The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1537

00:00:00.080 Good afternoon and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters episode 1537.

00:00:07.460 I'm your host Harry, joined today by Dan.

00:00:10.800 Hello.

00:00:11.260 And for this very special episode we have an woman.

00:00:14.880 And here is Liz, here she is.

00:00:16.760 Hello.

00:00:17.340 And this is a special episode because we are going to be doing some live reactions to the budget later on.

00:00:25.100 It's a very bad idea because I'm just going to have to react.

00:00:29.420 because he doesn't have anything else prepared yeah the budget is being announced right now

00:00:33.760 we're just going to hope that by the time we get around to it you've got enough to run so i'm going

00:00:37.720 to be keeping an eye on on basically the speech while we're doing the segment and hopefully i can

00:00:44.020 think of something to say by the time we get to the end but it's possible there's just a lot of

00:00:49.260 thumb twiddling almost certainly this is no it would be fine this is the british government that

00:00:54.860 we're talking about yes i'm going to prepare my shocked faces for when the government twiddles

00:01:00.580 with a few percentage points at the margins of some tax codes let me let me do some rehearsals

00:01:05.120 yes 5p off something oh my god there you go so meaningful yes and uh i'm going to talk about

00:01:13.880 whether britain's high streets can be saved which has some relevance with the budget because that

00:01:18.680 is a big goal of andy burnham's government is whether they can save the high streets or not

00:01:24.220 and i'm beginning to worry and wonder if it's just too late for it and then you're going to

00:01:29.240 be speaking about something that's always on everybody's minds slavery oh is that coming back

00:01:34.540 that's what that's going to be the secret big announcement at the end of the budget to boost

00:01:39.700 growth we're reintroducing slavery no you're going to be talking about how the church of

00:01:45.020 england desperately wants to give hundreds of millions of pounds to um the descendants of

00:01:50.100 slaves and yet not the Irish tragically one day we'll let you do your case for

00:01:57.180 Irish reparation segment and with that I think we should also mention oh yeah

00:02:03.840 sorry that there was no breakfast with Bo this morning oh yeah Bo is feeling

00:02:07.540 incredibly incredibly ill however we have managed to line up a presenter

00:02:12.700 who's going to do a special budget reaction on the breakfast with Bo tomorrow

00:02:16.860 oh liz what it's actually me no it's dan yes it's dan he's breaking the ball cap out again folks

00:02:24.460 here we go i might do it as me this time if we're ready for an hour of bemusement and befuddlement

00:02:30.220 no i actually know this will be something i actually know about because i saw the clips

00:02:34.140 coming from your breakfast with bow and it was just a series like a compilation of you going

00:02:38.220 what there's a chat going on oh my so yeah tune in next uh tune in tomorrow for uh dan

00:02:45.980 doing a live budget reaction as well for breakfast with Bo.

00:02:49.320 Muswell milk it.

00:02:50.280 Apologies on Bo's behalf.

00:02:52.060 He can't stop coughing.

00:02:53.420 But, you know, when you're on 60 a day, you can't really help it.

00:02:57.040 And with that, let's get into it.

00:02:58.480 So we've spoken a lot on this channel,

00:03:01.180 and it's something that's always in the minds of the British public

00:03:03.860 about the state of Britain's high streets,

00:03:06.520 whether they can be saved, what's going on with them,

00:03:09.000 why they are in such a state that they are in right now.

00:03:11.800 And as the budget is being announced as we speak,

00:03:15.980 the government and previous governments before it, the ones mainly in charge of destroying the high streets,

00:03:22.720 have tried again and again to see what they can do to fix it.

00:03:26.760 And we're getting some new ideas put forwards.

00:03:31.340 But it's worth looking into, like, the function a little bit deeper.

00:03:35.100 Again, we know that there's so much criminality on the high streets.

00:03:38.260 We know that there's money laundering fronts.

00:03:40.060 We know that the high street has been ruined by a number of different factors.

00:03:43.220 It's worth looking into, again, some of the functions of how these high street scams work,

00:03:49.480 why it is that some businesses are just empty storefronts which are abandoned and some are

00:03:55.400 filled with sweet shops and vape shops and phone shops and such, before we go into the

00:04:01.380 solutions for them and whether we think that these solutions are actually going to solve

00:04:04.900 the problem, whether they're going to go down to the root of the problem.

00:04:08.580 So, for instance, in London, this is an article from four years ago now, back in 2022, from The Guardian, asking where did all of those U.S. sweet shops in London come from?

00:04:18.300 The problem is we don't know.

00:04:19.760 And if you go to London, as some people on the panel do quite regularly, sadly now, you will notice, and this is the same across a lot of city high streets,

00:04:30.960 I find the U.S. sweet shops aren't as frequent in smaller towns.

00:04:35.940 It's mainly cities that they show up in, like Edinburgh.

00:04:38.140 and London. There's loads of these sweet shops and they're all massively overpriced. And you think

00:04:43.600 to yourself, why do there need to be so many US sweet shops right next to one another? Who's making

00:04:48.760 money off of this? Well, here you go. They mention in this article, anyone moving into an empty shop

00:04:54.840 becomes liable for business rates instead of the freeholder or long leaseholder. The problem is

00:04:59.700 establishing who the occupier actually is. So what we have is a shell game. When the council officers

00:05:05.520 visit US candy shops. They frequently meet staff who claim not to know who the owner is and point

00:05:10.520 to a shell company license certificate on the wall, a license certificate that seems to change

00:05:15.120 every three or four months, typically whenever it's time to start collecting taxes. The council

00:05:21.000 has the job of trying to unpack a trail of false occupation names or shell companies that dissolve

00:05:25.680 before we can take court action for business rates owed. When we do find the occupier, we find

00:05:32.040 more shell operations where assets may have already disappeared. Here's a little bit of a

00:05:37.700 rundown of how they mark up costs. From one store alone down Oxford Street, we recovered more than

00:05:44.580 2,000 suspected fake Willy Wonka bars. And what they do is they either have fake off-brand

00:05:51.460 chocolate put in there, which can actually be dangerous to eat, or they'll just go down to

00:05:55.960 like the local corner shop with its own brand cheap chocolate buy it for 40p wrap it in a

00:06:01.960 willy wonka wrapper and sell it off for nine or ten pounds and tourists won't know any better

00:06:06.440 sometimes locals won't know any better and we'll buy it which constitutes a huge amount of profit

00:06:12.040 on their end that's some would you say that's rather tidy margins they're operating out there

00:06:16.920 it sounds like a good idea i should do that well i mean perhaps if you've got some private equity

00:06:21.340 stored in your back pocket, you might be able to buy up

00:06:23.400 a few storefronts.

00:06:26.440 I mean, they can't cost

00:06:27.420 that much. They also point

00:06:29.460 out as trading standards officers make life

00:06:31.540 difficult for rogue traders with their enforcement

00:06:33.340 activity, but they can't tackle the problem

00:06:35.400 alone. They're pressuring landowners

00:06:37.340 of the buildings where these stores operate to reflect

00:06:39.360 on whether a short-term ploy to deflect

00:06:41.380 business rates serves the long-term future

00:06:43.300 of Oxford Street, because one of the

00:06:45.160 problems being put forward by

00:06:47.500 this is that

00:06:49.560 and by a number of other sources is one of the big problems is not only the councils where

00:06:54.660 sometimes councils can be complicit in this kind of activity by allowing it to happen directly

00:06:59.420 under their noses not informing or cooperating with local police authorities but there can also

00:07:06.120 be the private element of it massive landowning and landlord corporations private equity firms

00:07:13.400 and such who own these places who allow people to come in allow people to cheat the system

00:07:19.220 And because they don't actually have any fiscal responsibility over who pays the taxes,

00:07:24.120 as long as they're getting their rent through, they don't care.

00:07:28.440 They'll give it off to anybody.

00:07:29.580 And we have an example of that with this chap.

00:07:32.440 It won't surprise you to know that the sorts of people who are doing a lot of this are

00:07:35.640 called things like Asif.

00:07:37.520 Asif Aziz, Criterion Capital, manages a row of high-profile gift shops at Piccadilly Circus.

00:07:43.840 So why does his team keep renting them to students?

00:07:46.760 i'm sure have a lot of capital saved up to be able to operate a small to medium enterprise

00:07:52.400 so the people running these candy shops are students in on the names signed on the legal

00:07:58.920 documents belong to foreign students who shockingly enough by the time the authorities

00:08:05.560 get to where they were supposedly registered to collect tax and business rates aren't there

00:08:11.020 anymore so they come through the university systems in order to work and then disappear

00:08:15.280 Yes.

00:08:16.280 Are you saying that these shops actually sell sweets and make their money that way then?

00:08:20.680 The thing is, this article is actually quite good from London Centric.

00:08:24.500 They sent undercover journalists to a lot of these places.

00:08:28.460 They're not all money laundering just for drugs operations where there's no actual footfall that goes through them.

00:08:33.800 Quite a lot of them are just selling things at massive markups and not paying any of the business rates or taxes and pocketing all of the money and operating a shell game.

00:08:42.700 There's one of these not too far from me, right?

00:08:44.380 And there's a restaurant opposite, but it's like up on a plaza level where you can actually look down and see directly.

00:08:49.860 And so last time we went there, I insisted on having the table that overlooked this sweet shop.

00:08:54.760 And this sweet shop, because it's near a cinema, it does a fairly brisk trade with the kids coming out and getting the sweets during the day.

00:09:01.440 But in the evening, they stay open to like 11 o'clock at night.

00:09:04.700 And so it was quite late.

00:09:05.700 And I sat there watching the traffic.

00:09:08.580 and basically what you get is every few minutes you get a sort of dusky young gentleman pull up

00:09:14.080 in a high-end german auto park outside go inside and the staff were very good because they wouldn't

00:09:19.960 even speak to these guys they just take a packet out from under the counter of oren sherbert of i

00:09:25.800 don't know what was in the packet and and hand it to the guy who would then go and and he didn't even

00:09:30.740 seem to need to pay or anything so so they must have some sort of repeat order business going

00:09:34.620 of local dusky young kids have some credit written on the book must be something like that

00:09:38.520 i've seen them outside the city it's like um shoesbury in shropshire which is a county town

00:09:43.500 and chester where they're not these you know big metropolitan places they're quite small

00:09:48.080 and the shops are always empty um in shoesby there's this one which people go into because

00:09:53.920 they sell like cheap cigarettes behind the counter if you know how to ask yes and that's because

00:09:58.340 these places um are predominantly just money laundering funds they're not actually selling

00:10:03.220 american candy what i noticed with these guys is that they would go and then because i was there

00:10:10.320 for a while i noticed that after about an hour a number of these young gentlemen would come back

00:10:14.500 and it'd be the same guy who was there an hour ago would now pull up again in his high-end german

00:10:19.300 auto go in and get another bag from inside so they must really like sweets or maybe it is cigarettes

00:10:24.800 or whatever it is but that's going on there well there's no accounting for a sweet tooth yeah they

00:10:29.280 like crystal candy yes um well there's there's more than one sort of business model for these

00:10:35.860 kinds of enterprises but you can be assured that almost all of them are committing some level of

00:10:40.840 fraud or just acting uh as a front for criminal activities for for instance in this one uh so

00:10:47.620 this image that we have here naval row car park which looks like a thriving hub of industry

00:10:54.200 wouldn't you say

00:10:55.660 is actually the

00:10:58.720 registered address

00:11:00.860 registered business address

00:11:02.460 of where a gift shop owner

00:11:04.700 called Saftar Ali told the

00:11:06.800 authorities they should write to him

00:11:08.580 with any queries about his business

00:11:10.560 oh you want me to

00:11:12.660 pay some tax or business

00:11:14.840 rates? Send it to this tip

00:11:16.520 here you go, this is where the business

00:11:18.660 is registered, officially

00:11:19.820 and they point out, you know, this was specifically

00:11:22.880 car park spaces 116 127 and 128 do you think that lotus eaters could stop paying business rates by

00:11:31.320 getting all our bills sent to a tip let me break the color swatch out and i'll see how lenient

00:11:37.080 they'll be with us about it yes yes uh little it says is known about ali other than the fact that

00:11:42.480 he is a 35 year old pakistani national and that's one thing that isn't specifically addressed in

00:11:49.080 here the fact that there's a lot of racial and ethnic nepotism going on but they do actually

00:11:53.560 have the decency to point out the fact that these people are foreigners because what a lot of this

00:11:59.020 is is foreign criminal activity. I mean shouldn't you be English? I mean if the parking space is in

00:12:05.240 England and he's ever been to England surely that makes him English by the government's own standards.

