The Sunday Ishmael: 30/11/2025

 The rabble cheered, waved their order papers and congratulated themselves on forcing the Chancellor to bend to their will. The House was in uproar and had to be quelled on several occasions by tiny Deputy Speaker Nusrat Ghani, who had turned up as a railway ticket inspector, under the impression she was attending a fancy dress party.

Chancellor Smug sat down to the customary good patting administered on these occasions. 

Smugness and self-congratulation were rapidly beaten out of her by Kemi Badenoch, who delivered a swift rub-down with a housebrick with aplomb, perfect vowels and sisterly bitchiness, speaking woman to woman. The rinsing was so thorough I almost but not quite felt sorry for the Chancellor, with her stumbling, nasty north London diction.

In went Kemi, with her pit boots on: You're an Arse, aren't you, Chancellor?  An unmitigated horse's arse of an Arse? Yes? The House agrees that sitting opposite me is an Arse. An unprincipled, spiteful, cowardly, Arse, being wagged by Labour's backbenchers. An Arse with a deep loathing of the middle class. An Arse brownly blowing its own trumpet. An Arse with a Chip on its shoulder so deep it descends into its own arse crack. A sixth-form politics Arse waving its own poverty-stricken childhood in lieu of its over-exaggerated  Curriculum Vitae. You never were an economist at the Bank of England, were you, Arse-Woman, you never were an economist at HBOS - you ran a small administrative complaints department, sitting on your arse. You were unemployed for a year before getting elected. Aren't you a horse's lying arse of an Arse?"
Well, actually, she didn't say any of that, more's the pity.

She did rip her a new arsehole, though, saying: "People out there aren't complaining because she's female, they're complaining because she is utterly incompetent. This Budget could have saved £47billion including £23billion from welfare. She could have abolished stamp duty on homes to get the housing market moving, abolished business rates on shops to breathe life into our High Streets. She should be on the side of people who get up and go to work, people who take a risk to start a company, people working all hours to keep their business afloat, she should be on the side of the farmer trying to hand something over to the next generation, the investor deciding whether to spend their money in the UK or elsewhere."

Kemi. My hero.

It hurt. When, out of a spirit of pure mischief, the BBC invited both Rachel Reeves and Kemi Badenoch onto their Sunday morning politics show, 

Kemi looked at Rachel with amusement, while Rachel from Accounts looked anywhere but at her. She complained that she had been made 'uncomfortable' by the Opposition Leader's brutal attacks on the Budget in the Commons, and whined that she doesn't make personal attacks on people and she didn't like it. To which Kemi robustly said: 'my job is to hold the Government to account, not to provide emotional support for the Chancellor'.

I must admit I have skin in this particular game. I had hoped for a little something to stimulate the housing market, as I nourish a small ambition to downsize. Cancellation, or, at least, reduction,  in stamp duty, would, like a Prune and Laxido Smoothie, get things moving again, free up big houses so middling house owners can move up, sell their little houses to aspirant home owners, create work for estate agents, lawyers, removal firms, carpet manufacturers and layers, paint and wallpaper retailers and decorators, new kitchen and bathroom manufacturers and installers, curtain and blind makers and all the rest of them. Overseas readers will be astonished to learn that, in addition to having to find a deposit of 10% of the purchase price, a mortgage at 4.5% interest which will beggar you unto death and beyond, the British house buyer has to pay a tax on the purchase price of the house, currently sitting at £15,500 on a £510,000 house or £41,000 if you are buying it as a second home. That's going to make you sit and have a little think. No wonder Big Ange Rayner did that soft shoe shuffle to claim she was not buying her Brighton flat as a second home. Maybe that small debacle which lost the Ginger Growler her Cabinet position is the reason Rachel from Accounts felt unable to stir up that particular hornet's nest again.

Instead, of course, she bowed to the pressure of the anti-welfare cuts back benchers and delivered a true tax and spend traditional Labour budget. 

