What's killing UK growth?

28:57As in like, I'm a customer of RBS and I've got my savings in the bank. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Yes. Was there enough in the equity and bond positions to swallow the losses of banks like RBS? I actually don't know. Nobody ever did the analysis. But there was deposit insurance, wasn't there? And the 85K. It would be less back then, maybe 50K. Yeah, something like that. Financial services compensation scheme kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. So most people with their money in RBS wouldn't have had to worry. It would just be the people, you know, with over 100 ,000 or whatever in there who might have problems.

29:38And, you know, this was the problem. I mean, you go back to Northern Rock. the whole liquidity of the banking system froze up and Northern Rock had a system where they had to refinance the mortgages they had done every couple of years. It was a very foolish system but most of the building societies in the UK Alliance and Leicester, all of those had the same problem. and it just so happened that northern rock was the first up to the window of the market when the whole market froze up because everybody was worried they didn't know who was 110 mortgages there are these guys have given away more than they i know you know they've chucked money at people weren't they everybody was doing it and um um so so uh um northern rock come in and say we need a couple of billion from the market to finance these refinancing mortgages, and they can't get any money.

30:47And everybody hears about this in their queues around the block, like you mentioned. But bailing out Northern Rock didn't help, did it? Because it just went on to Alliance and Leicester and Cheltenham and Gloucester and all of those. And then it goes to RBS. And so at some point that is all because back in the day, nobody put a proper system in for quick turnaround of bankrupt banks. Would that be a regulator? Ha, ha, ha, ha. Excuse me. It probably would. And it would be one of the – well, it would be legislation. Chapter 10 would just be legislation across the country of the bankruptcy code. I don't think you'd necessarily have a regulator, maybe the Bank of England, I don't know, to do that.

31:44But it didn't work. That bailout didn't work. No, people will agree. And I think there's a lot of people, even today, you know, COVID, lots of small businesses went under of normal hardworking people whose taxes were used to bail out the banks. And yes, there was support for certain areas, hospitality, but even they were, you know, my partner in the beauty industry, she tattoos eyebrows on people and stuff. she was told to shut down very first and she was open last and she got no support even though she wears full ppe at all points and she's in like a sterile environment because she's doing tattoos so actually she you know the she's one of the safest places to be from but but she without me being there she did the business just went under so i can see why people would go let the banks burn you know i can see why people would say that i wonder what the second order effects are though because I wonder if some of the bondholders are other banks and you wipe them out and then they all start going.

32:45You know, was it a line of dominoes where they were like, we just can't let this fall? And that's an unfortunate quirk of the banking system. That was what they were afraid of, but I don't think that it would have been the case. And certainly the problem didn't start in 2007, 2008. And the fact that everybody was being made whole before then whenever there was a problem, made it a much bigger problem then. But no, I think it was at some point it's absolutely necessary to reset the clock. At some point, you've got to say. I mean, now in America they've turned to our sort of problem with Silicon Valley Bank.

33:31But again, think about that. Okay, Silicon Valley Bank, what were they doing? they were essentially in the phrase borrowing short and lending long. When your income is fixed and your expense is variable and interest rates go up and your expense becomes greater than your income, then you go bust. And the point I was going to make about that is that that is the fundamental mistake in banking, that banks, every 20 years they do this. where was the regulator? I mean, since 2008, they put in 20 regulators on this stuff. And here was Silicon Valley Bank and Republic Bank and other banks making the exact same mistake that banks have been making since banks were invented in the 1600s.

34:25And they didn't spot it. They didn't say, where are your models that, you know, put into your model that your interest cost goes up 2%. You know, are you still making money? Because they all should have these models. Stress test. Stress test, exactly. But they didn't do it. So my other point is that everybody thinks, oh, a regulator, you've got to have a regulator. They're useless. They're mostly useless. I've got a less controversial one, seatbelts. There you go. No one can argue with seatbelts. Saves lives. Lots of people just going through their windscreens. And now we've all got seatbelts.