00:12:09.900 I'll need to speak to Jacob Rees-Mogg about this and clarify and then they say they went back to

00:12:14.920 him to try and follow up on this but he'd vanished leaving behind hundreds of thousands of pounds in

00:12:20.480 unpaid taxes letters to him keep being returned from the abandoned car park what a shock the

00:12:25.940 expectation is his company will never pay the money it owes despite the unpaid taxes his gift

00:12:30.860 shop continues to trade in the center of london with a new legal owner all of this is taking place

00:12:36.700 in a shop unit rented from a company founded by one of britain's richest men and let's get a picture

00:12:42.980 of this chap as if aziz here he is he's a billionaire worth about 2.6 billion pounds he's

00:12:50.140 this one on the right stood next to a friendly very very friendly chap um oh wait that appears

00:12:54.800 to be sadiq khan looks like an english national to me he certainly does uh well they could stop

00:13:00.280 all of this at any time by just saying okay well we're going to seize the premises

00:13:02.920 they could we're going to seize the premises and that and that would put the responsibility

00:13:08.520 on the landlords to make sure they know who you should be you should be to contact the

00:13:12.200 landlord and said okay have you done your checks on who it is that you're actually renting the

00:13:16.500 property to and where can we build them for tax it wouldn't be difficult and if you don't do that

00:13:21.060 well we're just going to take the property off you well they could do all of that but they they

00:13:24.280 don't and i wonder if it's anything to do with the sorts of friendly pictures that we see here

00:13:28.400 between him and him and sadiq it is interesting that people hardly bring up um these like money

00:13:33.420 laundering funds one thing that's like barely mentioned is like the monopolization on corner

00:13:37.360 shops the fact that they've all across the country have just like turned indian overnight and it's

00:13:42.600 because of well the same case as this that people um will own these corporation these corner shops

00:13:49.500 belong to and they're from india they're from pakistan and then they will hire only other

00:13:54.800 pakistanis which is why you have like an english village in the countryside which is majority

00:14:00.100 english but its corner shop is still run by an indian and it's it's it's exactly this it's it's

00:14:05.500 classic cartel behavior but these guys and these journalists they went around chasing up a lot of

00:14:11.660 these enterprises and chasing up the people who supposedly were on the named forms um and who

00:14:17.000 supposedly owed all of the money they also say they sent undercover reporters to monitor the

00:14:21.540 amount of money that was going through the tills at the shops and found shockingly at quite a few

00:14:25.700 of these within a single hour because of how much they marked up the prices these people were making

00:14:30.900 maybe like six seven hundred pounds in a single hour of being open if they're in high footfall

00:14:36.300 areas so who was doing this investigation was it the police or hmrc no this was an independent

00:14:41.320 journalist group an independent centric okay so an independent journalist can do this but

00:14:46.420 the combined powers of the police and the hmrc they they can't no okay listen budget like we

00:14:53.700 know the budget's being announced right now money is tight you know trying to chase up people who

00:14:59.080 you money is not a good use of money right you seem to be struggling with the logic here dan

00:15:06.280 come on you need to get you get yourself into a better mindset they they chase me they chase car

00:15:12.600 they they seem to have no problem chasing a lot of people but yeah and it's blatant like everyone

00:15:17.500 knows that these candy shops are money laundering funds but they're never closed down whatsoever

00:15:22.040 they're just left open yes but it goes on to say the legal tenants of these gift shops are often

00:15:27.620 overseas students from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh. When we turned up at the registered

00:15:32.240 addresses given by these tenants, we found overcrowded flats, abandoned offices, or even

00:15:36.840 the fly-tipped car park. In most cases, the registered director had either vanished elsewhere

00:15:41.320 or left the country by the time that we arrived, with stacks of unopened legal letters and tax

00:15:46.400 demands visible through letterboxes. So what this also implicates is that these students who are

00:15:51.740 getting these visas are coming in and happily signing their names on the forms to register

00:15:57.320 them as legal owners or business uh business managers of these places knowingly committing

00:16:04.220 fraud and then buggering off before any consequences can come their way because they're being paid for

00:16:09.760 it as well so this is another thing that we can thank the university's student visa system for

00:16:14.480 that it helps to facilitate the hollowing out and destruction of our high streets because all of

00:16:20.500 these people they come here they go well i've got an easy student visa oh and now a criminal

00:16:25.780 enterprise wants me to get a couple of grand to sign my name and i'll never have to find a face

00:16:32.680 the consequences great sorted things before being in britain is amazing being before the age of mass

00:16:39.420 immigration you wouldn't be able to do this because you could go to a student and say look 0.97

00:16:42.540 i want you to commit tax fraud in exchange for a couple of grand and less of an idiot they'd say 0.98

00:16:46.840 well yeah but then i've got to spend the rest of my life in this country i can't have that following 0.99

00:16:49.700 me around this is not worth it and so you just wouldn't have been able to get this over the line

00:16:53.460 But nowadays, there's so many people passing through that, yeah, of course you can bung them a grand to become basically a tax exile from Britain for the rest of their life.

00:17:02.620 Yeah, but the thing that connected all of these gift shop owners, they said in this article that they looked into,

00:17:09.780 was that all of their properties were leased from Criterion Capital owned by Asif Aziz.

00:17:16.120 There is no legal responsibility, they highlight, for a landlord to enforce the payment of taxes by their tenants,

00:17:21.840 nor any suggestion that aziz should be paying the bill and lawyers for aziz said that while he is

00:17:27.080 the founder of criterion capital he is not involved in the matter of day-to-day lettings

00:17:31.440 and this is a matter for the commercial letty team uh letting team at criterion capital the

00:17:36.480 lawyers said that he and criterion deny any involvement in phoenixing which is the name

00:17:42.160 given to the um system whereby this operates and you can see a nice little graphic here

00:17:47.340 explaining gift shop makes lots of money the limited company don't doesn't register for vat

00:17:52.580 pay business rates or pay corporate tax they get the new company registered for a new director

00:17:58.460 new company takes over the shop old company collapses and liquidates and they all vanish

00:18:03.100 they don't pay any of the rates and then it just goes around and round and round so that's why it's

00:18:07.040 called phoenixing because it rises from the ashes like a phoenix but he says that they have no

00:18:13.260 involvement in this phoenixing and said that the lettings are made to commercial tenants on standard

00:18:17.060 commercial terms and that as long as they're paying the market rate they let them to they

00:18:21.120 let them come in which you know uh but uh he has also gone to court a number of times in the past

00:18:29.060 this aziz fellow and just last year when this article was being written had decided that he

00:18:35.060 was going to move to abu dhabi just in case right just in case and can you believe the sort of

00:18:44.340 charities that he funds as well

00:18:46.020 with all of his millions gotten from the sorts of

00:18:48.260 property. Muslim Brotherhood or something?

00:18:50.120 Well, Young British Muslims.

00:18:52.500 Right. The Aziz Foundation

00:18:54.200 which includes funding master's

00:18:56.320 degrees at prestigious universities, of

00:18:58.320 course, organising internships

00:19:00.320 with members of parliament

00:19:01.920 members of

00:19:04.500 parliament and leading

00:19:06.120 news organisations plus helping

00:19:08.420 to pay for London's annual

00:19:10.060 Ramadan lights. I wonder if the students

00:19:12.740 getting the grants for their fees

00:19:15.980 also happen to be the ones who crop up

00:19:18.640 on the company listings

00:19:19.940 as being the director for these businesses?

00:19:22.500 I wonder.

00:19:23.600 Because that way,

00:19:24.760 not only would he not be paying tax,

00:19:27.240 that way he would make it tax deductible

00:19:28.720 and I think the bungs that he paid them.

00:19:31.780 I mean, it's a good deal if you can get it, isn't it?

00:19:35.880 But, you know, that's just the one example.

00:19:37.960 That's all of these obvious criminal enterprises.

00:19:39.800 But there's other aspects to the idea

00:19:41.740 of the town centres high streets being hollowed out as well some of it is just absentee landlords

00:19:47.540 where they point out in this article in newton ash cliff icliff in county durham that there is

00:19:55.620 the entire town centre is owned by one billionaire and his firm and is about four times the national

00:20:02.900 rate of shops being closed there it's 26 percent quarter of all of the shop fronts in this high

00:20:09.760 street being owned and when they have been approached on whether they're actually going

00:20:13.360 to do anything about that whether they're going to encourage enterprise to come in they just don't

00:20:17.600 so some people worry that if there's just a london or international finance class in charge of

00:20:22.880 local shops who own all of them and any losses that are made from the fact that you're owning

00:20:28.640 empty shops well it's just as in the case of here 0.12 percent of its global holdings they're just

00:20:34.820 not going to care and they're not going to do anything about it other people as well asking

00:20:39.120 questions like whether private equity damaged the British high street, pointing out that private

00:20:44.540 equity firms will go to ailing businesses and basically use debt leveraged buyouts to buy them

00:20:51.360 out, trade a load of assets to pay off the debt and make a tidy profit off the top. Problem with

00:20:55.920 this is that, yes, this is a problem. Private equity is not there to improve your local high

00:21:01.420 street. But the only way that it gets to the point where you're really vulnerable to this kind of

00:21:06.200 leveraged buyout in the first place is if your business is not doing well in the first

00:21:10.060 place, like Debenhams, New Look, Pound World, Maplin are all examples given here, who all

00:21:16.400 seem to have been massively affected primarily by the rise in online shopping. And then smaller

00:21:21.840 businesses in high streets as well have been affected by that, and also rising business

00:21:26.620 rates, energy costs, employer tax that they have to pay, all sorts of issues, meaning

00:21:32.320 that they just struggle with increasingly small margins

00:21:35.840 to keep their doors open.

00:21:37.280 And councils won't lower business rates,

00:21:39.360 even though that's the one thing

00:21:40.380 that would actually save the high streets,

00:21:41.820 but they won't do it.

00:21:42.820 And the government is straining to lower energy costs as well.

