlee did it with a bankrupt country. Why can’t we?

Here is what nobody in Downing Street wants to say out loud: Britain already possesses the policy that would make schemes like this unnecessary, and this publication has been arguing for it since 2024. Council housing. Not “affordable” housing built by a private developer with a discount attached, but homes owned outright by the local authority, built by council-run construction yards employing and training the tradespeople who put them up.

This is a case the Tribune has made before, and it has not gone away because a different prime minister now sits in Downing Street. Clement Attlee’s government managed 806,857 council houses between 1945 and 1951, in a country that had just spent six years bankrupting itself fighting a war. A generation locked into thirty year mortgages on overpriced homes, or permanently priced out of owning anything at all, understands exactly what he meant, a point this publication made at length when it warned Labour’s housing plans risked creating a new generation of mortgage-serfs rather than tenants with any security at all.

Burnham himself has already gestured toward half of this answer. In July his government announced technical education pathways from age fourteen, alongside changes to how Ofsted measures schools, so a workshop counts for as much as a university offer. As the Tribune argued at the time, the intention is sound, and after eighty years of parity of esteem being announced and never delivered, the policy deserves credit for trying. Council housing solves the other half. A local authority with its own construction yard has permanent, predictable, publicly controlled demand for exactly the trades a technical education pathway would teach, and can guarantee the apprenticeship at the end, which no white paper can.

But watch how easily the other half slips away the moment it reaches a Treasury settlement. Launching his campaign for the Makerfield by-election, the man who is now prime minister was unambiguous about the £39bn Affordable Homes Programme: “I’m saying council homes because control matters.” This week his own government announced the first £10bn tranche of that programme, and only 60 per cent of it will go to social rented homes. The remaining 40 per cent goes to shared ownership and other “affordable” categories, the same part-mortgage schemes this publication warned against as a debt trap in 2024, dressed up as a ladder onto the property market.

Shelter warned the numbers fall short of the 90,000 homes a year needed to end homelessness even in full. The Tory opposition, not usually a source the Tribune reaches for, landed the more useful blow: shadow housing secretary Sir James Cleverly called the package “a sleight of hand”, noting the small print pushes delivery out to 2039, safely beyond this Parliament and this Spending Review. Control mattered enough to say from a campaign platform. It mattered less by the time it reached the spreadsheet.

Follow the Money, Again: The Treasury profits from scarcity – and that’s the problem 

So why has no government since built at that scale, not even one whose own prime minister once said the words out loud? Because the state, like the banks, has a direct financial stake in keeping house prices exactly where they are. Stamp Duty Land Tax raised roughly £15.2 billion for the Treasury in 2025/26, most of it from residential transactions, up from £13.9 billion the year before. Inheritance tax brought in a further £8.5 billion, and HMRC’s own figures show residential property now accounts for close to half the value of the estates that pay it, meaning something in the region of £4 billion of that total is, in effect, a tax on housing wealth.

Add the interest income the financial sector extracts from thirty year mortgages, and it becomes obvious that scarcity is not a market failure Westminster is struggling to fix. It is a revenue stream several powerful interests would rather not disturb. Build a million council homes at cost, rented to the people who need them rather than sold at whatever the market will bear, and you do not just house a generation. You shrink the tax base that funds the Treasury and the profit base that sustains the mortgage industry, and that is precisely why nobody with real power has done it.

A nation cannot scroll its way out of a housing crisis

Which brings us back to Pat McFadden on the sofa this week, and to the honest half of what he said. Social media probably is making some young people more anxious, less confident, worse equipped to walk into a job interview. That is a real and separate problem, and the Meta settlement and Starmer’s under-16 ban, due in force by spring 2027, may well do some good.

But a nation cannot scroll its way out of a housing crisis, and it cannot doomscroll its way into a construction apprenticeship that does not exist. Blaming the phone lets everyone in government off the hook for the ledger: for the tax revenue that depends on expensive houses, for the donor networks that shape which supermarket gets the press launch, for thirty years of choosing not to build. A workshop can help a young person write a CV. It cannot build the house that makes the CV worth writing.

Andy Burnham says his government is bringing back hope. Then let it prove that with bricks, not noticeboards. Build the council houses. Reopen the yards that train the people who build them. Tax housing wealth honestly instead of quietly depending on its scarcity. Do that, and the next generation will not need a supermarket to teach them what opportunity looks like. They will already be living in it.

A country that blames the algorithm for a crisis it built with planning permission has not run out of answers. It has simply chosen not to like the one sitting in front of it.