35:02They argued against those when they first came out. It was Volvo that introduced the seatbelt. Yes, yes. And people were like, they can't tell me what to wear and all this. Yeah, absolutely. I've gone through the world's good. Cigarettes is similar. Yeah. You know, when I grew up, you know, cigarettes were good for your chest. Good for your chest. They were like, yeah, you're a sissy, why aren't you smoking a cigarette? Like all these like adverse things. Did you smoke? Oh, yeah. When I was cycling around London, you sounded pretty good on the mic. I don't smoke now. No, but they were good for your chest back then.

35:32Maybe they were a bit different before they got regulated. It was just tobacco. The regulators ruined cigarettes. An interesting hypothesis to pursue. Okay, one thing about this path that everyone should kind of be on their own, make their own way, make their own decisions. As much as possible. Some people have advantages, don't they? So you're a lord, so people in your family are going to benefit from your hard work. And I'm not saying that you haven't worked hard, but your children or your children's children are going to have a leg up in life because of you. Right. So how would, you know, someone that's like free market, libertarian, anti-regulation combat unfair, like these advantages?

36:15Well, I mean, looking after your family is one of the most powerful drivers of striving and achieving that anybody knows about. I mean, I don't know if you're married or have children or whatever. Both got kids. Both got kids, yeah. Not together, but yeah, we both got kids, yeah. Then you know that, you know, you want the best for your children. Now, luckily when our daughter grew up, I was, you know, reasonably poor. So she lived a reasonably poor life. and I think most children shouldn't have too gilded a life because it spoils them for the rest of their life, which is tremendously important.

37:05But at the same time, you want your children to be happy and lead fulfilled lives and you're prepared to push yourself hard to achieve that for them. That's one thing. Now, this whole point about some people have more advantages than others, well, I've talked about that when it comes to talking about the developed world and the developing world, is that we have a moral obligation, I think, to at least make it possible for the developing world to overcome the disadvantages that they have from living in an undeveloped economy. but then I also think the three of us we're all quite smart and smart leads you to make money and are we going to get to the stage where everybody should be given the same salary whatever their abilities well no, I mean in Russia they there was a phrase they used to have, here they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.

38:25Because only the most really nice person, and I'm not a really nice person, the most really nice person will work without any thought of what it's going to bring to them in life, what it's going to bring to their family or whatever. There's a guy called Toby Ord in Oxford. who reckons he should live on, I think last time I looked, 19 ,000 a year. He's a professor at some place, and he gives everything else to developing countries and leads a very simple life. I admire him tremendously. We are not like that. We want to see the rewards of our good work. so

39:11I do think about the fact that and I thought about it all my life about the fact I knew I was smart when I was young and I knew that I'd do well even when I was poor and I knew that other people weren't going to do well because they weren't smart and how fair was that well therefore you've got to have a certain baseline that you don't let people fall below What about the people who are smart who don't do well? Can you concede that there's people that are poor, that are smart, that don't do well, or that they're dumb, rich people that do better than them? Do you know what I mean? Well, I don't think being smart guarantees you to do well.

39:54No. You've got to have a deferred gratification view of life constantly. You've got to understand compound interest, as you were saying. You've got to have emotional control. You've got to have all of these things, almost none of which I had as a child. I mean, I didn't even understand the world. I couldn't understand why people were yelling at me all the time because I'd say something that they didn't like. You know, you have to figure it out. So you've got to have humility and realise that being smart isn't a be-all and end-all of life. You got shouted at a lot for being too direct? Well, it's a bit sort of – I mean, they didn't have the word autistic.

40:42I was going to say, have you been autistic? When I read that book, which you probably know, The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night or something like that. Yeah, I've not read it myself. Well, when I read it, I thought, oh, oh, that's me. You know, because he, I mean, he was obviously quite badly autistic and he has a psychiatrist or something. And he comes back and said, they yelled at me, they yelled at me. I was doing chatting like you told me to do. Because autistic people, why would you chat? What's the point of that? And I was very much like that as a kid. And I just learned. I had algorithms in my head.