00:21:47.360 Well, instead of lowering energy costs,

00:21:48.680 they might just send us all off to war.

00:21:50.860 I feel like every day I'm just closer

00:21:52.740 to becoming an anarcho-communist.

00:21:54.900 You're already there, aren't you?

00:21:56.080 Particularly the critiques of billionaires such as this man.

00:21:59.800 I feel like I am already there.

00:22:00.920 I think I'm going to vote Green in the next election.

00:22:03.520 Well, the question in that case is that councils are asking,

00:22:07.740 is the solution some form of joint community ownership in these local communities,

00:22:13.400 which is something the government is actually trying to push right now.

00:22:17.700 And this is where it becomes stuff that's happened recently.

00:22:20.300 Angela Rayner last month unveils boost to high streets with new £10 million community-owned business fund.

00:22:27.080 And this is announced by the community secretary.

00:22:29.440 the fund will help to boost organisations that are owned and run by the staff, customers and

00:22:35.100 communities who use them. So cooperatives is what we're seeing here. Through the new fund,

00:22:39.960 local leaders will be able to provide access to advice, business support and finance,

00:22:43.340 helping people to establish and grow cooperatives in their area. Through the new fund, local leaders

00:22:48.680 will be able to provide access to advice. Sorry, I've copied the same thing. Their impact can

00:22:53.600 already be seen in vendors across the country, such as Manchester's Union Grocery. Earlier on

00:22:58.800 this year andy burnham also vowed to give locals a greater say over new shops that can open to help

00:23:04.700 revitalize britain's high street so the one thing that you can say about this i know lots of people

00:23:09.200 have um complaints about community ownership and cooperatives and such like this it does remove

00:23:15.960 the internationalist absentee problem right if it's somebody who's not part of your local community

00:23:22.200 who doesn't go to your local community where the properties are only on a spreadsheet that they

00:23:27.000 look at every quarter they have no incentive to actually take care of your local of your locality

00:23:33.480 if it's all run by people who are local to them then it removes that problem because they live

00:23:39.240 there obviously there are other solutions being put forward as well uh obviously we're talking

00:23:45.460 about a labor government what am i kidding we're talking about a government and so one of these

00:23:50.860 solutions is to just raise taxes on everything tax online sales more heavily to save high streets

00:23:56.880 which was something that the british chamber of commerce urged andy burnham to do which doesn't

00:24:03.020 actually help the problem of the high street it just makes everything it's more expensive for

00:24:06.960 everybody doing anything online and that includes the vendors and the people buying off of it but

00:24:11.600 you know this is a modern government and their only solution is we can tax something more

00:24:16.820 yes that's just the one the one idea well it's also there's another one borrow more

00:24:23.240 borrow more yes and tax more although in an interview for the guardian looking at how

00:24:28.260 britain can reverse the declining fortunes of town former bank of england chief economist

00:24:32.040 urged them to launch a realignment of the tax system away from favoring online sellers

00:24:36.800 alongside a review of business rates and measures to turbocharge devolution because really what

00:24:42.300 needs to be taken down is vat which adds 20 onto every transaction in this country business rates

00:24:50.140 employer tax energy costs all of these need to come down because when you when you really think

00:24:57.140 about it from a modern managerial perspective all taxes is a social engineering mechanism

00:25:02.600 for redistributive policies we print all of our own money it's all fake money it's not actually

00:25:09.260 tied to any resource anyway so you could just try and tilt the scales in the favor of honest

00:25:16.480 local businesses rather than get rather than letting criminals and all of this happen on that

00:25:22.640 article it kind of shows like how disconnected sort of this like boomer classes the fact that

00:25:27.980 they blame um the internet for the fact that um businesses are struggling to stay open in local

00:25:33.640 communities i mean supermarkets and the internet are a big part of it but they're not the only part

00:25:38.460 of it and the local businesses that do still exist they need some support they need a lot more help

00:25:44.060 than just will make for all of you local businesses who are probably also ordering some of your own

00:25:49.580 supplies online as well that's going to make it more expensive for you too genius genius idea

00:25:55.780 if people are struggling to live because things are taxed more heavily how do you expect them to

00:26:01.960 open businesses and one of the other problems is everybody's so used to getting everything online

00:26:08.380 all the time now everybody's so used to convenience of supermarkets of buying things online of not

00:26:12.860 having to prepare your own food you can just get an albanian on a small motorbike to deliver you

00:26:17.600 pizza at 3 a.m right um how do you break people out of that mindset the thing is is a lot of people

00:26:24.240 still enjoy going to small towns because they have small businesses and unique shops um which

00:26:30.180 they can buy presents for people they know or go vintage shopping and buy cool clothes do they do

00:26:34.920 that often enough to but there's not many on life support the thing is there's not many places like

00:26:39.420 that whatsoever i think a good example is there was this coffee shop i think i brought this up in

00:26:43.280 a previous segment in chester it's my favorite coffee shop it's a hipster coffee shop and

00:26:47.820 obviously loads and loads of people used to go there it was it was doing great in terms i used

00:26:51.940 to go and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and like coffee there cost like five pound but it's

00:26:56.740 the best like coffee um you could imagine these great cakes um but yeah it was it was quite

00:27:02.240 popular a lot of people went there uh and it was it was doing quite good but all of a sudden

00:27:06.840 overnight it announced that we can't afford to stay open um even though we get so many customers

00:27:14.380 because the business rates in chester are so high and we're going to have to close i'd assume energy

00:27:19.140 costs probably didn't help either yeah yeah that too so so the reality is i don't think it's because

00:27:25.000 people don't want to shop on the high street it's because of how expensive things are getting

00:27:29.500 that is part of it but there are there is also a case of revealed the stated versus revealed

00:27:35.040 preferences like a number of times there were quite a few uh different surveys cited through

00:27:41.220 all of these articles and this there was quite a depressing constant between all of them surveys

00:27:47.620 of people showed that 80 80 percent of them it all said well we want a strong high street

00:27:55.240 and then asked if they regularly went to their local high street it was less than 30 percent of

00:28:00.840 them so there there is also obviously your your case is one example but then again what is the

00:28:07.380 high street is it just generic um chains and corporations that is also a point that wasn't

00:28:12.640 highlighted in this but what's another way of getting people out into the high street outside

00:28:17.060 of just everything that we've said well just make it nice sadiq khan pictured here and here

00:28:23.060 has just has just shut down half of Oxford Street from cars and here's an artist's illustration

00:28:30.860 of what Oxford Street is imagined maybe one day to end up looking like we've got some nice green

00:28:38.080 astroturf we've got giant pots interesting artist depiction they're giant plant pots

00:28:45.540 with trees coming out of them uh we have jumpers suspended in midair from wire

00:28:54.220 presumably that's an artist's depiction of somebody who's just stolen your phone

00:28:58.120 yes he's just running away but i mean the reason i don't like the high street is not because it

00:29:02.800 doesn't have giant plant pots and statues in it it's because it does have something in it that

00:29:07.900 i'm not fond of well that's the problem isn't it none of this is addressing the criminal aspect of

00:29:13.380 yes also the fact that like the stores on oxford street are just far too expensive for the average

00:29:19.080 person people can't afford to go shopping and of course you know half of them are all sweet shops

00:29:24.860 and other criminal enterprise as well but you know i can kind of understand where it's going for

00:29:30.540 making places more walkable making it so that they're more pleasant and actually nice to be in

00:29:35.160 hey that's a start and you're seeing across the country in britain and wales and scotland

00:29:41.520 councils trying to support their local businesses and support their local high streets

00:29:46.320 Exeter getting a 210 million investment used to revamp vacant shopping centres

00:29:52.140 disused cinemas abandoned local eyesores Welsh towns putting you know here's the difference

00:29:57.580 between Britain and Wales a few hundred thousand pounds sorry 20,000 pounds in a grant to support

00:30:04.260 community-led projects so there's an attempt across parts of the country to take a more

00:30:09.440 community orientated approach beautification and other things but i don't know my worry is

00:30:16.880 will this community ownership will all of these things like beautification will they change the

00:30:23.040 incentives of ethnic and racial nepotism from people will they change the incentive will they

00:30:29.360 change the problems of business rates and taxes and energy costs being too effective will they

00:30:35.920 change the community like the the commercial incentives of normal consumers to get everything

00:30:44.000 at the cheapest and greatest convenience online or at supermarkets i i don't want to be too

00:30:50.840 blackpilled i worry is this all too late is the high street as it existed until the 90s and 2000s

00:30:59.500 Just a unique historical contingency that existed only because of a particular culture and economic situation that we found ourselves within.

00:31:09.060 And have things just simply changed too much for us to be able to get back to what it once was?

00:31:15.900 I can't answer all of these questions. Everybody's struggling to try and find a way to save the high streets.

00:31:21.860 But the leaders that we have right now have not found an effective way to do so.

00:31:27.180 maybe these community-led programs will actually do something maybe they won't i can't provide all

00:31:32.580 the answers so um i'll listen in to hear what some of the uh some of our commentators say about it

00:31:39.240 going forwards let let me know but with that i'll go on to a couple of rumble rants and we'll move

00:31:44.080 on to the next segment uh otchig door says nose candy i think that was referring to the um the

00:31:49.800 unusual exchanges going on at the sweet shop that you were overlooking something that you can get

00:31:55.220 hold of from your family sweet shop nearby run by aziv in a car park oh definitely belgians are 0.52

00:32:02.380 evil trust me saying i am half australian fire bombings at hundreds of barbershops and stores

00:32:08.320 selling vapes and illegal tobacco down under uh like in the uk this is transnational crime

00:32:14.000 borderline terrorism often run from places like iraq yeah we have seen that in a few places where

00:32:19.700 different barbershops will be owned by different various middle eastern ethnicities and get into

00:32:24.380 minor gang and ethnic wars with one another habsification robots and automation is what you

00:32:29.980 will have to use uh to get your takeaway food delivered harry they already do it in the u.s

00:32:34.540 but first re-migration i would i would rather just some like 16 year old english kid deliver

00:32:41.640 it to me if i'm going to get takeaway or i could just drive there myself you need like a pizza

00:32:45.900 3 a.m in the morning you call a sweet shop apparently well if you need a if if you need a

00:32:51.680 pizza at 3am you need to stop smoking weed and go to bed that's that's the actual answer you need

00:33:00.500 to go to bed and you can pick up you can pick it back up at midday the next day but go to bed for

00:33:06.000 god's sakes so today's topic is slavery and particularly how the church of england is

00:33:13.060 donate um well funding um reparations um with a hundred a hundred million pounds

00:33:21.020 um the church of england is going to spend a hundred million of its own money

00:33:25.660 on slaves for slave reparations the church of england is buying a hundred million pounds worth

00:33:31.640 of slaves yeah wow that's uh that's definitely uh a tan maybe maybe that will help come back

00:33:41.380 with a piano ferry full of slaves that we bought from you know rock and slave bars you know the

00:33:47.140 thing is i thought slave reparations is just like something which was very unique 2020 during the

00:33:54.160 height of black lives matter and that the left had just like simply moved onto it ukraine happens

00:33:59.220 and then people have all all of a sudden like forgot about covid and george floyd and then

00:34:03.680 like their new thing is like gaza and that people had come to their senses that's the idea of slave 0.77

00:34:10.520 reparations is just ridiculous. It's ridiculous to feel responsible for 0.93

00:34:17.280 something that happened long before you were even born. And it's even more 0.57

00:34:21.120 ridiculous to give someone a large sum of money for something that they never 0.79

00:34:25.060 even experienced themselves. But for some reason the Church of England, what I 0.96

00:34:31.940 like to call really the Church of Fairtrue signaling, is still stuck in

00:34:36.620 2020. It still thinks that the impact that they can have is through being kind to marginalised

00:34:49.740 communities. That's their way of accepting Christ and God into their hearts.

