The opening claim was that fiscal control is the first duty of a Chancellor. The obvious question to ask is, why? That is not a rhetorical question. Instead, it is because I think that a Chancellor’s first responsibility is to create a prosperous, resilient and fair economy.
After all, why should controlling the government’s finances be considered more important than maintaining full employment? Or ensuring the delivery of decent public services? Or tackling climate change? Or investing in the country’s future?
Managing the public finances is one of the tools available to achieve those objectives, but it cannot be the objective itself. Confusing an instrument of delivery with the purpose of activity has become one of the defining characteristics of Treasury thinking. And that confusion has consequences, because once fiscal control becomes the goal rather than the means, every other ambition the government might have is subordinated to it. To open your description of the job you plan to do with a category error is quite something, but Healey managed it.
So the Minister specifically there to do the fiscal bit – other ministers deliver public services etc – is not to do the fiscal bit job?
Seems odd.
Note that under MMT the Chancellor is still there to do the fiscal bit. Sure, spend away, then tax back to prevent the inflation. OK, someone still has to do that fiscal bit, right? The Chancellor…..
It’s another glorious example of the left seeing the world as they would like it to be rather than how it is.
“We would like money to be unlimited” vs. “Resources are scarce”
Why are you so stupid?
“prosperous, resilient and fair”
Isn’t that one of those ‘pick any two’ things, like quick, cheap and good?
None of the things he lists are going to happen anyway. Well maybe the green crap, but that’s wrecking the others.
Well maybe the green crap
You might have diarrhea there. Eat more absorbant foods, such as cake.
They’ll tax cake. UPF, innit?
Not UPF, just PF: eggs, flour, butter and whatever you want the cake to taste of – no UPF there for normal cooks.
If a vegan made a cake it would presumably be UPF but normal humans can make cakes that aren’t.
You forgot sugar…. Which makes it an UPF *and* Taxable under the Sugar Tax…
Honey cakes don’t have added sugar.
A normal cake is NOT an UPF, but is liable to sugar tax
This is the entire problem. The chancellor, as originally, should be there to count the kings meagre resources and leave everyone else to get on with it.
The very definition of the government’s – ANY government’s – tax collector is to, well duh COLLECT TAXES. Gather INCOME.It’s not the job of the tax collector to have opinions or direct where the money is spent – indeed I would say it’s treasonous to trespass on the executive’s power that way.
Correct.
Managing the public finances is one of the tools available to achieve those objectives, but it cannot be the objective itself.
When it’s your fooking job, yes, it is the objective.
How is “fookin” pronounced?
Is there a chance that he doesn’t actually know what ‘fiscal’ means?
“When I use the word ‘fiscal’, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” Cheshire Spud.
Pendant Alert: Humpty Dumpty.
If you compare a picture of Murphy with Humpty Dumpty and The Cheshire Cat it is quite obvious which looks more like the overweight individual from Ely.
100% chance. Literally every thing he writes on a subject shows you that he knows nothing about the subject – or else he’d know better than to write the drivel he just wrote on the subject.
Half of his writing is him ‘discovering’ something that’s been known for 200+ years – and getting it wrong.
I’ve been thinking about this ‘full employment’ shtick that the Left always go on about. Job Guarantees etc. And I think there’s now a real opportunity for the Right to steal the Left’s clothes here AND save money on welfare.
What if the State offered a job to anyone who wanted one? £30k/yr say. The kicker being thats it. You take the job, or get nothing. I’m not sure what you’d do with them, hire some empty office space and set them to work writing out the Encyclopaedia Britannica in long hand or something like that. Proper work rules, don’t turn up, eventually you get fired etc etc. Steal from your employer or assault work colleagues, police called, arrested, then fired. No more State job for you.
My guess is that this would reduce the amount of people the State had to pay by about 50% at a minimum. Very few of the welfare classes want to have to get up at 7am to get to work by 9. And spend the day doing something they hate. They want free money and housing so they can sit in front of their fuck off sized TVs smoking dope and drinking Stella. Or they are already working in the black economy, so couldn’t take a State job if offered one. You can only be one place at a time.
Its a revised version of my Welfare Barn™ concept, whereby anyone wanting welfare had to turn up and sit in a big shed for 8 hours and get paid at the end of the day. Only dressed up in the words the Left constantly use themselves, so couldn’t really complain about. I reckon you could offer a quite decent salary, and still make savings because the drop out rate would be stupendously high.
Completely off topic, sorry, but one for those who say there are no conspiracies and that all the shit that’s happening is merely the result of idiocy*.
Peter Daszak is a British-born zoologist and ‘disease ecologist’, who ran EcoHealth Alliance, a ‘nonprofit focused on pandemic prevention’, until January 2025.
EcoHealth Alliance collaborated for more than 15 years with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Daszak was principal investigator on US government grants funding bat coronavirus research in China, starting in 2014.
