Some years ago I needed a single ticket from Norwich to Salisbury. I was going to pick up a new car, so had no need of the return. The ticket office person persisted manfully to get me to buy a return "Its just a pound more for the return", he wailed. I explained I had no need.From February last year:Open returns, you mean. Why did they do that.LNER abolished return tickets last year IIRC.Ah ok. There are no open returns. You have to specify a return date.And if we could do a simulcast of being on our LNER apps I could prove to everyone that apart from the 10.45 departure there simply are no tickets available to buy to go from London to Newcastle on any day next week.Simply not true. I am on the LNER website right now and there are tickets available for every train from 8.30am onwards.
Edit. This is for Monday next week but the same applies to the other days.
Is this the end of the world? No. Is it an irritant? Yes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64548794
A trial in which return tickets have been scrapped to make fares simpler will be extended as part of a shake-up of the country's railways.
Transport Secretary Mark Harper confirmed that LNER, which operates trains along the East Coast mainline, will extend its trial of selling single tickets only on its routes from Spring.
If it continues to be successful it will be extended to other operators.
As an apt demonstration of how local councils are an obstacle to economic growth in this country you couldn’t ask for better.Oops, forgot to add the *Take out Jeremy Clarkson, who has become a national treasure following Clarkson's Farm, and I'm not sure the traction that this protest would get today. But plenty more people understand how a farm works than did before he appeared with his Prime series.Anecdotal evidence. I have my parents staying with me at the moment, and they have just been introduced to Clarkson’s Farm. They’ve binge-watched the whole of it in a week, and are totally astonished by how the numbers just don’t add up.
Now of course for him it's a plaything and I think people realise that he is the exception. Because what the prog did very well was illustrate how thin farming margins can be and how many if not most are living on the edge.
You only have to look at rates of suicide of farmers to understand this.
Now Jeremy has other commitments, and he hired a tractor driver to drive his tractor and a shepherd to drive his sheep - but the reality for many farmers, including many of his neighbours, is very different, something that was made abundently clear on the show. Clarkson can afford to invest into a restaurant and make money from televising his fight with the council*, but other farmers don’t have the same publicity for any of their attempts to vertically integrate their own supply chains.
It’s difficult to underestimate the effect of this series on the average British townie, and it’s certainly made support for the farmers against the government much higher than it would otherwise have been. Not the best of targets for Starmer and Reeves to have chosen.
* Whoever the feck at West Oxfordshire District Council thought it might be a good idea to allow Clarkson to bring video cameras into their meeting is a total idiot. Unless of course it was their aim to highlight what NIMBYism and local vendettas look like in practice, to a massive audience of people who generally hate NIMBYs and their local council.
Because if they can't then in a lot of cases the famers are no longer viable as businesses. As has been repeated many tiems recently (and as the thicker supporters of this policy fail to comprehend) farms tend to be asset rich and cash poor. Now I suppose the farmer could always sell a tractor or some land to pay the IHT but then the business may no longer be able to operate.Can you explain, in simple terms, why farmers deserve to pass on their farms to their heirs 100% tax free when others (with similar levels of assets in their estates) don’t?Note that the Netherlands elected it's most right wing gov't ever after their own gov'ts previous run in with farmers.What we're seeing here is how a cliquey North London left-wing metropolitan Fabian set understands neither business nor farming, and how that so readily bleeds into policy.
I've been astonished at how politically inept they've been, but they've never done it before and lack the humility to listen to anyone who has.
See also fox hunting, VAT on private schools etc. It’s a religion for them.The interesting thing here is how much they seem to relish a fight with the farmers.Interesting argument by the government that farmers want to benefit from good public services but let others pay for them.Except if you live in the country you would know we have never had good public services and probably never will. Paying high taxes to improve the public services of those living in cities is really not going to be a winning argument.
At last they're getting their PR sorted out.
It's as if they believe their own propaganda about them being well-heeled landowning toffs.
