CITY GRUMP

“We did it !” declares a gleeful Starmer. You did indeed. You helped achieve the second lowest turnout at a General Election since 1885. You and the Conservative Party, at 60% of those who bothered to vote, were the lowest combined percentage vote since 1923.

This can only mean one thing. The British have inspected the political physiques of these old Parties and concluded they are, in reality, two cheeks of the same soggy bottom

Starmer’s Labour Party attained the remarkable achievement of having fewer of us vote for it than voted for Jeremy Corbyn’s party last time around. The Conservatives under Sunak have been all but obliterated. Dishy Rishi, in his exit speech, started by saying “he gave it his all”. Too right. When his MPs decided to elect a droid, programmable by a set of children in CCHQ and a bunch of wily Whitehall civil servants, “all” means nothing.

In the same exit speech, the Droid was programmed to say, “the Windsor Framework has strengthened the United Kingdom.” This is a downright lie. The Windsor Framework has sub-contracted the sovereignty of Northern Ireland to the EU. No thinking Prime Ministerial human being could utter such nonsense.

What else should we conclude from yesterday’s quinquennial exercise in democracy?

That, inescapably, the System is broken. It is an absolute farce that the bouncy-castle-orientated, Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats are handed 71 seats (at the time of writing) whereas Farage’s Reform Party, which garnered 500,000 more votes, achieved just 4 seats.

No wonder the electorate have concluded that voting in a British General Election is often literally pointless. Hands up those who think the newly elected Lib Dem MPs will be pushing for Proportional Representation (PR) in the coming 5 years? I defy anyone to say First Past the Post is continuing to deliver actual democracy to UK adults. If PR  doesn’t come to pass then we could well be heading, effectively, for a Dictatorship in 10-15 years’ time.

And what of this rather opaque looking Labour contingent, which we will have to live with for a while?

My hope, and it is a thin one at that, is that the new Chancellor of the Exchequer will swiftly realise that if she is serious about orientating the Treasury towards growth policies then you don’t start by taxing capital formation. A point that seemed to escape the doyenne of old school conservatives, Lord Moore, when he recently wrote in his Spectator column, Sunak and the rest of them never increased capital taxes. What does he think dropping the CGT allowance from £12,300 to £3,000 in the last two years is? A mirage?

I am told Rachel Reeves is bright and feisty so I won’t hold her stint as a Bank of England economist against her. Let’s hope she possesses the common sense gene, something so often lacking down there at Soggy Bottom.

The City Grump has spent some 40 years in the City of London. He started as a stockbroker’s analyst but after some years he decided he was too grumpy to continue with the sell side of things so he moved to the buy side and became a fund manager for the next 20 years, selling his own business in the 1990s. Post the millennium, he found himself in turn chairing a stockbroker, a financial PR company, and an Exchange. He still keeps his hand in, chairing a brace of VCTs and investing personally in start-ups. The City Grump’s publications are available here.