I'm John Batchel with my good colleague Joseph Sternberg. He's in London for the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

He writes political economics. And he indulges me now and again to comment on the conduct of the parliament.

This is the original legislature's meeting to discuss the public finances of the people.

And over these last weeks, I've been reading story after story where labor led by Kier Starrmer,

an enormous majority, I think it's 165, which is just overwhelming.

The Tories don't need to show up.

And Farage and his reform party is essentially a

quote for the BBC. It's not on the floor of the parliament. But Commons has been debating not

between the opposition and labor, but between labor and labor, between backbench labor and

Kier Starrmer and his chancellor, the extractor, Rachel Reeves. But I'm not sure

I understand the case here. Joe, I thought it was agreed upon that the United Kingdom needs to

grow and they need productivity and they need growth going forward. And taxes are not a way to grow.

Taxes are a way to slow down and, in fact,

reverse growth. And they're to wear how they've fallen out of favor with world affairs

ever since they left the European Union and London's lost a great deal of business. At the same time,

they can compare how they're doing compared to how

the U.S. is doing over the last 15 years, and since the Great Recession, and even Europe,

which is itself sideways. But in any event, all of this led to labor proposing a, I think it's called the spring budget, and there'll be one again in the fall, in which there were modest, I mean, unbelievably modest reductions in welfare.

Unbelievable. And yet it was rejected. Have I read all this correctly? That they can't do anything because they're stuck on the idea of being the labor party for the little guy?

That's pretty much what's going on here.

I mean, what we are talking about is, I mean, it is hard to communicate how modest these welfare reforms were.

I mean, this is akin to the huge knockdown, dragout fight that we just had in the U.S. with

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