41:24This is the way you behave. This is the way you don't behave. This is the sort of thing you can say. This is the sort of thing that people seem to get upset about when you point out something obvious to them, which has nothing to do with this book. No, we take it at a tangent. So one last piece on the regulation. You were pro-Brexit. Right. Yeah. Don't you think that leaving a free market increased regulation? It wasn't a free market. It was one of the biggest protectionist cartels in the world. What I mean was we had a free trade. But that's what protectionism is, tariffs. Yeah, we had a free trade block and we left it.

41:58And when we left it, it became harder to engage. No, we had a protectionist block. We had a protectionist block that traded freely inside itself and imposed large barriers to the rest of the world. We've absolutely failed to sort all of that out. So, for example, we still have a tariff on Moroccan tomatoes. It's just a small example, but there are hundreds of small examples like this. Now, Moroccans grow their tomatoes a different time of year from us. So they're not competing with our tomatoes. That's the only point that people make about tariffs is that you're protecting your industries, protectionists.

42:36But they sell their tomatoes at a time of year that we haven't got any. And yet we still have a tariff on them. Why? Because we've inherited that from the EU and we haven't gotten rid of it. Why? Why we charge Moroccans a tariff for selling us tomatoes that we need? Why it's in order to make those tomatoes the same price as Spanish tomatoes inside the EU. Why are we doing that? And then we come up with all these things. Hormone-fed beef. Well, I don't think Argentina has hormone-fed beef, but whether it does or not is absolute nonsense. Oh, chlorine-washed chicken. to stop us from importing chicken from America.

43:24All these noises that are just protectionists. And most of our beef that we eat in this country is imported from abroad, but it's imported from places like France and Ireland inside the EU's protectionist tariff. And so they're expensive. It'd be a lot cheaper if we just got rid of all those tariffs. So the issue is that the world is becoming more protectionist, right? America is becoming more protectionist. So is a free trade ideology going to meet with this protectionist world? I mean, in the second book, there's a whole chapter on free trade and shows why it's the way actually to prosperity in a country.

44:08And the tariffs that Trump has started introducing are crazy. And that's why the stock market has gone down right now, because world trade is going to go down. And I sold out of all my shares a few weeks ago as soon as it became clear that Trump was going to impose these tariffs because the stock market was bound to go down. And it's really bad. It's really bad. Now, don't forget, by the way, that he's doing it. He's saying, well, that's what you've been doing over in the European Union all this time. You've had all these tariffs. Stop complaining. I'm just going to do the same as you.

44:53Ignore the little nuances in that. But either way, it's bad, bad, bad. And I think I make a very good case saying get rid of tariffs. Get rid of tariffs. And your country, New Zealand did that, because they were protecting all their agricultural goods. They got rid of all tariffs. Everybody said it was going to be a disaster. In fact, New Zealand has grown a lot in prosperity. Nobody is now arguing New Zealand to go back to tariffs. And it's the same across the world. Get rid of tariffs and we will all benefit from that. So do you think that that's the issue with how Brexit's gone then? Because, you know, Brexit's affected the UK economy.

45:38Oh, I think we've gained all sorts of benefits from Brexit. Like what? Well, have I mentioned about the soft power? I mean, I reckon a soft power in Germany is probably a little bit less than it was after we told them to get lost, surely. Surely in EU we're not as popular. Well, in the EU, they feel terribly hurt by our leaving us. You know, there are plenty of people in every country of the EU who feel that the EU is a disaster and they wish they weren't in it either. So don't forget that. It's not a monolithic thing. But also, they are desperate that nobody else leave the EU. So they feel they have to punish us.

46:22Make an example. That we have to line up at their stupid passport things. That is the most annoying. I find that the most annoying part of Brexit. It's childish. You know, when I'm there, I think, really? You're wasting my time. Yeah, I mean, a few years ago at the start of the Ukrainian war, my wife and I bought a couple of ambulances and we drove out to Ukraine with medical goods and stuff. And so I got a name for that. And so people were coming to me saying, well, how do I do it?