He was also part of the WHO team which went to Wuhan in early 2021 to ‘investigate’ the pandemic’s origins, having organised a 2020 letter in The Lancet condemning lab-leak theories as ‘conspiracy theories’ without disclosing his WIV involvement.
Many of that letter’s signatories were scientists who expressed privately their belief that the lab leak was the most likely explanation, but they were persuaded, in emails that were later leaked, publicly to state the opposite view.
Since then, a House Select Subcommittee investigation has found that Daszak was indeed deeply involved in the gain-of-function experiments that created the virus.
We now find that the US Border Patrol had plans to detain Daszak for questioning on his return from Wuhan in 2021, and to ask him among other things:
Why he was chosen to be on the WHO investigative team in the first place.
Where in China he went.
What happened in Wuhan.
Whether he took there or brought back any biological samples.
The nature of his contacts with anyone at the WIV.
All serious questions which one might think the US’s premier law enforcement organisations, and the US government itself, would want answered, in contact of a global pandemic that he had clearly had a major hand in causing.
Instead, it now transpires that for some strange reason the FBI ordered that Daszak be allowed back in to the US without questioning.
Later, of course, the man who drove the whole project – illegally, using US money – Anthony Fauci, was given a pardon dating back to January 1 2014 – conveniently beginning with the start date of the NIH grant which funded the bat coronavirus research in Wuhan, grant AI110964, which was the EcoHealth Alliance award on which Daszak was the principal investigator.
We now know, through leaks and enquiries which are ongoing, that elements of the US government funded and worked on the creating of COVID-19, in secret, and tried to shut down any investigation both of that and the leak (whether deliberate or accidental).
It could, of course, all just be one big set of amazing coincidences and no-one said to the FBI, ‘Don’t let them question Daszak’, the FBI just thought it wasn’t a matter of interest all on their own, because who cared where Covid came from?
Fauci is due to testify to Congress very shortly, and, like all honest former government employees with nothing to hide, he will almost certainly invoke the fifth amendment and refuse to answer.
*It should go without saying that I don’t dispute that western governments are rammed full of idiots, as well.
he will almost certainly invoke the fifth amendment and refuse to answer
Problem:
Fauci, was given a pardon dating back to January 1 2014
Pleading the 5th for what you have already been pardoned for is legally sticky.
Yes, but he was pardoned by President Autopen, which is also possibly legally sticky.
Agreed. But it would be odd for him to declare, “No! No! I wasn’t really pardoned!”
As below, the pardon only applies to federal crimes. If he has a reasonable fear of prosecution by an individual state for offences committed while in its jurisdiction he can certainly use the fifth (and it’s not an admission of guilt to do so).
Additionally, there have been serious voices – including Trump’s I think – which have talked about finding some way to revoke the pardon.
He’d just have to show that this was a reasonable apprehension, and it seems to me that he might be able to do so.
His big fear – if he doesn’t invoke it – is that he will either have to admit everything or lie, and if he lies before Congress that’s perjury and a serious offence. I don’t see how he can not invoke it, but let’s see.
He won’t have a reasonable fear of state prosecution because the vast majority of stuff he was doing doesn’t have analogues in our (multiple) state legal systems.
The problem with perjury is that he’d have to be charged and convicted.
Fauci is currently 85.
How likely would it be to go through a trial, convict and exhaust appeals before he dies?
Admittedly he might not want to spend his life in court, but I suspect his treatment is likely to be a lot better than e.g. Trump’s in New York.
85 ?!?!
Why bring him in at all? There is nothing of value to be learned.
Fauci can’t invoke the fifth if he’s asked about stuff he’s been pardoned for. No jeopardy, see?
The pardon only applies to federal crimes. If he has a reasonable fear of prosecution by an individual state for offences committed while in its jurisdiction he can certainly use the fifth (and it’s not an admission of guilt to do so).
What states has he been in while committing crimes? There’s likely only two or three.
You can’t be convicted of murder in Montana if it happened in Florida. Which is why there’s sometimes a parallel federal case of “violation of rights”. Which is federal.
You can’t plead the 5th for things you have been pardoned/immunized for. Its a long-standing legal tradition in the US.
He can be compelled to testify under oath because nothing that he did (during the dates the pardon covers) can be used against him in criminal proceedings.
In time of war, the Chancellor’s first duty is to help the nation survive.
In time of peace, the Chancellor’s duty is to manage the government’s finances.
There is no way a government can create a prosperous resilient and fair economy- the best it can do is to reduce the obstacles put in the way by previous governments.
How many civil servants does it take to manufacture a light bulb?
<insert number> to screw it up?
*Manufacture*
*manufracture*
Arguably the most telling sentence was this one:
‘That absence of thought matters. I described him in that same article as “a man to perpetuate the status quo.” That’s what people who have not thought do: they note the rules, and work within them.’
If reality exists we need to rewrite the rules so that it’s overridden….
Because he was hired to do the former, not the latter? And the latter is beyond his scope of authority?
How would The Tater like it if his cleaning lady took it upon herself to rent out his spare bedroom on the theory that its more important and productive use than using it as an office?