My new book 'Collapse of the Conservatives: Volatile Voters, Broken Britain and a Punishment Election' is published today! You can get a copy at amzn.to/48fzWsp

On Thursday I wrote about the 2014 injunction Russell Brand obtained against a woman who accused him of assault.

I've now obtained the final order. It's breathtaking.

She had no lawyer. No trial. Yet she was silenced for life - even barred from speaking to the police.

🧵:

"Just before it was nationalised 94 per cent of its [c2c's] trains arrived within five minutes of the scheduled time. The latest available data from this August showed this had dropped to just under 71.5 per cent of trains."

What a depressing Labour u-turn on the extension of ILR for Boriswave care workers. It’s not just the huge cost heading our way, it’s the way that care workers are singled out for the sentimental treatment we usually reserve for NHS nurses. For our own benefit as a country we need the average carer to be better paid, better trained, and higher status (I recently wrote a book partly about this The Care Dilemma). But we don’t have to pretend they are all angels: there are some who are v good, most who are average and too many who are useless, as in any walk of life. The immigrant carers are coming here for a better life from poorer often failing societies not because they love looking after British people. In my own last hospital stay most the care assistants were Boriswave women, mostly from Africa - some decent some indifferent - but ALL spoke quite poor and v heavily accented English that was sometimes hard to understand and unless I spoke slowly and deliberately they struggled to understand me. This is obviously a sensitive issue that many people experience but don’t feel able to talk about (though it must be reflected in those low satisfaction surveys), partly because a carer has helped you when you are vulnerable and there is a kind of reflex gratitude even if the care has actually been a bit sloppy or incompetent (and you also feel you’re getting it free so shouldn’t moan, even if you’re paying more and more in tax). Yet it’s crazy that we are spending billions subsidising this when we could be using the money to incentivise British ppl, who speak the language fluently and understand the culture, to do these jobs.

Here's one of the things @beeboileau and I found in our @TheIFS overnight analysis of the Budget. Healey has now allocated much of the spending reserve for the next few years, including to fund the Defence Investment Plan. This is categorically not what the reserves are for.

Indeed. This is what poorly thought through regulation does. This set of changes has made us poorer. This will particularly hit young people. Governments doing real damage.

📈 @OBR_UK now forecasts 10.8 million people will pay the higher or additional rate of income tax by March 2031.

This is 6 million more than if the higher rate threshold had risen with CPI inflation since 2022, and 250,000 more than the OBR forecast in March.

This puts into perspective. You can see average income growth over a 60 year period. This decade by the far the worst. Even worse than in 2010s which, at the time, were the worst in post war history.

Hidden away in the OBR report is this concerning graph showing housing completions - looks like even their reduced forecast is optimistic.

Plus rents and mortgages are going to get more expensive due to interest rates + the extra property tax.

BREAKING

The OBR suggests that successive increases in the national living wage and the employment rights act will hit jobs

It says the employment right act will have a ‘negative economic impact’ and hit businesses through ‘increased uncertainty, lost flexibility and higher It says that these will ‘more than offset’ any potential increase in productivity

📽️Here's our mega screen on this year's mega Budget. LOADS of charts on what was, depending on how you look at it, either the biggest or the smallest Budget in modern history.
But arguably the biggest story of all is what it says about the shocking state of UK living standards👇

BREAKING

The OBR says the tax raid on landlords - increasing property income tax rates by another 2% - will:

1) Make it less likely that people become landlords, ‘reducing long term rental supply’ and leading to a ‘steady long-term rise in rents’

2) See landlords simply pass creasing rents

Govt wrong to keep the Plan 2 student loan threshold frozen at £29,385 for three years.

This means more graduates on low incomes paying a 37% marginal tax rate and no effort to repair a breach of trust.

OBR chart on real household disposable income growth over the decades. Just wow

Here's the real story of this Budget, the can being kicked down the road. This Labour government is apparently planning spending cuts on most areas of public service spending of 2.6% per year between 2028-29 and 2031-32.

Pull the other one. It's got bells on.

The tax burden is forecast to rise to yet another record level as fiscal drag continues to drive up revenues

They are now forecast to rise from 41.4 per cent of GDP this year to 42.9 per cent in 2031/32

Healey is increasing the tax on income from property and savings by two percentage points

Only a tiny upgrade to growth forecast this year. Much bigger downgrade next year to just 1%

I wrote about fiscal devolution in @thetimes yesterday. Also drew attention to the absolutely abysmal way in which this govt has treated much of local government over the last two years. Genuinely scandalous.

Against a target of 1.5 million homes built in five years, we are on track for 856,000 (57%). Such an abject failure would in any other venture require an urgent change of strategy. Here, they just quietly abandon the target.

ft.com/content/285af4…

There is nothing socialist about a system of free movement that is used by multi-nationals to undermine wages. WATCH my Brexit speech today.