46:54And I said to one guy, look, the one problem you'll have is getting out of England and into the EU. Well, he decided to go Harwich Hook of Holland, which is a slightly better northern route through Germany to Poland. And in fact, the Dutch have people at Harwich, customs people. And he had stuffed his ambulance full of medical goods and so forth. And the Dutch guy said, you're going to have to empty that. You're going to have to fill in a form for every single item you've got. Don't forget, this was maybe, he would have been about six weeks into the war when we were all saying we've got to help this poor country.

47:38And the guy said, come on. And he said, well, you shouldn't have done Brexit. But it's this childish thing, and they've got to get over it. And I wish we had a prime minister who actually lectured the EU and said, come on, guys, we're your friends. We go back. We've helped you. You've helped us. Stop this. I mean, in fact, about a year ago, I was so fed up with people saying, tell me one thing that Brexit's got. You've got a Q card. I went and I just wrote up a quick random list. It's one-sided. 22 random Brexit. Cash, 350 million a week in cash. Yeah. Ukraine. What do you mean? Well, we were the very first people to go and help Ukraine.

48:25We didn't have to summon the Council of Nations. and so forth. Boris went straight off to Kiev and I mean our ambassador did flee the country which I thought was a bit feeble. What are your favourites? What are your favourite benefits? So we don't have to go through them all. I'll add there's 22 on there. So you see quite a lot of benefits. That was written when? It was a long time ago that I wrote that. Autumn 2023. I love this. You've even put a little is that you in a suit in the corner there? There we are. That's me in my dressing room.

49:01so just for the audio listeners in my hand is a piece of card it's about the size of two business cards at the top it says 22 random brexit benefits in the bottom left hand corner it's got um an image of a little bald man in his pajamas which is lovely and then there's yeah 22 benefits here so we've got like number one the cash 350 million weekly number two just says ukraine um picking out random ones here we've got immigration policy at number nine so yeah we'll find a way that to circulate the image so that you can have a look at it if you want but yeah just wanted you to know what we're looking at here i need to do this i need to like every you know just print off a card of like why i'm wrong why i'm right and you're wrong and have me in my slippers on it well i i was just so fed up with people asking this constantly that i thought i'd have something i mean it's a sensible question isn't it to be like you know what was the benefit because the 350 million this was like on the bus wasn't it this kind of you know you'll get that back it turns out it was more than that now we we would be paying about 500 million a week now if because because the budget's gone up is it is it that is it i mean that like boris has been heavily criticized for those claims that the nhs would get 350 million a week and it got far more than that has it yeah yeah yeah i mean i mean one of the things that us brexiters insisted on was the moment he got into power, he increased the NHS budget by that much.

50:28I think actually it was before, I think it was during Theresa May's time that they put the budget up by that. Of course, the trouble is, and I didn't invent that slogan or necessarily approve it, but the trouble is that extra money is not what's needed in the NHS. The basic problem comes back on that whole thing of competition and innovation. And we basically got, it's not too ridiculous to say we've got a communist system for the NHS, which is that basically one size fits all and it's going to be run by administrators and regulators. And however much money you put it in, We're going to get worse outcomes than most, than, by the way, France or Germany, whose health systems I think are far better than ours.

51:27So, yeah, but that was a slam dunk that we were going to no longer have to give that money to the EU. I think Germany, did Germany spend a similar amount to us? No, it spends more. In my book, I show that they spend more. On the NHS. Yeah. It's 13%. We spend 12%. Yeah. So, I mean, 1 % is not that meaningful. Yeah. It's not how much you pay is how they're organized. How it's managed. They are private sector. You can choose between six insurance companies and the insurance companies compete with each other to produce better outcomes. Cheers. I love that. I mean, I just like that you put yourself in pajamas on it.

52:08It's just pretty gangster, really.