00:34:54.300 Well the problem is 100 million, that's not going to be enough. I mean they could offer 100 trillion,

00:35:00.300 it won't be enough. Nothing is ever going to be enough because these people just know that it's

00:35:04.300 It's an eternal blank check.

00:35:05.680 That's the thing. 0.68

00:35:06.500 Even King Charles knows that slavery reparations is just ridiculous.

00:35:11.560 I mean, the Caribbean, for example, is asking Britain to give them 33 trillion, 0.92

00:35:17.300 which is such a ridiculous number. 0.67

00:35:19.260 It's so extremely high. 0.92

00:35:20.880 So Indians said 45 trillion, and everybody else just went,

00:35:24.500 oh, okay, we can ask for trillions now, can we?

00:35:26.580 Yeah, next it will be cillions.

00:35:27.800 And also to your point is about this being a bit 2020 and stuff.

00:35:31.720 That's the thing that I'm getting from this,

00:35:33.300 because back a few years ago you had like david lammy and dawn butler would stand up in parliament

00:35:38.260 and say i'm afro-caribbean give me reparations yeah but now they're standing up and saying i'm

00:35:43.220 english so how does it work if the english are giving reparations to the english because

00:35:48.740 apparently we're all english now everybody is english even people in nigeria are in english

00:35:53.380 yeah well why would the english give the english reparations how does can i ask for reparations

00:35:58.100 from the north from the normans yeah can we get can we get like the irish get reparations for the

00:36:04.020 potato famines like how far do you want to take this but it's true and if david lammy is english

00:36:08.340 what and and he gets reparations why shouldn't i get reparations yeah yeah exactly um because he's

00:36:13.700 just as english as you dan um but i think most people realize that reparations is just like a

00:36:19.940 cash grab um from like african countries um in order to like exploit the west and get loads of

00:36:26.100 of money. It's just like an excuse. But the Church of England thinks it's a good idea.

00:36:31.960 They're investing 100 million as a form of reparations into black communities to be used

00:36:38.500 to distribute grants to businesses and social projects in Britain. And along with like supporting

00:36:46.260 research and education related to the church's wall in slavery, which to me is like ludicrous

00:36:54.140 as well it's it's like the church just wants people to hate it they want people to stop 0.89

00:36:59.580 attending uh the church of england and they want to make themselves out to be this evil racist

00:37:05.340 institution that shouldn't exist is the church of england is just actively suicidal also now you know

00:37:12.140 if you're going to a church of england church and you're putting any money in the pledges or anything

00:37:16.620 if it's not going to that local church there they'll be going to fund things like this yeah

00:37:21.500 Yeah, and even worse is, nobody really has any idea where these funds are going to go.

00:37:27.580 They're not going to go to individuals, they're going to go to projects,

00:37:30.380 but nobody has any idea where these projects are going to be.

00:37:34.200 And this has been happening, I mean, this got announced in 2023 and it's still going on.

00:37:38.240 The Church of England is still dedicated to it.

00:37:41.460 They've also set up an independent black-led oversight group

00:37:46.520 to advise them on how to implement these funds to black communities.

00:37:51.500 what's that yeah i should just give all of the money directly to you specifically well i mean

00:37:56.780 if you say so and if they're going to lose either way because if they just if they just gave 100

00:38:01.540 million to like random africans they would just have like have a new audi yeah in exported out

00:38:08.700 new mansion and then and then the first time it needs maintenance it would just be left on the

00:38:12.100 side of the road to grow weeds yep and they're also hoping that uh this number will increase

00:38:19.280 through donations um to one billion so they want to invest one billion uh into slavery reparations

00:38:27.060 and this so what is this going towards local infrastructure in african countries or something

00:38:31.700 no i think i think i have no idea i mean they say on their website but they're all so

00:38:36.720 they're all like extremely vague about it to the point where nobody has any idea if this is going

00:38:43.020 to african countries if it's going to black communities in britain i don't even think the

00:38:47.300 Church of England has any idea and that's because it's just an ultimate virtue signal and so the

00:38:55.300 reason this came about is because they did an investigation in which came out in 2023 linking

00:39:02.320 the Church of England's historical wall to the slave trade and to me it's hilarious

00:39:09.920 how the Church of England has participated in the slave trade because apparently it's guilty

00:39:15.800 because of something called the Queen Anne's Bounty in 1739,

00:39:20.620 which was a scheme established to help clergy's

00:39:25.060 who were extremely impoverished in the 1700s.

00:39:28.860 And in order to raise funds,

00:39:32.100 this charity invested about 400,000

00:39:35.940 into something called the South Sea Company,

00:39:40.360 which transported 34,000 slaves.

00:39:43.660 i mean one we shouldn't like why should we even care about this considering britain's role in

00:39:49.160 abolishing slavery and also the church of england's role um in the 1700s in helping to abolish slavery

00:39:55.060 and encouraging the british state um to stop slave ships south sea were there were there only

00:40:02.860 contracts to transport slaves or did they engage in a lot of non-slavery related business as well

00:40:09.260 i think it was that i think i think that's the one that was tried to emulate the east india

00:40:13.860 company but ended up going bust and loads i was going to say this this south sea was the one that

00:40:19.240 had the massive bubble that burst as well i think i think it's that one yeah well yeah it is that

00:40:24.380 one because that's the thing that most people um what the church of england won't tell you is the

00:40:28.360 fact this company went bust and everyone who invested in this company um didn't make money

00:40:33.500 yeah they lost fortunes i mean including like government ministers and stuff i mean all the

00:40:37.880 high society yeah took losses on it also i'm sorry i don't like a time when the institution

00:40:43.500 was pervasive everywhere it's just understood as a fact of life right would it not be better that

00:40:49.420 the money being made from slavery was actually going into like for instance with um what was

00:40:54.780 his name colston in bristol um going into like local community projects starting universities

00:41:02.380 improving the lot of normal working people helping to like strengthen the spiritual life of England

00:41:10.600 rather than just going to enriching a few individual people is it not better that that

00:41:15.440 money if it had to come from slavery was put into something worthwhile to be fair if we were doing

00:41:21.720 slavery today or they were doing slavery at the time with today's elite morals they'd be talking

00:41:28.140 about safe and legal routes and about making it more efficient and making sure the welfare

00:41:33.180 conditions of the slaves arrive here it'll be all of that but also it poses like an important

00:41:38.620 question is like one really responsible for a company's actions if they buy a share in that

00:41:46.860 company for example um am i responsible for um starbucks's like exploitation of its workers and

00:41:55.780 the fact that it funds Gaza because I buy a coffee at Starbucks.

00:41:59.500 Am I also equally responsible for that evil? No.

00:42:04.380 I think there was the big controversy surrounding Nestle

00:42:07.880 about the fact that some people were saying that they caused loads of deaths in Africa

00:42:12.860 or something through their farming practices.

00:42:15.600 Are all of the shareholders of Nestle to be held individually responsible

00:42:19.860 for every death now, if that's true? 0.89

00:42:23.560 yeah so so it is ridiculous and also um church of england and these people that talk about slavery

00:42:30.280 reparations will never bring up the fact that africans were involved in slavery africans 0.50

00:42:35.100 literally sold um the slaves to the europeans they were the people that went to these tribes

00:42:41.060 and enslaved them and arabs too yeah let's not forget the arabs that's that as well is it better

00:42:48.320 that the slaves make money that then gets to be put back into the church or that the slaves get

00:42:54.240 transported over immediately castrated and used as guards for the sultan's personal harem am i

00:43:00.220 allowed to answer um i think i know what your answer is going to be and so this brings me to

00:43:07.220 this article which makes makes an excellent point that's by the catholic um hallowed and it's by

00:43:13.020 this irish nationalist who says of course if reparations matter the church of england must

00:43:17.860 face its anti-Catholic past, such as its oppression of Ireland and the fact that it banned Catholicism

00:43:23.820 in Ireland and, you know, six cillion, like, I don't know, like, Irish people died from

00:43:29.740 the potato famine or something. Should the Church of England pay reparations for that?

00:43:37.100 And it's like, how far do you want to take this? Should, like, the Scandinavians pay

00:43:40.840 reparations to the English for invading us, like, over a thousand years ago?

00:43:44.700 Should the Anglo-Saxons

00:43:47.220 pay reparations to the Cornish

00:43:49.280 and the Welsh?

00:43:50.320 Yeah, maybe 0.97

00:43:50.920 It's ridiculous

00:43:53.040 How far back do you want to go? 0.93

00:43:55.180 Could Italy pay reparations for the Romans?

00:43:58.780 Well, like

00:43:59.300 the left would say

00:44:01.380 well, of course not, because that's like 1,000 years ago

00:44:03.560 and none of us today are

00:44:05.320 impacted really by that, but it's the same

00:44:07.520 with slavery

00:44:07.960 Actually, I think people who have

00:44:11.160 we are still impacted by the Norman

00:44:13.520 invasions that is true i believe that uh if you are if in england you have a surname derived from

00:44:21.540 norman background you are more likely to be earning at least 10 percent more uh than all

00:44:27.760 of the other equivalent yeah they still own our aristocracy yes that's why maybe maybe for 0.99

00:44:33.120 green green party to abolish uh to finally abolish those damn normans maybe this is why 0.96

00:44:41.060 anarcho-communism's good to replace the elite no no um it's very bad um but yeah and and it's like 0.97

00:44:49.280 that's my argument is how far do you want to take this and also the working class in the 1800s who

00:44:54.780 were treated like slaves by their masters um who were like if they were poor and homeless and on

00:45:00.040 the street and couldn't afford to live they were put in workhouses and and also there's this case

00:45:04.840 in sweden of um in the 1800s during the industrial revolution of a worker with um protesting in the

00:45:12.300 street and this um boss comes out and shoots him to death because in his eyes um he owns his

00:45:19.920 worker's life he can just take away his life if he wants to if he's not doing his job please don't

00:45:25.400 tell carl that you could you could argue well was was the working class not slaves in the industrial

00:45:31.060 revolution in the in slum conditions it's like how far do you want to take this and i've seen

00:45:36.020 the picture that's been going around recently of somewhat a working class household uh from 1962

00:45:42.340 as recent as 1962 and it it looks very deprived yeah and so it makes me think why is the church

00:45:50.580 of england doing this why is it unique right now to the church of england was and and we talk a

00:45:56.260 a lot about virtue signaling but it's because the church of england represents this very

00:46:01.220 performative christianity people go to church not because they truly believe in christ and they want

00:46:06.300 to follow the gospel and but because it's about status it's about reputation in their communities

00:46:12.180 particularly in relation to metropolitan um cities is you look good if you say to people i go to

00:46:17.740 church on a sunday um i'm doing this at my local church i'm having like coffee and so on and

