u/Ranter191901

“What a friend we have in Kemi,

All our sins and grief’s to bear.”

 

My apologies to the Christians among you, but the very rich really do have a friend in Kemi Badenoch despite their many sins and grief’s.

SINS: Greed has to be right up there. In fact it is one of the seven Deadly Sins of the Bible. Greed is considered deadly not because it is the worse sin, but because it’s seen as a root vice – something that distorts judgement, corrodes compassion, and leads to other moral failings.

 Excessive self-interest is a second sin. Accumulating wealth far beyond any practical need while resisting higher taxation or fairer distribution is simply immoral, especially when others suffer as a result of your personal avarice. Many of our super-rich structure their lives (residency, trusts, offshore vehicles, etc) to minimise tax contributions to the very society they profit from.

 Hubris is a third: There is an assumption that financial success proves moral superiority, intelligence or entitlement to political power. It doesn’t.

 Exploitation: accumulating wealth by employing labour practices that keep wages deliberately low, job prospects insecure, poor working conditions, and unions weak.

 Evasion: using loopholes in the law to avoid taxes whilst insisting they have “done nothing wrong” and are simply “playing by the rules”.

 Detachment and neglect: living in a social bubble so insulated that ordinary hardship becomes invisible or abstract. In this way they can ignore the social consequences of the inequality they are responsible for – under-funded public services, child poverty, housing shortages, two-tier education system, etc.

 Hypocracy: while publicly supporting social causes they privately petition, lobby and structure their finances to avoid contributing  to them.

 Put in a nutshell they take from a society they refuse to sustain, wherein they enjoy the benefits of Britain while dodging the bill.

 What about the “grief’s” they have to bear?

 Well, to be honest, not many the rest of us are burdened with. According to Binder Dijker Otte’s  (BDO) “WealthAnalysis: A psychological study of trust in the lives of the wealthy” (2026) the super-rich are loaded with non-material griefs. Their biggest worries being uncertainty, conflict and instability, not tax bills.

 They trust no one, not even members of their own families. A staggering 90% of wealthy families reported disagreements over wealth. They suffer emotional grief at the thought of tax avoidance relocation moves. This produces stress, guilt and fractured family geography. The majority worry about inheritance tax, land value tax replacing council tax, and a reduction in the lifetime gifting allowance. Surprisingly, only 2% of the very wealthy thought UK tax levels were unreasonable or too high.

This hasn’t stopped Kemi Badenoch coming to their rescue. She has promised to abolish inheritance tax, and said that couples should be able to leave an additional £1million tax-free, on top of the value of their home. She plans to cut employer national insurance payments, and give the wealthy full access to child benefits. In addition she has promised there will be no mansion tax (even though one doesn’t actually exist).

 The super-wealthy really do have a friend in Kemi. She is handing them at least £6 billion in tax cuts. This massive sum of money, says St Kemi*, “is to be paid for by cuts…including the welfare bill.”*

 I have been accused on this forum of being “ignorant” and maybe I am. But surely, a tax break is no different in substance to welfare payments? Both a tax break and a welfare payment make someone better off, maybe in different ways, but someone ends up with more money in their pocket. What I truly do not understand is why it is laudable to give the already rich more money than it is to help the poor? In fact, in this instance St Kemi deliberately intends to make the poor poorer by taking money from their pockets to swell the coffers of the rich.

 Clearly, Kemi Badenoch and the Tory Party fully advocate this verse from All Things Bright and Beautiful:

 “The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them high and lowly,

And ordered their estate.” 

 Kemi Badenoch has criticised Burnham for wanting “a return to the 1970’s for Gods sake”: she wants to take the country back to an even earlier period when the poor, begging bowls in hand, knew their proper place.

Have you noticed how the savings made by scrapping the triple lock safety net for pensioners are always presented?

“Triple lock reform could save £19 billion a year by mid 2030’s” (Intergenerational Foundation: 18/05/26)

“Keeping the triple lock on pensions will cost an extra £20bn a year by 2050, according to a leading think tank.” (Telegraph: 09/09/26)

The point to be made here is that the large figures being quoted are estimate future savings over a long period of time. As with all estimates, the amount calculated to be saved varies from one study to the next because they – Intergenerational Foundation, IFS, Resolution Foundation, OBR – all use different models for their calculations. This is why the amount saved varies so wildly.

