Politics: budget hype

By Richard North - November 26, 2025

I won’t be the first to observe how different things are.

It used to be the case that budget day, as a media event, started with the chancellor being photographed outside No.11 with his famous red box, then (in the past) walking to the House where he would deliver his speech. The newspapers the next day would give the run-down on what we’d gained or lost, the Sundays might have given an in-depth view and that was it.

It was also the case that it was a resigning matter to reveal any details of the budget before delivery, although that last happened the year before I was born, in 1947, when Labour’s Hugh Dalton was forced to resign for, seemingly inadvertently, revealing a sentence of the budget to a reporter minutes before delivering his budget speech.

But now, the “budget show” has become a rolling soap opera, fuelled by months of leaks and speculation prior to the event, with the media increasingly obsessed with its content, right up to the day when it becomes a media extravaganza, dominating the headlines, with the broadcasters running all-day panels, and most other news being squeezed out of the agenda.

Bluntly, I’m already bored with it. What will happen will happen and there is very little one can do about it in the short-term. It maybe will take about five minutes today to pick up the highlights and learn the worst but, I fear, it may be some days still before the media settles down to something approaching normality – not that that word can be used to apply to the fourth estate.

For my part, I’ve spent far too much time and effort on the Maccabi ban, which means I have stories stacked up, waiting for a spot, yet it seems hardly worth writing on any of them for the moment, until the media hysteria dies down and people start to focus again on the wider issues – those that do.

Had this been a normal day, I would perhaps have picked up on Monday’s Telegraph report headed: “The Turkish barbershops hiding a vast criminal network”, with the sub-heading: “Police and immigration officers are cracking down on the suspicious small businesses blighting British high streets”.

That the “Turkish barbershop” brand slated as a hub of organised crime is one of those “No shit! Sherlock”, moments, provoking the observation that you know the situation must be really bad when the legacy media “discovers” something that most sentient people have known for many years.

Nevertheless, it was good to see the issue being written about, and we need to see much, much more, with links made between the disparate activities which appear to be separate on the face of it but are often part of an ever-mutating nexus of organised crime.

Thus, while we’ve seen the BBC and others (mainly the local press) write about illicit tobacco sales and related enterprises, and we’ve seen the reports of industrial-scale illegal waste tipping, these and many other enterprises are linked with organised crime and, in some cases, may be perpetrated by the same groups.

It was actually in 2022 (although I am sure there are earlier examples), when the BBC reported that organised crime gangs were illegally burying thousands of tonnes of waste across Scotland.

At the time, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency said it was up against gangs which had been involved in running drugs and weapons for decades, while the BBC quoted Kath McDowall, a senior investigator for the Agency complaining that they had “taken lessons they’ve learned from doing other types of criminality and are now applying it to waste”.

As recently as last October, we had the Guardian reporting on a Lords committee covering the issue, after it found at least 38 million tonnes of waste was illegally managed every year, “leading to serious environmental, economic and social consequences”.

The headline of the paper’s piece was: “Organised crime making millions from illegal waste dumping in UK, says committee”, with the sub-head stating: “Peers say ‘woeful’ record on prosecutions has led to a ‘low-risk, high-reward’ criminal culture”.

The story itself pointed out that waste crime costs the UK economy £1 billion a year in clean-up, enforcement costs and lost revenues to legitimate businesses and the taxman – with up to £150 million evaded in landfill tax alone.

Actually, if the 38 million tonnes is an accurate figure for the amount of waste illegally managed, then the estimate of £150 million evaded in landfill tax is a wild under-estimate. Currently, this tax stands at £126.15 per tonne, which would suggest that losses are closer to £4.8 billion – giving some idea of the scale of the problem.

Yet that is only one part of it. Tipping fees can easily double that and, in some areas of the country (especially in the South-east), £600 per tonne is not uncommon. We are potentially looking at criminal enterprises worth over £10 billion annually.

Small wonder that the Lords committee found that large-scale fly-tipping was conducted by organised crime groups involved in money-laundering, drug-dealing and modern slavery – and doubtless much else.

Interestingly Baroness Sheehan, chairman of the environment and climate change committee, which authored the report, was reported by the Telegraph as saying: “Criminals seem to be able to act with complete impunity – it seems to be seen as a low-risk, high-reward crime”.

Separately, we are told, she warned Emma Reynolds, the Environment Secretary, that “waste crime is critically under-prioritised despite its significant environmental, economic, and social costs”.

But that is the story across the board. The same under-prioritisation and lack of resources is seen with attempts to stem the flow of illicit tobacco and vape sales, as hard-pressed Trading Standards are undergoing a funding crisis which leaves them struggling to meet even routine demands.

Yet the linkage between enterprises is known and in the “barbershop” piece in the Telegraph we see the description of the National Crime Agency operation which, we are told, followed the conviction of an Iranian Kurd who had used his barbershop in London as a base for an overseas criminal network.

This was Hewa Rahimpur who had smuggled 10,000 people into the UK in small boats after having claimed asylum after arriving in Britain in 2016, setting up the barbershop with a friend before renting a space for a food kiosk.

In reality, the Telegraph tells us, he was the leader of a sprawling crime gang that sourced boats, engines and lifejackets for migrant crossings. In October 2024, he was jailed in Belgium for 11 years, with the case, along with the overall proliferation of barbershops, proving to be a “tipping point” for the authorities in the UK.

But, no sooner do the authorities clamp down on one highly visible group of enterprises, then others pop up in their place, and will continue to do so as long as the disparate elements of organised crime are investigated separately by different enforcement agencies, with very little coordination.

What one must also observe is that the range of criminality is very often linked with immigrant communities and there are proven links will illegal immigration and modern slavery, which cross-link with illicit drug smuggling, drug dealing and grooming gangs who trade young girls for profit as part of their broader enterprises.

Sal Melki, the NCA’s deputy director of economic crime, is cited by the Telegraph who says that the risk for investigators is that organised crime gangs open up different kinds of shops or devise a complex web of businesses to launder cash and conduct their illegal operations.

“If we get to a stage”, says Melki, “where criminals change their modus operandi to just be a fraction more sophisticated, then we need to make sure that our police officers and immigration officers have the knowledge and the skills and the tools and powers to flush that out”.

But the spread of networks to poorly connected and modest market towns, and the sheer scale of the collective enterprise, suggests that the NCA are only scratching the surface, their operations most often just picking up the foot-soldiers while the crime bosses escape untouched.

What we need is properly coordinated and resourced task forces, along the lines of the FBI’s famous “untouchables”, which can take a holistic approach to organised crime, and go after the top echelons and the crime families.

If it wasn’t for the budget hype, it might be worth me writing about this issue but, since no-one is listening, I will save it for another day.