52:13this government this point around government then and and cutting the government and you know efficient spending i um like austerity felt like cuts you know to to government spending have we not been through a cycle of cuts it may have felt like cuts but it was in fact uh more spending every year but in real terms it was the lowest spend and you know when you look at the infrastructure of the country i think people would say that not much money's been spent on it well all this book suggests is that we get back to the position at the beginning of tony blair's government so i'm not i'm not being wild i'm saying that at the time when tony blair started out government was about 50 % smaller as a percentage of GDP than it is now.

53:08And at that point, we were the fastest growing best economy in Europe. We had relatively low taxes, because the trouble is, if you've got that expenditure that it felt so horrible not to get during austerity, if you've got that expenditure, then you've got to have those taxes. and if you've got those taxes, well, do you have friends that you have who have left the country? Because they all are. All the strivers, the high achievers, I don't want that, you don't want that, but they're all leaving. Not all of them. I'm here. No, no, true enough. But a lot of them are. You're a bit of a slacker though.

53:53No, so many, and it's not billionaires. and non-doms and all these convenient hate figures. It's hairdressers. It's real estate agents. It's accountants. They're all going off elsewhere, in particular to Dubai, which when you go there, it seems like they're more Brits than Arabs. Three of my British friends moved to Dubai in the last year. Exactly, and why? One of them. And they're not slackers, right? No, they've all got very good jobs, very well-paid jobs. One's interior design, one's a lawyer, and her husband's an engineer. And the tax is a fraction of what we pay here. A lot of slave labour in Dubai, though.

54:36There is a lot of that. I don't approve it. That's in the construction industry. Yeah, but you underpay people, and that's how – you have a free labour force. But they don't underpay people in general. In general, the salaries are higher than you. They pay the Westerners a lot, but the Pakistani workers and that, they pay them nothing i i i'm not in favor of that but by the way those pakistani workers get paid more than they would in pakistan that's why they've come from pakistan to dubai i uh you know i don't like anecdotal evidence because it leads to you going i know three guys that have left to dubai and that means the whole world's gone like but like i've got anecdotally i i was i had an incident where i was attacked on a night out by a random stranger just punched me in the side of the head it's why i got a scar here now yeah i woke up on the floor and bust up my face i had to walk the police told me um call a taxi because an ambulance is going to take too long i got to the hospital and i needed an emergency brain scan that took 17 hours it took a year for the for it to go to court and the guy was given a suspended sentence because there's no space in the prisons and he's never paid a penny of the fine that he was even though but they can't chase them because they've not got the resources every system the public sector was under-resourced and like incompetent under-resourced or doing the wrong thing i don't want to sit there and say that the 10 police that turned up were 10 of them the 10 police officers turned up within a few seconds you know they were there but then they were like you won't get an ambulance because there's not enough ambulances but why did they need 10 police well i don't know what i'm saying I don't know.

56:16What I mean is they were there. And I don't want to say that people on the ground are doing their jobs badly. I don't want to say that in a hospital, the doctors were going, oh, let's just shove our thumbs up our arses and sit here and let all the people that need a brain scan wait. They were saying there's not enough scanners. There's one scanner and it takes an hour and you've got to, do you know what I mean? And there's 15 guys in this room that need a brain scan. Well, look, it's to me almost tear-inducing that people don't understand what a ridiculous way of organizing a health system our NHS is.

56:53It's basically communist. It's basically saying the fatal conceit, we can organize it all from the top and it'll all cascade down and we'll tell them all how to do it.

57:08But here we have, we used to have 10 % of people taking private health insurance to get around this problem. It's now, last time I looked, 22%. Yeah, I've got it. I've got it. Private GP as well, which is bloody expensive. By the way, some public servants have it. All the people in the Bank of England have private health insurance. That's a great vote of confidence in national health. I would love my money back for what I'm giving to you. Just because I've paid for my private. There you go. I pay twice. But in America, 90 % of people have private health insurance. Now, the 10%, the states spend a lot of money on it and still fail in certain respects.