The reason the estimated savings are always related to several years down the line is because that way those who want the triple lock abolished can quote big numbers. A saving of ”£80 billion “ sounds so much better than “£650 million per year saved by the end of the current Parliament”.

This latter figure comes from the Resolution Foundation. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but this Parliament has two years to run so the immediate yearly savings made if the triple lock were to be scrapped today would be £650 million, divided by 2, which is £375 million per year.

A saving of £350million per year is hardly a figure to get excited about: so much better to quote a saving of £80 billion over 50 years as the OBR has done: people remember the figure but not the time frame it refers to.

The triple lock provides real security to pensioners in the form of a guaranteed annual increase, protection against inflation, prevention of political interference in the amount of money paid to pensioners, and support for lower-income retirees. Burnham should be defending the triple lock not attacking it.

In the same way Starmer set about pensioners immediately he entered office by trying to scrap the Winter Fuel allowance, so Burnham's debut as PM is marked by him attacking pensioners by scrapping the triple lock.

I agree whole-heartedly with Sharon Graham of Unite who said that scrapping the triple lock is “morally wrong” and that Labour should stop “picking the pockets of pensioners”. She said the government should “move to the other side of the equation” and consider wealth taxes instead of cutting pension protections.

A wealth tax of 1% on UK billionaires would raise an estimated £5 - £6 billion, more than enough to cover the cost of the pensioner triple lock. I just don’t understand why Labour is so afraid of the mega rich.

The hard maths of the OBR/Treasury model tells us that excluding all other pension payments the triple lock element only accounts for an increase of £15 billion by the year 2040. - £625 million per year. One can only assume that cutting the triple lock is only one of many cuts to pensioner payments to come.

Shame on you Mr Burnham.

 I know facts rarely win an argument but here are a few for us to ponder regarding the pension triple lock.

 The State Pension Triple Lock is a rule guaranteeing that the State Pension rises each April by the highest of: CPI inflation as measured each September; average earnings growth (May-June); or 2.5% minimum increase.

 The Triple Lock was introduced in 2011 to stop the State Pension falling behind wages and prices after decades of erosion. The key decline in State pension value happened because Thatcher’s 1980 reform switched up-rating from earnings to RPI inflation, which is almost always lower than wage growth. Over 30 years, this created a large gap.

 Having created conditions that made the UK State Pension scheme one of the least generous in Europe, the Tory Party found that many of its eldest key supporters were now turning to other parties. Pensioners are the UK’s highest-turnout voting bloc so to help shore up their traditional core vote the Tories introduced the Triple Lock.

 15 years on and politicians and political commentators from ALL parties are calling for it to be scrapped as it is claimed it is too expensive and is ruining the economy.

 “The triple lock is dead…Burham announces shake-up to pensions payments as Labour seeks to rein in the costs” (Telegraph: 29/09/26)

 Is the triple lock really that expensive that we are prepared to withdraw the income security it provides for our elderly? Lets look at the mathematical facts.

 In 1976 the State Pension accounted for 4% of GDP . Fifty years later, it is 5% of GDP, a year on year increase of 0.02%. Hardly an economic or mathematical increase that is “unsustainable” as some commentators argue.

 Here is another untruth.

 Those that argue for the abolition of the Triple Lock often use the figure covering ALL old-age protection payments: state pension; pension credit; pensioner housing benefit; winter fuel allowance; free bus pass; TV licence concessions; age related social care; attendance allowance; and carers allowance.

 In addition, and all too often, those who want to abolish the Triple Lock also include NHS and social care costs for pensioners as part of their calculations. This is why a figure of 13% of GDP is often quoted in relation to the cost of pensions. This is grossly misleading.

 The State Pension itself is 5% of GDP and has hardly risen in the last 50 years. It is all of the other old age benefits that have added to the total payments to pensioners. The Triple lock applies ONLY to the state pension. It DOES NOT cover any of the other pensioner payments.

 But their are other misleading arguments. .Just this week I heard a political journalist stating that it was unfair on workers for old age pensioners to be receiving an increase in their pensions that was higher than the average wage rise. Really?

 The average wage in the UK is £38,000 - £44,000. The average state pension is £12,548.  Even a numerical imbecile can see that an equal percentage rise for both would leave the average worker with a far better increase in income than the pensioner. Even if the pensioner were to receive a 5% increase while the average worker received a 2.5% increase, the worker would still be paid a greater amount than the pensioner.