00:46:24.840 that's why the church of england has to engage in slavery reparations because it's not real action

00:46:33.820 it's like a surrogate for real action it is just to like fetch your signal about how good your soul

00:46:39.120 is it reminds me of this video i saw um a couple of weeks ago of someone telling um people not to

00:46:45.340 pick blackberries because you're stealing food from the birds which is ridiculous since there's

00:46:49.920 bushes for birds which humans can't eat and which birds get berries from but it is this

00:46:54.640 i care so much about the environment i'm i'm making these non-issues to show you how much 0.87

00:47:01.060 i care about little birdies i'm a performative moron yeah and that is what the church you find

00:47:06.440 you find most often the people who behave in that way in particular as you just highlighted

00:47:11.140 are the least well informed on the subjects they care so much about yeah and well such as as the

00:47:18.260 church of england and it's also and like we were talking about well why don't they focus on ireland

00:47:23.660 why don't they focus on the working class why don't they focus on all these other groups well

00:47:27.620 it's because like virtue signaling really comes from an inferiority complex it comes from um this

00:47:35.500 loser mindset and and in order to bring about change they identify with other groups they see

00:47:42.260 who are equally on the same level as them who they perceive as losers and to the church of 0.59

00:47:49.540 england it is african communities they can't understand why for example um africa africa is

00:47:57.500 a third world country to them the only answer has to be colonialism slavery we're the reason like

00:48:02.360 this they can't understand that actually they just live differently from us that they don't really

00:48:07.380 function in uh western societies and they have their own way of living and but they can't recognize

00:48:14.180 a very polite way of putting it they have to describe them as the oppressed in order to

00:48:19.060 virtue signal i i did see um post from somebody earlier who said that they live in the congo

00:48:26.180 and they work there and on days where it rains in the congo uh people just don't go to work

00:48:32.180 Are there socio-economic factors causing this or is that just the preference of how people behave there?

00:48:39.180 Or when wells break down and Europeans tell them you should probably repair their wells because the drought season's coming.

00:48:46.180 And they say, what do you mean the drought season's coming? Look, it's raining. We've got so much rain.

00:48:52.180 Yeah, maybe that's why, maybe it isn't because of colonialism.

00:48:57.180 Yeah, if language is an indicator of the kind of concepts that your people have, it's interesting that many African languages have no word for maintenance.

00:49:08.860 And so this brings me to this article by The Times, which is of recent news.

00:49:14.360 People are fed up that the Church of England is like this.

00:49:16.900 There is like members of the Church of England that go to church because they generally believe in God and they love Anglicanism.

00:49:22.260 and they want to conserve these historical churches

00:49:26.000 which belong to their communities.

00:49:28.160 So they're sick of funds being spent 0.84

00:49:33.460 in relation to these useless areas.

00:49:36.580 So these two individuals are taking the Church of England to court.

00:49:41.980 And the reason they're doing that is because

00:49:43.640 the Church of England,

00:49:47.320 they have something called the Church of Commissioners

00:49:50.340 um who are basically enacting this um the slavery reparations but they are drifting away from their

00:49:56.360 core duties it's not in their duties to um engage in quote-unquote social justice their duties um is

00:50:03.900 and and as it states is to promote the mission and ministry of the church of england by supporting

00:50:10.160 poorer dioceses with ministry costs providing funds to support mission activists paying for

00:50:15.360 bishops, ministries, paying clientary pensions. Basically their function is to take care of the

00:50:22.480 priests that belong to the church and also to conserve the church and to follow Jesus Christ.

00:50:29.880 So these two individuals are therefore taking Church of England to Cork. They're not following

00:50:34.720 that. They're not infesting that money into keeping churches open. They're infesting that

00:50:42.180 money into social justice and one thing i find interesting about this article is they have a

00:50:47.360 graph here of everything that the uh the church is is spending money on so most of the money is like

00:50:55.220 to fulfill their main duties but then you go down here and it is net zero 40 million 40 million on

00:51:02.280 net zero uh project spire which is uh the slavery reparations project 39 million um other racial

00:51:09.780 justice projects 12 million on safeguarding 31 million does the church have to spend 40 million

00:51:15.920 on net zero for yeah exactly and the reason i have a problem with this is because so many churches

00:51:22.740 all across the country are closing down and when you go to a cathedral today whenever it be chester

00:51:27.460 chester cathedral lincoln cathedral and westminster bath cathedral it's they always ask you to pay

00:51:34.060 i mean you can get around it by saying look i'm here to pray i'm here to worship god i'm not

00:51:39.600 um paying an entry fee um in order to um have a relationship with god in the church

00:51:47.200 um but they say oh we need the funds because we need to stay open uh but they have all of the

00:51:52.040 they have like enough money to fund social justice projects but they don't have enough

00:51:57.520 money to keep churches open it's ridiculous and these are all the churches that are being sold 0.92

00:52:02.400 all across the country it's quite disgusting and one of them's chester which is which is really

00:52:07.600 side and they've got a little graph here of the church that's being sold and they're being like

00:52:12.720 sold by these what's it being sold for what's it being sold to so it's being sold to anyone anyone

00:52:18.880 can buy it which is even more like despicable so it could become another one of those yeah it could

00:52:23.600 be an ngo it could be a bar it could be it could be whatever it could be knocked down and maybe it

00:52:28.720 could be another one that's bought out by something else it probably won't get knocked down

00:52:32.480 it's protected as a heritage building but it could become a mosque um and i mean look at the

00:52:38.240 inside of this church it's beautiful like and i mean this is like the importance of churches even

00:52:43.600 if you don't believe in god um it's they're like sort of monuments of our past they have such

00:52:48.720 character they're full of these beautiful artistic details and craftsmanship sale price 100 grand

00:52:55.440 only that's it yeah so you know a house is like close to half a million but you can buy like this

00:53:02.240 massive church yeah the back of it's really pretty as well like a house a house at a hundred grand

00:53:10.160 in this country would be considered a bargain these days so you can get a full historic church

00:53:15.840 that's a protect you said it's a listed building yeah you can just for a hundred grand transform

00:53:20.280 it into whatever you like i mean look how gorgeous that is the only danger is is if if you try to

00:53:26.220 live in it there's a high chance somebody's going to burn your house down because a lot of these

00:53:30.200 churches seem to just spontaneously combust these days that's true and what will likely happen is

00:53:35.660 someone will buy this and just like butcher the inside and turn them into flats which is disgusting

00:53:40.140 um and and completely evil i mean look at this one as well it's open to foreign investment as

00:53:45.260 well so some foreign only 40 000 to buy this beautiful um church built in the um 1800s

00:53:52.100 it's like so cheap and that's what people do they buy up these beautiful pieces of heritage

00:54:00.060 to turn them into flats that they can sell and make loads of profit from and what's also really

00:54:05.980 bad is that the clergy like a lot of the problem as well is is a lot of churches simply just don't

00:54:11.840 have priests and so they don't have regular service on the sunday they have like priests

00:54:16.800 which wrote around who are from like a nearby town and clergy has declined by 40 percent but

00:54:23.040 what's crazy is the staff employed by the church of england has increased by 80 percent so they

00:54:29.460 have like the means to buy to employ staff but they don't have the means to

00:54:34.860 employ more clergy and they hire people such as like safeguarding experts net

00:54:40.460 zero officers and racial justice leaders.

00:54:44.460 Surely if these things are going for as little as 40,000 pounds as 100,000 pounds

00:54:49.960 surely that 40 million would go a very long way to keeping these places open.

00:54:55.460 yeah you would think so and this brings me to my little last um tab the friends of friendless

00:55:03.580 churches i love this organization because what they do is they buy um old churches medieval

00:55:10.600 churches or sometimes given medieval churches and then they restore them um and they uh keep

00:55:17.220 them open for people to visit and admire and they can because they they understand them as

00:55:22.200 historical monuments as as worthy as like museums and art galleries and that they are disconnection

00:55:29.380 to the past and to a community that once lived there I mean what a big problem is most churches

00:55:34.780 closed down because communities are lost over time particularly when they leave wall areas and

00:55:40.660 are forced into the metropolitan slums of a city and so these churches you know fall into disrepair

00:55:46.720 What's interesting is, I was looking at this website, and they have, where's the Frequently Asked Questions?

00:55:55.620 FAQs on the pages at the bottom there.

00:55:59.620 They talk about how they get their funding, and I think they're given 90,000 by the Church of Wales,

00:56:05.220 and then they receive nothing from the Church of England at all.

00:56:08.620 Sometimes Church of England gives them churches to restore and look after, but they will never fund organizations like this.

00:56:15.120 but they can afford to pay $100 million to the descendants of slaves.

00:56:22.440 But they can't put $100 million in projects like this,

00:56:25.760 which are actually doing something,

00:56:27.960 which are actually taking care and restoring abandoned churches

00:56:31.320 all across the British Isles.

00:56:32.840 It's sick.

00:56:33.880 Well, looking after your own people isn't one of their priorities.

00:56:38.100 Yeah, that's because the Church of England is just a surrogate for morality.

00:56:43.320 It's just another, the organization on its highest levels has been turned into just another globalist NGO.

00:56:53.040 Yeah, it's true.

00:56:59.140 Yeah, that's my segment.

00:57:02.000 Well, thank you very much, Liz.

00:57:03.360 We've got quite a few people wanting to speak regarding this. 0.97

00:57:08.580 Belgians are evil, trust me. 0.73

00:57:10.360 Turkey restricts, how is this relevant? 0.98

00:57:13.320 DNA tests, okay, I see, I see, because it's clear the majority of its blood, particularly I would say in the West, is non-Turkic, i.e. quasi-Greek and slaves from Slavic lands and Arabia.

00:57:26.420 By contrast, Anglo societies didn't eradicate the identity of the slaves.

00:57:32.060 True.

00:57:33.100 Random name, the reason Africa is a third world country, Liz, with country highlighted, I know...

00:57:38.340 What was it, continent?

00:57:39.240 You said country.

00:57:40.060 Did I say, oh gosh.

00:57:40.980 You said country.

00:57:41.820 My mind's all over the place.

00:57:43.080 This is very funny, because parts of it might as well be.

00:57:44.800 This is why you shouldn't take ADHD meds before livestream.

00:57:47.680 Just, like, completely.

00:57:49.420 Um, it sounds you out.

00:57:50.940 Shouldn't take ADHD meds in the first place.

00:57:53.740 They can only count to three.

00:57:55.440 So bad.

00:57:56.060 Habs.

