Utopia, you are standing in it!

The reluctance of both the Chancellor and the Prime Minister to confirm that benefits (notably Universal Credit) will be uprated next year in line with inflation has fed speculation that the Government is considering a real-terms cut. My advice would be to squash this idea as soon as possible – mainly because it is bad economics. But it would be bad politics too, undoing any good done by the U-turn on the 45p rate of income tax.

To recap, benefits are usually uprated in April in line with the CPI measure of inflation recorded in the previous September. This meant that benefits rose by just 3.1% in April this year (the inflation rate in September 2021), well below actual inflation of 9.0% in April itself.

The row about this at the time was partly defused by additional one-off payments to low-income households. But ministers also argued that benefit claimants could…

Renewable energy rent seekers keep spreading the lie about wind and solar being the cheapest form of power there is. Trouble is, there isn’t a shred of evidence to support claims about wind and solar being cheap. There never was.

The position your country occupies on the table above is directly related to increased reliance on the unreliables (German power prices are now at record levels – recently hitting 40 US cents per kWh).

One game played by wind and solar propagandists is the use of the Levelised Cost of Electricity as a method of burying the true and actual cost attached to chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

Francis Menton explains the tricks of the game, below.

The Completely Fraudulent “Levelized Cost Of Electricity”
Manhattan Contrarian
Francis Menton
18 August 2022

My last post on Tuesday reported on the Soho Forum climate change debate that had taken place the…

On 28 June 2022, the Lord Advocate referred to the UK Supreme Court (“UKSC”) the question of whether the Scottish Parliament has the power to legislate for a second independence referendum (“Indyref 2”) without an Order enabling it do so under section 30 of the Scotland Act 1998 (a “section 30 Order”). Assuming the UKSC will accept the reference, we argue that it should rule that the Scottish Parliament has no legal power to pass legislation facilitating an independence referendum without a section 30 Order. However, we propose that this does not prevent the UKSC from attempting to break the deadlock by declaring that the UK Government is acting unconstitutionally in a political sense if it does not make a section 30 Order. Of course, there is no guarantee that a section 30 Order would be issued – we consider alternative pathways to an Indyref 2, including possible invocations of…

A wealth tax is an extraordinarily destructive way for governments to generate revenue.

It violates the principles of sensible tax policy and it does a lot of damage since people have less incentive to save and invest. It’s unadulterated double taxation. Or, in some cases, triple or quadruple taxation.

And it’s unfair.

These factors explain why many nations in Europe have abolished their wealth taxes. This map from the Tax Foundation shows the holdouts that still pursue this senseless version of class warfare.

You’ll notice that Spain is one of the few countries that still has this punitive levy. And if you want to learn more about the Spanish version of this levy, you can click here and here for thorough summaries.

But one thing that everyone should understand is that politicians are always capable of making a bad situation worse.

And as you can see from this…

Fossil fuel is the catalyst for modernity: coal, then oil and gas, have driven the mechanization and industrialisation responsible for lifting billions out of agrarian poverty, and all in the space of little more than a century.

A reliable supply of electricity allows the impoverished to escape the daily drudgery and misery of a life without it.

Spend a week gathering dung and twigs to cook meals over a smoky fire in an unlit hut, and you’ll soon be screaming for fossil fuels.

The miserable misanthropes and neo-Marxists reckon that fossil fuels are an evil to be driven back to the depths from whence they came. Except, of course, when it comes to their own selfish energy needs. Think pontificating actors, wannabe princesses and their royal beaus lecturing us about our energy use, as they traverse every inch of the globe in their private jets.

Amongst the anti-human, anti-progress squad…

The Māori Party, without any apparent blush, makes a provocative claim about the genetic superiority of Māori on its website.

The claim is to be found in a section which sets out the party’s sports policy:

 “It is a known fact that Māori genetic makeup is stronger than others.”

This genetic strength perhaps attenuates when Māori join the ACT or National Parties and express opinions that challenge the Government line on what must be done in partnership with Maori because of obligations supposedly demanded by the Treaty of Waitangi.

Māori Development Minister Willie Jackson earlier this year said ACT leader David Seymour, of Ngāpuhi descent, claimed to be Māori – but “he’s just a useless Māori, that’s all”.

“Absolutely [he’s] Māori but maybe just the most useless advocate for Māori we’ve ever seen.”

He subsequently told Morning Report he did not regret his comment because Seymour was a “dangerous…

The Reserve Bank’s MPC will deliver their next OCR decision on Wednesday. The consensus seems to be (quite strongly, and I have no particular reason to differ) that the Bank will raise the OCR by another 50 basis points. At 3.5 per cent, the OCR would then be at the peak level it was (inappropriately) raised to in 2014, at a time when core inflation was well below the target midpoint and the unemployment rate was lingering high.

I’m less interested in what the MPC will do than in what they should do, and on that count I’m less convinced that the consensus call would be the appropriate one. In times like the last 2-3 years, no one should feel overly confident about any particular assessment of what monetary policy stance will prove to be needed: there is inevitably an aspect of feeling your way, knowing that when all the…

Once the engineers were banished and the bureaucrats took charge, the fate of reliable and affordable energy supplies was sealed. Trashing coal-fired power plants, demonising nuclear power and squandering untold $billions on hopelessly unreliable wind and solar would have never happened if the engineers were left alone to run the show.

The results are difficult to conceal. Virtue signalling politicos and their barrackers in the MSM are, however, doing their level best to deflect attention from the disasters playing out in Europe, Britain and California.

They run a fair line in interference in relation to Europe, pointing the blame at Vlad Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. Which ignores the fact that Europe’s disaster was already revealed by the grand wind drought that hit during the last half of 2021.

America was, until Joe Biden took over, awash with gas, so wind and solar acolytes can’t run the same ‘Putin did…

What can you say about one of the funniest people that ever lived? Well frankly not much, except for that today marks his 132th birthday. Other then that I will leave Groucho do the talking.

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

“I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.”

“He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.”

“While money can’t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.”

“Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men — the other 999 follow women.”

“Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, and I’m going to be happy in it.”

“One morning I shot an elephant in…

In the 2021-22 session of parliament, government defeats in the House of Lords reached record levels. Sam Anderson argues that two key factors combined to drive this phenomenon. First, the Johnson government pursued a controversial legislative agenda. Second, it seemed in some cases unwilling to compromise where evidence suggests that previous governments would have done so.

There were numerous examples throughout Boris Johnson’s premiership of his government’s rocky relationship with parliament. One recent manifestation – noted elsewhere – was that there were an unprecedented 128 government defeats in the House of Lords in the 2021-22 parliamentary session. This led some government supporters to suggest that the Lords has become a ‘House of opposition’ that ‘views themselves as there to obstruct’ the government. But is this assessment fair?

The Constitution Unit’s tracking of when and on what topics governments are defeated in the House of Lords offers key insights…