 As I say, facts rarely convince anyone of what is right or wrong but here are a few more anyway.

 On the face of it you would think pensioners would never be worse off than the year before as payments are pegged to inflation if that is higher than 2.5% or average earnings growth. Not so.

 The inflation rate used to calculate the state pension is the rate in September of the previous year.  The September inflation rate can be 3% (which is likely to be the case this September) but the winter inflation rate could be higher. It depends on when the inflation rate spikes.

 For example, in 2021-22 the September rate was 3.1%  but it rose dramatically after that to 5-7% and then 11%. What is more the inflation metric for calculating pensions is the Consumer Prices Index (CPI). This measure of inflation does not include things like rent, mortgages, council tax or home insurance. Rents and mortgages in particular regularly rise much faster and higher than the CPI. Last year, for example, rent inflation was between 4-6%, while mortgage interest payments rose by a massive 30-40% driven by Bank of England rate increases.

 Clearly, the Triple Lock is not the pensions panacea it is sometimes made out to be. Nor are British state pensions as generous as some politicians would have us believe. The UK state pension is both smaller and less generous than most EU systems.  UK retirees receive about 54% of their pre-retirement earnings compared to the EU average of 68%. Even with the Triple Lock increases, UK pensioner’ get far less in cash terms than their peers in countries like Luxemburg, Denmark or the Netherlands. In addition, many EU countries have a lower retirement age than the UK, whereby their pensioners’ not only receive more money than UK pensioners but they do so from and earlier age.

 Let us remember that the full State Pension is only £12,548 a year. Many pensioners already rely upon extra benefits over and above the state pension to prevent poverty, disability hardship, cold‑related illness, social isolation, and housing insecurity. They are hardly in a position to see the value of their pensions eroded by cutting the protection provided by the triple lock.

 

The UK’s electricity sector – generation, transmission, distribution, and retail supply-  is a complicated mess. It is structurally fragmented, slow, and increasingly unable to meet demand.

 The House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee (2025-26) said the grid is:

 "not currently equipped to support the nation’s clean energy transition or digital ambitions.”

 The consistent verdict from Parliament and the National Audit Office (NAO) is that the system is not fit for purpose for net-zero or modern electricity needs.

Neither Parliament Committees nor the NAO blame net-zero policies for the high price we pay for our electricity. Neither do they expose the true reason why British electricity bills are so astronomically high: privatisation.

 A brief history.

 Before privatisation the Central Electricity Generation Board (CEGB) which was responsible for generation, transmission, and wholesale sales of electricity, operated on a profit margin of 2.7% return on assets. A 2.7% profit rate is extremely low by private sector standards (as we shall see) but it was set deliberately low because the goal was the provision of a cheap public electricity service. In the same vein, the return on investments was set low at 5% because the CEGB valued long-term savings and was willing to invest in expensive infrastructure if it reduced future operating costs. 

 In short, it favoured high capital operating cost technologies that produced cheaper electricity.

 Privatisation changed this dramatically. Private companies expected at least a 10-12% profit margin and choose cheaper-to-build but more expensive-to-run technology. The higher profit margins increased the costs to consumers directly. Choosing cheap-to-build technologies delayed the need for new infrastructure, which delayed grid investment, which then caused a mismatch between the grid a and renewable supplies, leaving us with massive, urgent, expensive upgrades, that we are all now paying for.

 End of history lesson

 Far from privatisation being economically more efficient as the advocates of free-market capitalism insist, it has led to us paying billions of pounds more to the electricity sector than we need.

 Some stark facts.

 Across a raft of reliable evidence, the privatised UK electricity sector extracts roughly £8 - £10 billion per year in profits.  This is equal to £400 - £500 per household. That is a profit margin of 23% - 38% depending on which part of the sector is looked at. To make matters worse, most of the profits extracted form the UK consumer go to foreign investors – foreign governments, overseas billionaires and global investment funds.

 So next time you hear a Reform UK or Tory politician arguing the country cannot afford net-zero/green-policy costs remember that the easiest way to cut consumer energy bills would be for the electricity sector to extract less in profit. If they cut their profits by 50% consumers would save at least £200 per year and they would still be making £4bn - £5bn for their shareholders.

 

 N.B.It is also worth noting that as from now (April 2026) most net-zero/green-policy costs   no longer appear on our electricity bills. These costs are being met out of general taxation, the typical UK household now only paying  £25 -£35 per year towards net-zero/green policy costs.