00:57:56.780 This is why the Church of England needs to be removed as the state religion

00:57:59.560 and just replace it and recognise Christianity,

00:58:02.640 Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, no specific version. 1.00

00:58:05.960 Belgians are evil. 0.99

00:58:06.700 Trust me, those cultures that killed most slaves, 0.99

00:58:08.960 or had the biggest slaves' trade, Spain, Portugal, Arabs, Ottomans,

00:58:11.840 are ironically spared guilt in 2026 because they were so brutally efficient in destroying

00:58:17.480 their slave uh their slaves and foreigners i'd imagine i'd imagine spain and portugal probably

00:58:23.860 have a lot of claims put against them these days i've not looked into it but i'd be shocked if they

00:58:27.800 don't victigious why are people not going after their own ancestors for selling their own people

00:58:33.200 and what did those sellers do with all of that money well the thing is the descendants of slaves

00:58:38.780 by virtue of being the descendants of slaves we're not the descendants of the ones selling

00:58:43.720 people it's why actual africans have a little bit of a funny thing about black americans 0.82

00:58:49.140 and basically think they're all a bunch of wimps if you as a black american went to africa and told 0.88

00:58:56.480 the africans who live there i want money because you sold my ancestors in the past they'd laugh in 1.00

00:59:02.520 your face and say you're a loser it's like my ancestors were the winners yours were the losers 0.94

00:59:07.580 ha ha ha real dan ek dan the sweet shop you were talking about is that in eastley if so 0.99

00:59:14.380 is defo dodgy sorry i'm watching on delay yes oh there you go marked ashamed pension actually no

00:59:21.540 hang on that would be libelous i can't remember where it was that's my official position

00:59:26.000 there you go pension fund managers the largest being social security administration

00:59:31.660 are hard at work trying to transform their pyramid schemes into tontines or tontines

00:59:36.580 however you pronounce it all right shall we get the live budget reaction then dan go on take us

00:59:41.700 through how screwed are we yes right so uh the idea of this segment is i'm going to do a live

00:59:47.040 budget reaction because the chancellor sat down after we had already started the podcast so uh

00:59:53.620 i'm gonna i'm gonna see what we can come up now we've got the budget document this was a holding

00:59:57.580 page when i loaded it so hopefully there should be a document there now uh okay well maybe that

01:00:05.180 will be coming in time then we've got the obr this is going well so far this is brilliant yes

01:00:09.860 because basically the chancellor he stands up at half 12 and he gives a speech and he lies and then

01:00:16.080 he sits down and the uh the bud uh the the uh treasury treasury in the obr then publish their

01:00:23.920 papers and then you read those papers and you realize that the stuff that he said um was a bit

01:00:29.460 of a fabrication so for example you'd expect him um we go through it in a second you'd expect him

01:00:35.140 because he was defence secretary and he resigned on the basis of there not being enough defence

01:00:39.420 spending you'd expect him to stand up and say oh there's going to be a load more defence spending

01:00:44.380 and then you look at the document and you realise actually what they've done is they've just

01:00:48.240 reclassified MI5 pensions as defence spending stuff like that so so you can only go so far

01:00:54.660 on the speech but anyway uh while we were talking I don't know why these ones aren't coming up with

01:00:59.640 but I did get a document and I did check page 105 of the budget table 6.1 and I saw that actually

01:01:08.620 yes they are reallocating 2.1 billion of capital allocation into the defence budget so it's not

01:01:17.280 actually giving more money to defence it's just reallocating money that already gone in there so

01:01:21.320 anyway let's try and go through um there we go uh what the what the chancellor has actually done

01:01:31.820 um a lot of badenoc in there scroll down anyway that could get boring right so um what i will

01:01:39.880 talk about is some of the stuff you want to be a bit aware of so a bit of a primer uh before we

01:01:47.740 get into the all right the nitty gritty so primer stuff oh there we go the the the the document has

01:01:53.460 finally appeared right so deficit versus debt is everybody happy with that please right so the um

01:02:01.920 deficit is how much your um how much your more you're spending than you're earning so the gap

01:02:10.180 so that's the bit that you you want to have that positive before you start paying off debt

01:02:15.280 the debt is the total stock of money that you've got out there so uh what i did see in this was the

01:02:21.500 borrowing is 4.2 percent of gdp this year so that's equivalent of you um spending 4.2

01:02:29.440 percent more of your salary than you earn every year that's what does that compare to previous

01:02:35.420 years uh that is going up oh what a shock so that that is a shame um the debt is currently at three

01:02:42.280 trillion a year sorry no three trillion in total um which is which is a lot and because we have a

01:02:48.620 deficit on top of the debt that means the debt is getting larger so if the chancellor when we go

01:02:53.300 through it the chancellor says he's reducing borrowing he won't be reducing the debt he'd be

01:02:58.860 reducing the rate at which we get into more debt which he isn't what's uh current gdp generated by

01:03:06.600 the country um it's it's also around about three trillion so it's a 100 debt to gdp ratio yes and

01:03:14.680 the reason why that's bad is because okay if you think about the future what is the future going

01:03:19.040 to have is it going to have lots of economy or lots of debt well when when the two things are

01:03:25.400 about the same size as each other because the relationship is like 100 one to the other you

01:03:30.960 can just look at the rate they're growing now that the debt is growing at the rate that you have to

01:03:35.660 pay on the debt so the bond yield that we sometimes talk about and that is heading with is past five

01:03:41.940 percent is heading to six percent so that gives you a benchmark of how fast the debt is growing

01:03:45.980 the gdp however is growing at about somewhere between zero and one percent a year and then

01:03:52.220 every time it's a positive number it's not a negative number everybody gets very excited

01:03:56.380 what was it 0.1 earlier this year announced with too much fanfare yes so you can see the problem

01:04:03.020 if if this thing is the same size as this thing but this thing is growing at 0.1 percent and this

01:04:08.760 thing is growing at six percent this thing is going to get a lot bigger faster than this thing

01:04:14.180 which is bad um i'll also point out the difference between a structural deficit and a cyclical

01:04:21.460 deficit because that might come up as well a a cyclical deficit could be you know just because

01:04:27.460 you know there's a geopolitical shock you know somebody decided to invade iran and it wasn't a

01:04:31.080 very good idea energy prices have gone up we're having a recession therefore we've got a short

01:04:35.220 term bit where the sums don't add up and then you've got the structural deficit which is um

01:04:41.300 we've decided that we're going to give a triple lock to boomers and we can't afford to and it's

01:04:48.460 just money or or we're going to we're going to fund the nhs more than we can afford to

01:04:52.700 and that's a structural deficit and we have been like every other g7 country we've been locked

01:04:57.500 into a structural deficit for a long time one thing that i never understood if it was just a

01:05:02.880 term or not what what was the difference between like a double lock pension and triple lock pension

01:05:08.380 was it just an extra lock is it it's just a name for them to say no no we're really definitely

01:05:15.140 double uh double promise yes that we're not going to take it so it used to be i can't remember which

01:05:21.680 one was original maybe the original one was it used to rise at like two and a half percent a year

01:05:25.640 and then they added okay but what if we raise it by how much wages go up and then what if we add a

01:05:31.880 triple lock which is you get you either you either get the two and a half percent or how much wages

01:05:37.700 have gone up or how much inflation is and and the reason why that was a bit a bit sus i mean not for

01:05:43.620 boomers but it's a bit sus for everybody else is because the way inflation works is like post

01:05:47.720 covid you've got all this inflation and then um inflation was really high for about three years

01:05:53.200 and then it started to taper off and then people started getting pay rises but they didn't get

01:05:59.380 both inflation made their the value of their wages go down and then later their pay rises made their

01:06:05.240 pay go up so people were going like that and that whereas pensions they got the inflation uplift and

01:06:12.560 then they also got the wages uplift which meant they they started basically um the value of their

01:06:17.900 pension went up a lot quicker than wages did which got the both effects um the fiscal rules

01:06:24.360 we talk about that uh because he he will no doubt mention that about 50 times uh the fiscal rules

01:06:30.720 are basically two parts of that there's a stability part which is they must raise enough revenue to

01:06:35.080 cover day-to-day expenses by um the end of the period now what might you think is that well at

01:06:40.680 the moment it's 20 29 30 so what he's basically saying is the sums will add up on a day-to-day

01:06:47.120 basis in the future and then you might think okay well in the future the sums will add up then

01:06:53.120 but what happens is when you are in the future the data which the sums add up will be in the future

01:07:00.020 you follow so it's just constantly kicking the can down the road yes yeah yes yes so you never

01:07:06.880 actually have to make the sums add up well you do in the future but in the future yes by the time we

01:07:13.580 get to the future the only thing we'll need to make sure no when you're in the future the future

01:07:17.080 the future of the future is still the future of the future yes yes and it's it's if you think

01:07:22.360 about it everything beyond this very second right now is the future yes and that includes the next

01:07:28.200 second from when i finish the sentence and a million years from when i finish the sentence

01:07:33.120 well they actually put a number on it that is normally about three years out okay so in three

01:07:37.820 years the sums will add up and that and that's the fiscal rules except when we are three years

01:07:43.620 in the future in which case the sums will add up three years in the future from then

01:07:47.320 you see you see how it works we're just like constantly putting it off yes yeah yes so is

01:07:52.780 that why like the united states is in so much debt it just doesn't care because it's just well

01:07:57.480 i mean uh i mean there's lots of reasons there's also interest yes you have to pay on all of the

01:08:02.580 that as well yes but but the fiscal rules say that it should accept except the fiscal rules

01:08:07.840 do make an allowance for um capital expenditure so if you're going to build uh i don't know new

01:08:13.700 motorway or something and that's going to raise your growth in the future then you could bank

01:08:18.780 the uh benefit of that future taxation by spending now and then spend it it doesn't matter if the

01:08:26.520 thing actually produces more tax revenues in the future because you've accounted for it today

01:08:32.000 so i hope that all makes sense yes this doesn't sound like a very responsible way to manage an

01:08:38.040 economy well it's worked so far so i suppose we've not had a complete collapse yes um fiscal

01:08:46.240 headroom that's also worth talking about so um the fiscal headroom is okay so we know that the

01:08:53.360 future the sums are going to add up but what if what if there's a surplus in the future right

01:09:00.560 what if all of our projections on how stuff works are true and in the future there's a 15 billion

01:09:08.100 pound surplus well you don't want to be old-fashioned and boring and wait until you are

01:09:14.000 in the future and then spend the 15 billion what you want to do is identify that in the future

01:09:19.120 there will be a surplus of 15 billion and then spend it today what yes but but that's that's

01:09:27.800 your fiscal headroom so that's that's like me looking at my account and saying well i've only

01:09:32.960 got 100 pounds now but i know on payday i'll have a lot more yes so i'll spend it all now actually

01:09:38.960 yes yes on credit cards and then i have an interest to pay on the credit cards yes because

01:09:44.780 it would be incredibly boring to wait until you've actually got the money until you spend it

01:09:48.940 but then also isn't doesn't that cause the problem that by the time i get the 15 billion yes i'm just

01:09:54.820 paying back the 15 billion that i spent with interest well no because you can just borrow

01:09:59.600 it from the future and we never actually get to the future because the future is always in the

01:10:03.720 future we covered that sorry yes right so um anyway so i did note um while we're doing the

01:10:10.120 other segments that the fiscal headroom is unfortunately down so they did think that in

01:10:14.260 the future they were going to have 23.6 billion um and now they think they're only going to have

01:10:18.560 15 billion how do they even calculate this um because they say well because they say right okay

01:10:24.200 well look everybody is uh producing a bit of gdp and so we know that in the future they continue

01:10:31.820 to produce gdp and then we just get more people in and they will produce gdp but what's about all

01:10:37.460 of the people who are already here and that we'll bring in in the future who are not net

01:10:41.320 tax contributors which is quite a lot of people no you just you just you just no no no you don't

01:10:46.800 do it like that no no what you do is you take the stock of existing people and you say okay

01:10:52.880 well what are they producing when you divide it by the number of people and if you add somebody

01:10:57.720 from sudan they will obviously contribute at the same rate as somebody from kent