All IHT could be abolished by cutting carbon capture and storage by 50%. This would bring inline the monarch and public service pensions 0% rate with everybody else.Can you explain, in simple terms, why farmers deserve to pass on their farms to their heirs 100% tax free when others (with similar levels of assets in their estates) don’t?Note that the Netherlands elected it's most right wing gov't ever after their own gov'ts previous run in with farmers.What we're seeing here is how a cliquey North London left-wing metropolitan Fabian set understands neither business nor farming, and how that so readily bleeds into policy.
I've been astonished at how politically inept they've been, but they've never done it before and lack the humility to listen to anyone who has.
The interesting thing here is how much they seem to relish a fight with the farmers.Interesting argument by the government that farmers want to benefit from good public services but let others pay for them.Except if you live in the country you would know we have never had good public services and probably never will. Paying high taxes to improve the public services of those living in cities is really not going to be a winning argument.
At last they're getting their PR sorted out.
I think you have missed my point: 100% relief on IHT for farmland may have been introduced in the 1980s, but the wealthy at that point could evade IHT by putting their assets into trust: they had no extra incentive to buy any more farmland than they already owned as it made no difference to their tax position.THe IHT relief which is what we are talking about came in in the early 1980s.The rules on the taxation of trusts were changed in 2006. Look when farmland prices start to rocket: https://www.savills.co.uk/landing-pages/rural-land-values.aspxNo it hasn't. We had this discussion yesterday. Farm land values didn't start to increase until almost 2 decades after the introduction of INT relief.Unfortunately the net outcome of the IHT dodge has been to drive up the price of agricultural land even further out of reach of ordinary farmers.It's not exactly 'deserve to'.Can you explain, in simple terms, why farmers deserve to pass on their farms to their heirs 100% tax free when others (with similar levels of assets in their estates) don’t?Note that the Netherlands elected it's most right wing gov't ever after their own gov'ts previous run in with farmers.What we're seeing here is how a cliquey North London left-wing metropolitan Fabian set understands neither business nor farming, and how that so readily bleeds into policy.
I've been astonished at how politically inept they've been, but they've never done it before and lack the humility to listen to anyone who has.
For us townies, in terms of beauty, conservation, recreational amenity, long-term stewardship of the countryside etc, it is seen as a better outcome if agriculture is done by family farmers with a long-term interest in the land rather than agribusinesses. It's not cut and dried, but I'm willing to buy that. The IHT dodge is a way of trying to keep farms in the hands of families with a long-term interest rather than agribusinesses.
I'm not convinced it's 100% effective, mind. But that's the reason for it.
What we should be arguing about is how we better effect that particular outcome (if we are agreed that the outcome is worthwhile - I think it is, but am open to persuasion.)
It seems to me that this is a classic case of subsidising a proxy for the thing you want in the hope that you will get more of that thing & discovering that the market will very efficiently drive up the price of the proxy instead.
It seems plausible that pre 2006, the wealthy were evading IHT by putting assets into trust. When trusts were hit with a 6% per decade asset tax, they started putting their money into one of the few UK assets that were still 100% free of inheritance tax: farmland.
Food security and a diversified means of producing food (not large corporations) is definitely a public good.How is it a public good? Its obviously of benefit to those who don't pay the tax, but I don't see how it benefits the wider population?There is an argument that keeping family farms intact is a public good and therefore should be treated differently.Can you explain, in simple terms, why farmers deserve to pass on their farms to their heirs 100% tax free when others (with similar levels of assets in their estates) don’t?Note that the Netherlands elected it's most right wing gov't ever after their own gov'ts previous run in with farmers.What we're seeing here is how a cliquey North London left-wing metropolitan Fabian set understands neither business nor farming, and how that so readily bleeds into policy.
I've been astonished at how politically inept they've been, but they've never done it before and lack the humility to listen to anyone who has.