The most controversial aspect has been the removal of the two-child cap on benefits payments. For our overseas readers and those who prefer not to pay attention, in Britain, if you are unemployed, or are employed but on low wages, the state will step in and give you a welfare payment called Universal Credit. This benefit is intended to keep the wolf from the door by a calculation based on a standard allowance with additional elements for specific circumstances, and deductions based on income. These circumstances include an additional amount for each child you have, up to a limit of two children. The total Universal Credit amount is reduced based on your income. For every £1 you earn over your work allowance, your Universal Credit is reduced by 55p. 

If you had three, four or more children, you wouldn't get any more income. Universal Credit, and its predecessor benefits, was never intended to provide  a disincentive to seeking work by providing more than the minimal income. It is a massive indictment of Britain that wages are so low that the state has to step in, with my money, to top them up. Now that Rachel has removed the two-child cap, she has removed any lingering disincentive for poor parents to have large families.

You may think that this is a good thing, given that  the UK’s fertility rate is currently around 1.5–1.6 children per woman, well below the replacement level of 2.1. This means that, without immigration, the population would gradually shrink and age. So, paying people to breed seems a sensible move forward. Not so, in class-ridden Britain, where Universal Credit claimants are regarded as the wrong sort of people. We don't want any more of those sort of people. We'd rather import religious nutjobs from mediaeval desert cultures than encourage Britain's poor to bang out more kids. There'll be none of that "Have one for the nation, madam". France, Hungary, and Nordic countries all provide generous child allowances, subsidised childcare, and tax breaks to support families, but in Britain  direct financial incentives have been politically problematic. The two‑child cap was framed as preventing “welfare dependency,” while its removal is now being criticised by some as “rewarding breeding.”  There’s a persistent stigma around benefit claimants, with critics suggesting that state support encourages “undesirable” fertility. When someone talks about “perverse incentives” they really are wanting to restrict breeding to those seen as a “desirable” parent. Are you getting a faint whiff of eugenics, here? 

Rachel from Accounts is sticking to her script that she is lifting 500,000 children out of poverty, which is nonsense, of course. Poverty at the bottom line is certainly about enough food to eat, clothes to keep you warm and modest, a roof over your head. You know, like in Africa, where we've been sending charitable funding - "international aid" for all of my life, with no discernible positive outcome. The black babies still have flies in their eyes, distended abdomens and have to walk miles for a drink of dirty water - or so the charity bandits tell us, with heart-breaking pictures that I swear blind are recycled.

Poverty in Britain is defined thusly: Relative poverty refers to people living in households with income below 60% of the median in that year, while Absolute poverty refers to people living in households with income below 60% of median income in a base year, usually 2010/11. This measurement is adjusted for inflation. (source: House of Commons Library)

But, despite this dry definition, the word poverty is bandied about by Rachel Reeves as a signifier of being a good person, a civilised person, intended to conjure images in the listener of those babies with flies in their eyes etc. 

God knows, during my professional career, I have been in enough miserable homes, where the dogs' excrement is uncleared, the semi-clad toddlers crawl on sticky floors, the walls are damp and mouldy, the kitchen is filthy, the bin overflowing.....but this is not the result of cash poverty. It is a consequence of poverty of aspiration, exclusion, the breakdown of neighbourliness, ignorance, illiteracy, addiction, the absence of fathers from the home, the breakdown of the extended family, the death of religion, just not knowing how to do things better, how to live better than this. Giving parents more money is throwing a fig leaf over Britain's endemic problems that actually require a lot more money than Reeves is proposing, to the cheers of her party and the contempt of our Kemi.

As for taxing the property-rich; I'll refer you to the magnificent John Steinbeck in his book Travels with Charley: 

"The concept of real property is deeply implanted in us as the source and symbol of wealth. And now a vast number of people have found a way to bypass it...It is obvious that within a very short time a whole new method of taxation will have to be devised, else the burden on real estate will be so great that no-one will be able to afford it; far from being a source of profit, ownership will be a penalty, and this will be the apex of a pyramid of paradoxes. The pressure comes from our biologic success as a species. We have overcome all enemies but ourselves."

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Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

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At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

Let's tax it!