Best Of

For me its the wrong question.

Labour have two choices:
Stick with the manifesto pledges, fiddle round the edges, the economy stagnates, they get blattered at the election
Man up, things are bad, tax rise for growth, economy performs, people feel better, nobody cares about the manifesto

They'll probably manage to splice the front half of the second one and the back half of the first one...

You beg the question of whether tax rises will lead to economic growth. Why not cut taxes for growth? The Chancellor can't just tack “for growth” on the end of whatever the Treasury brainstormed and guarantee it will happen.

Sure! Its an option, but I'm not sure its one they can do.

Cut taxes to entrepreneurs like me to go generate economic growth. OK, infrastructure is bad and getting worse, my potential customers feel broke and aren't spending and now feel even worse as you've cut expenditure on vital stuff again.

Government could borrow to pay for the tax cuts for growth. No, hang on that was the Truss Delusion.

Whilst I agree that taxes are too high, they can't cut them now. But what they could do is unveil a completely revised tax code - change the game completely by rolling welfare into a universal payment and scrapping all the tax loopholes by abolishing the taxes they avoid.

You can't drive growth by taxing less. But you could drive growth by taxing differently...

You certainly could drive growth by taxing less.

Here's an example:

I'm currently running a business with a full order book out to 2028. I want to do more work, employ more people, maybe even make a larger profit and pay more tax.

My biggest constraint at the moment is premises. I basically need a steel framed shed with a decent sized overhead crane in it. I'm renting one that's 5k sq ft, I to grow really need 10-15k sq ft. I nearly bought a 21k sq ft site, the bit that kiboshed the deal was that it came with a £32k pa business rates bill, and covering that, and the stamp duty was just too much dead money to overcome straight after moving.

There are several things you could do which would enable me to grow. You could abolish planning permission, and let me build a suitable building on farmland (I'm in a rural area, and quite geographically constrained if I don't want to lose my existing staff). The site I was trying to buy was £850k, I could buy some land and build everything I want for about £250k.

Alternatively, imagine a scheme where when a business moves into a more expensive rateable premises, the difference in business rates is phased in over 5 years - that would have given me time to get over the "hump" of moving, and let me start expanding and taking on staff to get turnover up before I was hit for the rates.

Incidentally, the site I wanted to buy has been sold to a haulage firm. They are going to knock down the buildings to get out of the rates, and use the hardstanding to park lorries. So the council will lose the rates anyway, and there will be one less small industrial site out there for a manufacturing or engineering business.

Taxes, especially badly designed ones, destroy growth. The only route to meaningful growth is reducing taxes and/or regulation. Until we have a government which understands this, we will remain stuck in this doom loop of ever higher taxes and lower growth.

The idea that a high tax burden destroys growth just doesn't reconcile with the experience of the rest of Europe, where we see both economic growth and significantly higher standards of living in countries with higher tax burdens.

You might be right that the correct route for the UK is lower taxes, lower regulations. But it does come across as dogmatic when you assert in this way. You can make a strong argument that the 40% burden in Germany and the Netherlands, 45% in France has delivered more for their populations than the 33% in the UK.

Firstly, it is the opposite of dogma when a member takes time to relate his actual experience.

Secondly, Europe's growth has been stagnant vs. the USA over the last 20 years. Few countries have done quite as badly as the UK, with its toxic mix of high tax and regulation with an oddly laissez faire attitude to the family silver being sold off, but the overall trend is clearly shown in the relative growth figures. That absolutely reconciles with the theory that a high tax, high regulation environment kills growth, and it's absurd denialism to say otherwise.

Compared with the United States in the past 20 years or so, we have had Osborne's failed austerity but more subtle is the Covid response where Britain subsidised companies while America subsidised workers. It also of course has had a shedload of government investment which our faux free marketeers decry as ‘picking winners’.

We did not have 'failed austerity', we had an extremely modest attempt to rein in spending which led to a couple of years when Government spending didn't rise - it certainly didn't fall by much, and it soon continued its upward trajectory. There was no serious attempt to reduce the size of the state.

@TOPPING (fpt)

"Let me help. Most of them - units dealing with elderly patients - are fucking useless. Because actually, they don't really care whether the elderly patient survives or not. Not really. Of course there are individuals who are great in the NHS but institutionally perhaps because there is precious little accountability (and then only when something "obvious" has gone wrong), it doesn't matter if your 85-yr old aunt lives or dies. Or is neglected. Or isn't fed properly. Or whose bed isn't changed regularly. Or who is or isn't given the correct medication.

I challenge everyone on PB to ask 10 friends about treatment an elderly relative has received at the hands of the NHS and a significant proportion of them will have shocking stories. But of course the ones that have received great care (and of course plenty do) will write letters, call phone-in programmes and bang saucepans to say how marvellous the NHS is."

And into this system the government proposes to introduce an AD law which will create an obvious, glaring and gigantic conflict of interest and multiple opportunities (pressures even) for its staff to "suggest" or "coerce" (because who will find out - all effective external scrutiny having been removed) such people into suicide to save money for the NHS. For those who think I am exaggerating listen to the answers Stephen Kinnock, the Palliative Care Minister, has been giving to the House of Lords Committee this week. As well as lying about what the Equality Impact Assessment said, his answers are utterly chilling in their lack of humanity for precisely the people @TOPPING is describing and, indeed, people like me with a terminal illness.