01:11:01.560 i can't argue with that well there you go it all makes sense doesn't it all make sense

01:11:07.580 um debt to gdp ratio we talked about that a bit um because you asked about that one but yeah

01:11:13.460 basically the debt and the gdp are about the same size so it all becomes about which one is growing

01:11:17.860 faster it's the debt uh fiscal drag that might come up as well so fiscal drag is basically where

01:11:26.440 you set a level so for example for high rate tax you're going to start paying high rate tax at this

01:11:31.500 level and then inflation happens and the value of that level isn't actually that much anymore

01:11:37.540 so you are dragged into tax so you might think okay well i'm not paid that much but oh bloody

01:11:43.840 how i'm now a high rate taxpayer well yeah i think the rate for 40 percent tax is what like

01:11:51.800 around 50 000 pounds in this country um and as part of this i saw it rumored that john healy was

01:11:58.220 going to increase the minimum wage yes if you worked a full-time job you'd be earning almost

01:12:03.980 28 000 pounds per year yes so if you work if you work stacking shelves full-time at asda

01:12:10.860 um 27 grand a year 16 yeah 16 years ago you'd have been on about 12 000 pounds a year which is

01:12:19.640 quite significant jump to 50 000 in that rate with your salary's gone up what 15 grand but

01:12:27.120 inflation has massively raised it and you know how far does it go until minimum wage is nearing or

01:12:33.740 close enough to 50 grand except the rate of tax is still going to be at 50 grand when are they

01:12:39.420 going to push up tax rates i mean in terms of the bands i mean yes you're exactly right are they

01:12:44.260 going to push up have they also announced that it's going to be pushed up to like 70 000 pounds

01:12:48.040 for 40 tax i haven't seen that i was i was keeping half an hour on it but i would be shocked if that

01:12:54.000 was the case normally they don't so yes the gap between somebody on minimum wage and somebody on

01:13:00.880 higher rate tax is now just 22 grand whereas it used to be almost 38 yes so so the difference

01:13:07.720 between somebody who is so poor that the government needs to intervene to top you up

01:13:12.500 is less than one minimum wage distance from somebody who is so rich that you have to pay

01:13:17.700 more to subsidize the state yes and and also because of this fiscal drag effect more and more

01:13:25.620 people are finding themselves as a high-rate taxpayer so also i mean we were talking about

01:13:30.940 the high streets earlier um that's money i mean the the government's not just going to give that

01:13:37.140 money to businesses to employ people the business the businesses have to pay that themselves which

01:13:43.200 will then mean their tax rates on employer tax is also going to go up um i don't know if he's

01:13:48.680 explicitly mentioned a an employer tax in this one but no in in terms of the actual gross numbers

01:13:54.660 that they're going to have to pay at the other end of it well if you're having to pay people more

01:13:57.780 the tax on that is going to add up to more at the end of it as well yes so that's just even more of

01:14:03.700 struggle for local businesses yes have they announced a complete scrapping of any and all

01:14:08.120 business rates no there was a little bit on business rates i will come to that all right

01:14:14.080 uh but no just wanted my theme theme on fiscal drag so when the higher rate tax was introduced

01:14:18.940 in 1988 the higher rate taxpayers a typical higher rate taxpayer was earning double the average wage

01:14:28.440 and now a higher rate taxpayer was earning about 30 more than the average wage

01:14:33.460 because of this compression so to put it in another way that might make sense

01:14:37.240 is when higher rate tax was introduced even a um a police chief inspector would not have paid higher

01:14:44.260 rate in fact only people who did would be police superintendents they just about crossed the higher

01:14:50.640 rate tax rate uh likewise um head teachers for example did not pay higher rate tax when it was

01:14:57.520 introduced whereas now police sergeants and ordinary teachers pay high rate tax and these

01:15:04.580 are back in years when the money they were earning was also just worth a lot more by itself

01:15:08.920 it's like everyone's losing out yes your your purchasing power parity would have been higher

01:15:15.900 you could you could have done more with that money as well um hmrc are now projecting that

01:15:21.920 about 8 million people will be higher rate taxpayers so quite conceivably you know you

01:15:27.560 could be one of those people especially if you're a young person you're a higher rate taxpayer but

01:15:31.660 you can't afford a new car or house which is which is a bit sus um so let's have a look at

01:15:40.420 what we got so far let's go to the we're going through some of this still oh there's lots of

01:15:48.060 spade not because she's talking now oh god i'm going to go back through previous pages

01:15:52.220 oh sod it i'll just do it for my notes right okay so um stuff that's already mentioned so that what

01:15:58.440 is the centerpiece of this budget well the centerpiece is that they are going to lower gas

01:16:02.980 bills oh okay by how much well they're going to remove the standing charge that you pay on

01:16:10.320 your gas because you know you've got a standing charge that you pay you pay like i don't know

01:16:14.960 whatever is 13p a day and then you pay for the usage of the gas so instead of charging you that

01:16:20.120 whatever it is 13p a day they'll just charge you more for your usage and that's and that's a tax

01:16:25.660 cut what how are they charging me more for the the usage well because instead of charging you

01:16:32.500 for a standing charge they just put the usage rate up so if you if you for example have a house

01:16:38.820 and you never use gas well you won't have to pay that 13p a day anymore if you do use gas your bill

01:16:43.920 will just be redistributed so you're going to end up paying more well if you use a lot i mean if i

01:16:49.340 mean if it's a second home and you're rarely there and you rarely use the gas well no you're going

01:16:53.880 to get a saving you could get all those 13 pences queued up and the rain is sorted yes so that is

01:16:59.420 the centerpiece of the budget so there you go a big tax saving which will save apparently people

01:17:04.040 108 pounds a year wow amazing yes um which is almost enough to buy you a week shopping if you

01:17:11.400 shop incredibly frugally so congratulations everybody don't go wild with your 108 pounds

01:17:17.180 unless you actually use gas in which case it won't actually make any difference to you

01:17:21.340 what about fuel bills fuel are they going to scrap the net zero levy that adds 25 percent

01:17:27.820 onto the fuel bill no i didn't see any of that no i didn't see any of that um i did see um extra

01:17:33.880 extra capital funding for state-backed lenders so that that's going to be

01:17:39.740 things like the British Business Bank okay so this this is like we've decided but there wasn't

01:17:45.920 enough growth so we're going to set up a business bank a British business bank and then we're going

01:17:50.260 to lend directly we're going to pick winners they're going to get a bit more money so an

01:17:54.620 extra 15 billion for them that's lovely well done completely irrelevant for everybody watching

01:17:58.880 unless you happen to have a company that you're starting and you want to get some state money

01:18:02.380 um devolution and regional borrowing so they said basically they want

01:18:07.400 local mayors to control more their budget

01:18:11.880 which is probably desperately exciting if you're into local mayors

01:18:16.820 or used to be a local mayor uh might might be less um exciting for everybody else now what

01:18:23.020 else have i got oh yeah um yeah growth uh has been downgraded a bit um 1.2 percent next year

01:18:30.120 and 1% the year after.

01:18:32.280 Which I still think, I mean, if we actually got 1%

01:18:34.500 two years in a row, that would be pretty

01:18:36.200 bloody good. I'd be

01:18:38.160 shocked. Yes. I think the mayor

01:18:39.960 thinks it's actually really concerning when you think about

01:18:42.260 how many areas in Britain have

01:18:44.180 been ethnically replaced by Muslims

01:18:46.000 and whose mayor is also a Muslim.

01:18:48.640 So it makes you think that

01:18:49.600 his budgets are going to go.

01:18:52.220 And control more of that budget.

01:18:54.100 Also, I thought the whole point of

01:18:55.840 GDP is supposed to be some kind of

01:18:58.260 collected measure in abstract terms it's supposed to be like a collective measure of

01:19:05.480 how much productive capacity how many actual things and how good the quality of life is

01:19:11.900 that your country is producing and has for its citizens um but if one percent of gdp growth

01:19:19.440 comes say from like i don't know the bank of england puts a load of money for some reason into

01:19:25.640 anthropic stocks on the ipo and they start to grow off of that yes that's not actually like

01:19:32.220 productive growth no i don't think that'd be captured anyway because what gdp is supposed

01:19:36.200 to measure is the value add at every stage in the economy yeah but so for example but there's no

01:19:41.480 there's no requirement but really it just measures consumption yeah because there's no requirement

01:19:46.840 for that to actual add add real value so for example if we were to spend a trillion pounds

01:19:52.780 building a bridge halfway across the atlantic and then we got halfway across and we realized no this

01:19:58.600 is a stupid idea we're going to stop this and we literally had a bridge to nowhere we'd have a

01:20:03.200 trillion pounds added to gdp but there's no requirement for that to actually be a useful 0.96

01:20:08.900 amount of spending but it would look good in the numbers which is important um yeah so uh just

01:20:15.120 reviewing my notes here um yeah growth is a bit boring your debt interest the amount we're spending

01:20:20.540 on debt uh that's up 14 billion whoa which is quite a lot well that's that's because um bond

01:20:28.880 rates keep going up because the people who lend us the money keep looking at these budgets and

01:20:33.400 thinking yeah but you're not ever going to pay this back are you so i want more i don't know

01:20:38.160 why they lend it so who are the people who like own the bond oh um insurance companies banks as

01:20:46.740 tier one capital it will be pension companies it will be foreign holders individuals i mean a whole

01:20:52.440 bunch of i mean some wealth funds will do it um bond funds there's a whole bunch of people who

01:20:56.800 might do it there's lots of people who buy those bonds and some of them are kind of basically

01:21:00.880 forced to because it's considered the safest form of capital so they're kind of obligated to like

01:21:06.360 pension companies insurance companies and banks so they're putting up interests at the expense of

01:21:10.740 their own country and the environment around them well the thing is if you if you're going to lend

01:21:16.320 your own money to the government i mean i wouldn't do it at six percent i would ask for a lot more

01:21:20.900 than that and and our bond yields were getting really out of control but then france decided to

01:21:27.460 pour gasoline all over its head and set itself on fire so the focus of the bond markets has kind of

01:21:33.960 shifted to france but still our rates are higher than we can afford which is to say historically

01:21:40.100 low um yeah oh there'll be oh yes i also saw something about a hundred pound energy payment

01:21:46.980 to um 20 million households so on top of your hundred pounds that you're getting by not paying

01:21:54.720 your standing charge and your gas apparently as an energy support payment will you know 20 million

01:22:00.720 households are going to get 100 quid what's the criterion for um council tax bans a to d i put

01:22:07.340 oh okay so i mean maybe that's real um okay so excellent so you know potentially you know you've

01:22:13.460 got you've got 200 pounds coming at you wow ladies and gentlemen you know um don't get too excited

01:22:19.400 um yeah the gas tank charge i did um electricity vat oh yeah so they're extending the uh temporary

01:22:26.040 zero percent rate on electricity until july 2027 so basically um you know we realize that people

01:22:32.700 are going to kick off because energy is getting a bit high so we're going to temporarily reduce

01:22:37.320 the vat on it um fuel duty they're extending the freeze on that we're not going to put your taxes

01:22:43.820 up on your fuel again until july 2027 so very exciting there oh and minimum wage yes uh that's

01:22:52.680 going to be up uh 3.9 so so they put that down as millions of young people getting a pay rise