57:54But, for example, everybody over 65 gets free health insurance. Everybody over 65 gets free prescriptions and so forth. So it's not too bad. But they're a poor health society. The Americans are not the bastions of health. They're poor health in certain areas. Their life expectancy is lower. Life expectancy is lower, but that's because there's a lot more murder and a lot more burgers. Well, so for example, as I discuss in the book, child mortality is much higher in the States. And you think, well, that's terrible. But a lot of that is because in their statistics, they count deaths in the first 24 hours as child mortality.

58:39And here, as I understand it, we don't. You have to die one day or older to be included in the child mortality effect. Now, of course, you think, well, that's just a small thing. But, of course, it lowers average mortality an awful lot if a whole bunch of children only lived one day. So the – and then you throw in the murders and a bunch of young men mostly dying in, you know, ages 17 to 21. Take all of that out. You would want your health care to be in America, not here. Now, for example, on this scan thing, I was in America some months ago and I had to go for a scan. You go in, it takes your picture.

59:29You don't even have to check in. You just type your name. It's got all your records in there already. You sit there for five minutes. They take you into the scan. You're out 20 minutes later and you're gone home. and there are a lot of people a lot of people in that waiting room with me you know i don't know enough about that system to comment but i see people moan about the fact that their drugs have become so expensive that they can't access them that people go into hospital and because they're not insured they're turned away for treatment i don't know enough about the american health system to comment i just hear criticism of it but i hear a lot of criticism of the nhs as well I promise you there are lots of things wrong with the American system, but you'd prefer it to here.

1:00:13I mean, so it's back to regulation. You know, I believe that doctors should run health systems, and that's mostly, in America it's the doctors who are in charge. Here we've said it's going to be the administrators who are in charge. And now I think there are more administrators than medical staff in the NHS because they just build and build their regulatory system and their way of doing things. Coming on to taxation, because obviously you're pro-low tax regime, but you said, interestingly, that you think VAT is something that could be increased. Yes. Because it's a tax on consumers. Yes. Not business.

1:00:50Well, of course, the less you spend, the less you have to tax. So if you've got to be a really low spend government, then you wouldn't have to increase any taxes. But what I talk about in this book is what helps economic growth more and what helps economic growth less. And the way what both the Conservative and the Labour governments have done over the past few years is increase taxes on business. So NIC, I mean, in your operation here, I assume you pay a few salaries. You've had to increase... Sweatshop this. I'm on that free Labour. Well, that's fine. We're running out of a shell in Dubai. Dubai calls.

1:01:41But in general, people running small businesses are being killed by this NIC increase. And whereas they were thinking of hiring another person over the next few months, now they're thinking of firing somebody over the next few months. So all these costs on business, and the fact that we put corporation tax up because those filthy corporations, they should pay more tax. Well, no, mate, that's the employer, you know, who now can't employ so many people because they're having to pay more tax. Those are the worst kinds of taxes to charge. And the least bad, it's not that they're good, it's that they're the least bad, are consumption taxes.

1:02:23And VAT is the classic consumption tax. And if you look at a chart, we only charge VAT on about half the goods and services that we could charge it on. And interestingly, you look at a country like Denmark, which is right at the top of the heap in terms of services it provides to its people, quite large government. they charge VAT on almost 100%. So you mean like kids' clothes, food, these kind of the things where we almost protect them from VAT? Yes, you know, that we say, oh no, you can't possibly charge VAT on that. And I couldn't reel off the list to you, but I'm sure it's not quite as, not all of them are so tear-jerking as kids' clothes.

1:03:18Anyway, Denmark says all of them, right? And its economic growth is quite good, even though it's got a large government. But it's because the taxes that it charges are the least bad on economic growth. And I think in my book, I say, well, if you charge VAT on everything, you might be able to get the overall rate of VAT down. I can't remember. I hope I'm not lying here. But I think that's what I say. The VAT system is a mess. I think it's like, you know, Jaffa cakes and biscuits. And it is a mess. I mean, you want to talk about bureaucracy. The VAT tax system creates so much administration because of what we sit there with what we do, which is new social media.