Thankfully, though, that charge cannot be laid against David McNab:

The Money Sham by Stephen Laughton is the UK companion to Stephanie Kelton’s bestselling The Deficit Myth, bringing the same monetary clarity to bear on British institutions, history, and politics.

What They’re Saying

“The Money Sham is a sharp, accessible, and genuinely important contribution to our understanding of money and the monetary system. Laughton has done the hard work of synthesizing some of the most rigorous heterodox thinking available and translating it into something that will open eyes and, hopefully, change minds.”

Professor Stephanie Kelton

“We all need to know how the monetary and production systems of our economy work, because conventional economists have filled our heads with nonsense ideas. Stephen Laughton explains the real basics of money and production in language that any reader can understand. Throw those delusional textbooks away and read this.”

Professor Steve Keen

About the Book

Rising prices, ‘eat or heat’, lengthy hospital waiting lists, unaffordable housing, mounting unemployment, stagnant investment, ill health, nurses at food banks, low wages, depression and despair, an incomplete list of the ills that so many face in the UK today.

The Money Sham explains how a fundamental misconception about money leaves politicians, the media, and the public trapped within a bankrupt economic philosophy. We are told the UK is short of money, burdened by government debt, and at the mercy of market forces that must be appeased at all costs. These myths shape British politics, foster division and despair, enrich the 1% and leave the rest of us behind.

This is not just a theoretical exploration of what money is. It is a political–economic history of how flawed ideas about money have derailed all attempts to solve the problems we face. The book exposes a hidden continuity from Isaac Newton’s monetary framework through to Thatcher, New Labour, Conservative austerity after 2010, and to Labour 2024, showing how a child-like Piggynomics framework has guided policy decisions across generations.

The Money Sham dismantles conventional wisdom, exposing the flawed premises underlying the Bank of England’s public explanations of money, the austerity narrative, and the belief that the government must borrow its own money before it can spend. It offers a clear account of the country’s current crisis, alongside a concrete evidence-based programme for renewal, grounded in monetary realism, real-resource economics, and the practical realities of British institutions.

A Programme for Renewal: Seven Transformative Policies

At the heart of The Money Sham is a concrete, evidence-based programme for economic renewal, seven policies grounded in Real Resource Economics that challenge the orthodoxies shaping British policy today.

1. New Economic Institutions: Replace the Office for Budget Responsibility with an Office for Inflation Analysis (OIA) that monitors supply chains, labour shortages, monopoly pricing, and private debt growth. A new Office for Responsible Taxation (ORT) simplifies the tax system and assesses how taxes affect inflation and inequality, recognising that taxes are tools for sustaining the currency and reducing inequality, not funding mechanisms.

2. Rebuild Financial Regulation: A new Office for Banking Regulation will reintroduce credit guidance, restrict speculative lending, and direct bank credit toward productive investment. Banks will face major restrictions on derivatives, off-balance-sheet activity, and speculative lending, growing the real economy and reducing inequality.

3. Affordable Housing Through Credit Reform: Limit buy-to-let borrowing, introduce land value taxes, discourage land banking, and reduce permitted mortgage-to-income ratios, restoring housing affordability and raising living standards.

4. Stronger Competition Policy: Strengthen the Competition and Markets Authority to tackle monopoly power, price gouging, and excessive corporate concentration. Mergers and acquisitions permitted only where they clearly increase productive capacity and serve the public purpose.

5. Permanently Low Interest Rates: Higher interest rates cannot control inflation and in the current era drive up prices, worsen inequality, and reward the wealthy for doing nothing. Permanently low or zero rates, combined with reformed bank regulation, will bear down on inflation and reduce interest payments on the national debt.

6. A Transition Job Guarantee: The government provides a job at a living wage for anyone who wants one. A buffer stock of employed people increases the velocity of money circulation, stabilises prices, and promotes social cohesion, at far lower cost than the current system of deliberate unemployment. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Argentina in the early 2000s, and present-day Austria provide successful precedents.

7. Abandon Devaluation Phobia: The UK should no longer allow bond markets and speculative financial flows to dictate domestic economic policy. Exchange-rate pass-through into UK inflation is relatively low; devaluation can improve competitiveness and stimulate domestic production. The UK should prioritise employment, productive investment, and real productive capacity over financial orthodoxy.

Book Details 

Author: Stephen Laughton

Publisher: Lola Books 

Pages: 346

ISBN 978-3-9828799-0-1