01:22:57.920 if you're on minimum wage if the business that you work for doesn't go under yes well i mean

01:23:05.000 what minimum wage really does is it makes it illegal to have a job below the minimum wage

01:23:09.780 so if you can't sell your labor for more than that for more than it's worth for a company to

01:23:15.620 hire you then you just it's basically illegal to have a job and you can see that working in

01:23:21.380 something like mcdonald's you went into them 10 years ago it's full of basically students

01:23:25.360 and low low cost people and then they kept putting the minimum wage up and they said okay well we

01:23:30.820 just fit kiosks then that you type everything into because it's illegal to have a job if you

01:23:35.780 if you if you can't command a high enough uh wage um oh yes bank surcharge yeah because they need

01:23:42.220 they need to um they need to get some money from somewhere because obviously they're busy giving

01:23:46.160 away money now some of the money that they're giving away is money that they definitely will

01:23:49.820 have but in the future what's surcharge so banks basically got an extra they got an extra eight

01:23:55.840 slapped on them um after the financial crisis as a sort of screw you tax you know you can have some

01:24:01.920 extra tax on banks and that got taken down to three percent and healy has put it up to six

01:24:06.840 percent but he only put it up to six percent not eight percent so i would expect when i check to

01:24:12.300 find bank shares are up because they were expecting eight so there you go a bit more tax coming in

01:24:17.640 there uh business rates relief uh is going from 12,000 to 18,000 so if you've got a small

01:24:25.320 sweet shop um that you rent for about 18 grand a year congratulations you now don't have to pay

01:24:31.440 the the sweet shops probably weren't paying the business rates to begin with yes but if you if

01:24:35.320 you if you were inclined to pay it well now you don't have to well you get some relief anyway

01:24:41.280 that that could help some small businesses people who aren't going to pay tax now don't need to pay

01:24:46.080 tax but those those who are legitimate that is going to be some relief for them yes this way to

01:24:51.900 resolve the high street problem yes it's going to be it's going to be fairly small places i mean

01:24:56.680 you you have to be able to rent this thing for less than 18 grand a year so that is quite

01:25:01.320 quite a de minimis little little property um more requirements on on online marketplaces

01:25:09.220 collect vat oh this was exciting yes i saw this right so if you're not excited about your hundred

01:25:15.440 pounds that you're going to get from the government um they they have removed tariffs uh food tariffs

01:25:22.120 on a hundred products so when you next go into tesco's and it stocks like 80 000 different

01:25:29.220 products a hundred of those have had the tariffs taken off so it could potentially be a bit cheaper

01:25:34.780 could save some money yeah you could yeah i mean this is really racking up now isn't it i mean this

01:25:39.260 is this is a really transformational budget um housing um an additional 1.5 billion

01:25:46.180 for social and affordable houses

01:25:48.700 whole 1.5 billion that's that's lovely um yeah but the social housing is going to foreigners anyway

01:25:56.460 well yes but it's all gdp isn't it um so there you go um i mean i mean i'll go through the

01:26:05.720 document later and i'll do brokonomics on it and i'll talk about it on breakfast about tomorrow but

01:26:09.640 but basically i'm not really seeing anything i mean there's no there's nothing fundamental

01:26:14.600 has happened here no it just feels so performative like they want to be seen as doing something when

01:26:19.760 they just don't actually care well it's exactly what i expected fiddling at the margins well

01:26:24.300 there were two so the one thing i wanted to figure out looking at this is is this a holding

01:26:30.880 pattern budget for we we don't want to upset people for now i think they might have done

01:26:38.540 the minimum to stop the bond markets from preferring a complete hissy fit because they

01:26:43.560 have done some tax rises when obviously they haven't cut any spending we were running a

01:26:48.280 massive deficit of like 100 over 100 um billion a year so you would think okay if i mean if you

01:26:55.180 were spending if you were spending four percent more of your salary than you than you earned

01:26:59.340 every year you think okay well i need to cut my spending by four percent it would make sense they

01:27:05.380 haven't done that but they have raised some taxes for some reason they can't cut spending but but

01:27:12.380 they probably have done the minimum to stop the bond market revolting and the thing i was looking

01:27:16.200 at is okay is this a we're just going to kick the can down the road budget or is this a election

01:27:22.200 budget sounds like a kick the can budget yes it does look more like a kick the can budget than

01:27:29.160 an election budget so would would the prediction have been if it was an election budget maybe they

01:27:34.780 are going to announce a snap election i would have expected to see more giveaways if there was a snap

01:27:39.980 election coming but by the same token he hasn't really upset anybody by doing anything i mean

01:27:46.060 it's just okay here's 100 quid and here's another 100 quid as long as you don't actually use the

01:27:51.600 gas after we've given you the 100 quid in which case is you might actually end up paying more

01:27:55.380 and and it's i mean there's there's not really a lot there so so the hundred quid giveaway might

01:28:00.760 cancel out the hundred quid giveaway and don't forget those hundred things in tesco's if you

01:28:08.560 can find them now have slightly lower tariffs on them i'll be keeping an eye out yes so yeah so

01:28:14.860 it's probably a kick the can down the road um and leaves his options open if he wants to go for a

01:28:19.660 budget um one other thing i will talk about though and like i said i will have a because

01:28:24.340 it's very possible you know like i said with the defense spending he was able to announce a bit

01:28:29.080 more defense spending but then i went in that's the one thing that i did have time to go and check

01:28:32.680 the the table in the budget it's not he's just reallocating capital spending from elsewhere to

01:28:38.120 the defense budget to make it look like he's put the defense spending up he hasn't it's just a

01:28:42.440 capital capital reallocation um the and so i will i will do a proper breakdown on brokonomics and

01:28:49.520 i'll do a bit more breakfast with bow tomorrow but i also did see um what would it look like

01:28:55.200 if we were to actually change something so um rupert published this um you know what he would

01:29:03.740 do with a budget and it's a bit long so i'll i'll give you the i'll give you the top line summary

01:29:09.180 um and see if this sounds a bit different to what labour have just done

01:29:13.540 he's proposing spending reductions of 180 billion where would those reductions come from well there's

01:29:21.780 there's a whole bunch of different places that would come from but i mean i'll give you a couple

01:29:25.000 um off the top of my head so um 80 billion off welfare spending um 20 billion off net zero and

01:29:32.400 45 billion off quangos like off common that sort of nonsense so i mean that i mean that is a material

01:29:38.780 change cutting spending by 180 billion and cutting taxes by about 160 billion and as you can see

01:29:45.340 there's a difference between the two which would throw us into surplus which would be necessary to

01:29:49.140 start even slightly paying down the debt so that this is this is what a transformative budget would

01:29:56.160 actually look like this is actually this is a putting us on the right track budget um he he

01:30:01.980 also talked about the ambition of getting which he would plan to do over two parliaments so you

01:30:07.740 know less than 10 years um get the debt the sorry the share of gdp which the state is down from 45

01:30:17.020 to 33 now to put that in terms that make sense to people um at the moment capitalist britain

01:30:26.880 is spending a higher proportion of its gdp on the state than communist china and when i say more

01:30:35.700 i mean 50 percent more so so their um their proportion of gdp that goes on the state is

01:30:42.940 is about 33 and ours is 45 so we're half again bigger than communist china in terms of state

01:30:49.880 spending if the store were to get in um our spending would be cut by about a third down

01:30:58.720 to the point where we're now spending only as much as communist china um which is good we would

01:31:04.660 it would even be lower than places like russia united states japan and south korea but can they

01:31:11.380 do that would that not annoy um the bankers who benefit from interests and so on um i think overall

01:31:20.500 the bank should probably like it because it would stop us from going bust in a very messy way but it

01:31:25.860 does mean cuts to things like welfare and net zero and quangos so if you work for a quango

01:31:32.500 you might not want to vote for a store if you're on benefits you might not want to vote for a store

01:31:36.820 and if you're making lots of money off net zero you might not want to vote for the store but if

01:31:41.380 you have kids and grandkids you might want to because they're basically saying we're not going

01:31:46.260 to do the the labor thing of you know we're going to borrow from the future and then as soon as it

01:31:51.540 looks like there's anything in the future we're going to borrow that as well they're saying

01:31:55.860 actually know we're going to we're going to fix the ship so that is better so anyway um yeah tune

01:32:02.640 in tomorrow for breakfast with bow and i'll go through this once i've had time to actually read

01:32:06.800 the paper and i know what the hell i'm talking about well thank you very much for that dan we've

01:32:11.280 gone a little bit over but uh have we got any video comments samson

01:32:15.700 i really don't understand economics

01:32:20.900 head huts uh habs can we just bring on the economic collapse at this point because that's

01:32:27.160 where we're heading anyway unless everything goes to poo in 2030 i suspect 2030 is the special year

01:32:32.400 random name maybe we should give our debt to africa uh it's in the trillions it's not like

01:32:37.640 there'll no difference and also want all order uh harry and now time for dan's live budget reaction

01:32:43.340 dan immediately pulls a handgun from under the table and holds it to his head harry and liz spend

01:32:48.420 the rest of the segment talking him down. Nah, I'd get it. Let's go on to the video comments.

01:33:18.420 on your door before an all-clear alert is broadcast, visually verify that their body

01:33:23.060 has not been hijacked by a floater.

01:33:25.600 What in the A.I. slop?

01:33:28.180 That was a little public service announcement for everybody out there.

01:33:36.220 Alongside Fusion Energy, one of the Midian race's greatest achievements is the Alchemist.

01:33:43.220 augmented warrior capable of telekinesis the most powerful can even transmute matter

01:33:50.660 these abilities are made possible by the megan device housed within a mechanical prosthesis

01:33:56.660 implanted directly into the brain the megan device is the essential link between the

01:34:02.340 alchemist's mind and the power they wield you say a megan device as in merkel is that what you said

01:34:12.580 well check that out if you're interested it's the cat ai hey lotus here's hopefully that budget of

01:34:18.340 yours that the government just pushed down wasn't too harsh on you so i have a question for you

01:34:23.700 um i just heard a german term that i think is like really um insulting but also really useful

01:34:30.500 bobo um it's a term for the um you know the upper middle class people who've been like

01:34:36.660 running culture and politics

01:34:38.780 for the last few years.

01:34:40.440 Mind you, I wish

01:34:42.720 to expand upon it, but go check out

01:34:44.760 Burnt Toast. He's real good on it.

01:34:48.740 Thank you very much, and the

01:34:50.680 cats are delightful as ever.

01:34:53.060 As we've gone over, that's all we've got

01:34:54.540 time for today, everybody watching, so

01:34:56.720 thank you all very much.

01:34:58.520 Again, and for Dan's live

01:35:00.740 react, if you want more on that, once he's

01:35:02.720 read up a little bit more on it, you can

01:35:04.760 check out the next Brokonomics when that comes out.

01:35:06.380 There's massive spending cuts in the document that I just missed.

01:35:09.140 Yeah, or you can tune in tomorrow live for Breakfast with Beau with Dan.

01:35:14.460 Yes.

01:35:15.240 Yes, and outside of that, thank you very much, Liz, for coming in, as ever.

01:35:19.640 It's been a pleasure, and thank you all for watching today.

01:35:22.760 I've been Harry. Take care. See you next time.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - October 28, 2026

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1537

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