1:04:03And what I essentially do is I bring money from outside of the UK into the UK because most of our clients are American. Because it's Google. It's like it's ads. So you're an export. Yeah. Trying to think. And, you know, you think you would protect our industry. but we can't even get classification. People don't even know what we do. There's no like social media influencer VAT stamp, the number, and trying to work out what we should charge and what we shouldn't. We have to hire accountants just to scratch their heads to think, you know, so I do agree it's a mess. I wonder, you know, my challenge is, should consumers pay more of a burden?

1:04:41Because through fiscal drag, through the holding of their tax bands, the levels that they have, you know, the general public have already been rinsed through tax. Should we not look at, say, like wealth taxes? Should we not look at council tax, these kind of things, as better places to raise money? Well, I refer you to my earlier answer about Dubai and Monte Carlo and New York and Australia. You can't take your house to Dubai. You can't, but you can sell it. Yeah, good. And then go off to Dubai. Yeah, yeah, but what I mean is the council tax is, you know, the door. I actually agree with the council tax, you know, the bigger houses, and I got one, should be charged more.

1:05:18I agree with that. Humble brag.

1:05:23But a wealth tax in general... Oh, yeah, yeah. So France tried imposing that. I think they charged 1 % a year and immediately 46 ,000 very rich people left and their taxes went. I think when I say wealth tax, I mean, I think like council tax is a wealth tax. It's just regressive at the minute because it's not been revalued and restructured to be a wealth tax. But it's perfect because you can't take the house with you and if you want to live in it, you pay the tax. Well, I mean, probably if I was an absolutist on my position, I would say, no, I only use the same services as anybody else does. So I shouldn't pay any more council tax than the meanest hovel.

1:06:02But I think, yeah, you know, in solidarity with everybody in my neighbourhood, I should be paying more than they should. But not as much as him, obviously. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, go on. I was going to say, the council tax thing, we've talked about it a few times, and everyone seems to agree that it's logical. Left and right. Left and right, it makes sense. So why? Why? We're struggling with growth. Why are we not doing it? I don't know. Keir Starmer said growth, growth, growth. We've got no growth, and we've got all these manoeuvres to change growth and make simple changes. No one's going to complain if we adjust the council tax.

1:06:36If we start tripling it, then people are going to get upset. But if we make it a bit more relative to the size of your property, if you've got a 50 million pound house, you should probably pay more. Yeah, and you've got a little flat that you're renting, then you shouldn't be paying the same. I mean, I don't disagree. And it is bizarre in this, as in so many other things, why they aren't doing it. But it's also bizarre why most of what Rachel Reeves is doing seems precisely oriented towards reducing growth. because it's economic growth that makes us all rich, that makes us not mind so much having to pay these taxes and so forth.

1:07:11Yet in her finance bills, like with the increase of NIC, it just seems designed to reduce employment and so forth. It's quite difficult to understand because it's all fairly straightforward. And I haven't spoken to a single person who disagreed with what's in these books. I didn't set out to be particularly clever. I'm just sort of summarizing what other people said. But people of all parties have come to me and said, you know, that's absolutely right. In all the reviews of the book, even in some left-wing papers, they say, oh, Rachel Reeves should read this book. Have you sent it to her? Well, I was wondering.

1:07:53You should still move in through the post. It's that heavy. She might think it a troll. I wouldn't want to, you know. Throw it out a window. Yeah, brick her window with volume one. Great. Thank you so much. Thanks for being two great guys. It was really enjoyable. No, no, no, no. It's great. It's great.

1:08:14Please remember, this is not financial advice. Like we say a lot on the podcast, investments can fall and rise. In fact, it's pretty much a guarantee. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. So your money is at risk with investing and other fees may apply. As with everything financial, please do your own research. We really encourage that because no one cares more about your money than you. I'm Damo. Banti. This was an episode of Making Money from our company Most. It was filmed and edited by the team at Flow Spire, Jack and Ben. It was produced by Ruth Edwards and brought together by Will Stallerman.

1:08:44What about Ruth and Toothless a Dog? Yeah, shout out them too.