Don’t worry.

Some men will be along shortly, to mansplain that the actual things that have happened in Canada and the Netherlands can’t happen.

I could try anger. But I just smiled at the doctors who were dehydrating my father. And politely asked them to put him on a drip for the eleventh time.

"units dealing with elderly patients - are fucking useless. Because actually, they don't really care whether the elderly patient survives or not. Not really. Of course there are individuals who are great in the NHS but institutionally perhaps because there is precious little accountability (and then only when something "obvious" has gone wrong), it doesn't matter if your 85-yr old aunt lives or dies. Or is neglected. Or isn't fed properly. Or whose bed isn't changed regularly. Or who is or isn't given the correct medication."

And the end of the day though why is this up to the institution? Individual nurses deal with individual patients. If they can't be fucking arsed to hydrate them as seems to be often the case these days then they are morally responsible as human beings imho.

Not a new thing. Back a bit there was a scandal when hospital patients were found to be drinking the water from the flower vases. They made sure that wouldn't happen again by forbidding flowers in wards.

Very much the same story with the majority of the wards my father found himself on in the last decade or so of his life.
There were exceptions, but the rule was either indifference or outright neglect.

When he was hospitalised with bacteraemia for a couple of months, he simply would not have survived had we not visited him daily to ensure adequate nutrition and treatment.

Some others on the ward didn't.

My Mum in her final weeks had mostly good hospital care, but not always perfect. (My dad and first stepmother died at home, the second stepmother in a home, and all in the US.) My aunt, despite much ill health, continues on and receives excellent care as an outpatient.

My dad lived for quite a long time with dementia, and had various other health episodes, so I got a fair amount of experience.

Elderly patients who don't for whatever reason get visited by family tend also to get neglected by the staff.

That isn't always true, but regular visitors are good for patient morale as well as for keeping up care standards.

Bad care can get normalised very quickly. It is a feature of institutionalisation.

This review article looks at problems of neglect in different care systems in UK, North America, Continental Europe and Scandanavia and South Africa.

https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6963-13-156

Oh, it wasn't always true in my father's case either, but more often than not, it was.
It was the basic failure to ensure adequate nutrition and hydration that I found most disturbing.

That's an interesting report, though a bit detached in tone. I only skimmed it, but nowhere, for instance, did I see leadership and effective management discussed.

I have to admit that it's hard to argue with @Cyclefree . While I am fairly strongly in favour of the principle of assisted dying, the practical concerns she raises echo some if my own.

I am one of the many doctors sceptical to say the least about Assisted Dying. I accept that there are some staff that may abuse it, but I think pressure from avaricious relatives cannot be ignored either.

The problem of neglect and poor nursing and medical care is much wider though, and not unique to the NHS. It is probably much more prevalent in private social care, and is an issue in other healthcare systems too. Neither is it a new phenomenon. Florence Nightingale made her name by exposing poor care at Scutari hospital 170 years ago.

Often there is poor leadership at ward level, and in the same hospital there are often wards that are vastly different in the quality of care, sometimes even adjacent to each other.

That's certainly true from my experience, too.
Though the difference is that is a larger Siemens choice in social care; it's more possible to 'shop around' - though again that requires family committed to doing so.

I think people get habituated to their environment very quickly. Whether nuses, doctors, prison officers, police, lawyers, social workers, bankers or the armed forces people rapidly adapt to their conditions. That power of adaption is one of our strengths as a species and why we can live in some very hostile environments, but it has its dark side too. It is how people become heartless, cynical, callous and normalise bad behaviour.

We become products of our environment and it takes a fairly strong character to stand against the tide. I think the best defence is wide friendship groups outside that environment in order to recalibrate. In an atomised online world that gets harder each year.

The guy has lost it.

He's in a world of his own; owning the libs is irrelevant when you're in charge and failing.

Trump responds to a question about rising prices and affordability: “The reason why I don't want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it's far less expensive under Trump…Karoline, could you discuss that question that was asked and how it was asked in such a fake, disgusting manner by the fake news?”
https://x.com/BulwarkOnline/status/1986864594371895648

His mental decline should be the lead story, but nobody will report it

Trump has replaced Biden's portrait in the Whitehouse with a photograph of an auto-pen. With what should the next Democratic President (it might be a while) replace Trump's portrait?

Keep Trump's portrait.

As a warning from history.

Good morning

My daughter recently divorced her husband and has bought a home nearby

It is extraordinary how bad most everyone has been in the process from the divorce lawyers, to the conveyancers, to the utility services, to the local council, and to Welsh Water who knew her water meter had been buried in road works two years previously and have not exposed it since

I do not like the word broken Britain but sadly it is and I see little prospects of any improvement soon

The prisons still use paper with no computerised records as WIfi is not available apparently

Of course the collapse of the prison and courts happened under successive governments alongside so much more, but ultimately we expect to pour countless billions into a failing NHS with little or no reform, pensions and benefits are out of control, paying interest on our debt of £100 billion pa, etc and we wonder why we are where we are

Labour's answer is to tax and tax everything in sight, hand out billions more on WFP, triple lock, and now abolitioning the 2 child cap.

This has to stop and radical action is required to change the direction of the economy but nobody is brave enough as they perceive the public will not elect them

Ultimately this only ends up one way and that is the IMF intervening

And to those who blame the 'other lot' each lot is to blame and no political party is any better than the other at facing realism