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There is nothing whatever "simple" about "fixing" the tax system - it's a nightmare of conflicting considerations, unintended consequences, waterbed effects and so on. And there's probably no single solution to caring for the elderly. Some package of measures may include a bit of tax reform, but will probably also mean encouraging people (mostly women because around 70% of people in long-term residential care are women) to put aside more for their old age, facilitating the sale of family homes, implementing best practice to raise productivity in care homes and importing more foreign labour.

None of that will be particularly popular, so I doubt you'll see a big bang solution - probably, as with funding the NHS, a system that is permanently about to break down, but politicians always do just about enough to keep it collapsing completely.

For my fellow Whovians.

Channel 4 Going Inside 10 Downing Street In Steven Moffat Drama

Sherlock writer Steven Moffat is opening the doors to 10 Downing Street in a drama for Channel 4.

The UK’s most famous residency will be the subject of Number 10, which comes from Moffat’s ITV Studios-owned production house, Hartswood Films.

The show is, in effect, an Upstairs Downstairs-style drama looking to the activities of many people inside the property, which houses the British Prime Minister and their family during their terms. Politics will be put to aside as Moffat focuses on the fictional personalities that make up the home.

Per the synopsis: “10 Downing Street. There’s a Prime Minister in the attic, a coffee bar in the basement, and a wallpapered labyrinth of romance, crisis and heartbreak in-between. Set in the only terrace house in history with mice and a nuclear deterrent, it’s the only knock-through in the world where a hangover can start a war.

“The government will be fictional, but the problems will be real. We’ll never know which party is in power, because once the whole world hits the fan it barely matters. This is a show about the building and everyone inside. Not just the Prime Minister upstairs, but the conspiracy theorist who runs the cafe three floors below, the man who repairs the lift that never works, the madly ambitious ‘advisors’ fighting for office space in cupboards. Oh, and of course, the cat.”

https://deadline.com/2025/08/channel-4-steven-moffat-drama-number-10-1236491676/

Why can't grannies exhaust their capital before asking others for cash? There is an oddity about not paying enough into the tax system during their lifetime, allowing the country's debt to grow and then expecting the current cadre of workers to pay so they can hand on an inheritance.

The same question could of course be asked about the cost of granny's health care. Reasons: It is immoral to give incentives to people to spend all they have so that the tax payer picks up your bill. Secondly it encourages lifetime alienation of assets by people carefully planning to land their bills on the taxpayer and punishes those who act straightforwardly (IHT does a similar thing). It rewards the feckless.

Personally I think the Dilnot cap got it about right.

Yeah guys, Gavin Newsom’s content is ridiculous. But it’s making you uncomfortable because he’s holding up a mirror to what you tolerate on behalf of partisanship. It jolts people out of their passive acceptance of how insane Trump sounds.
https://x.com/SarahLongwell25/status/1957650485575618799

Newsom gets to be a jerk, and claim the (relative) high ground of parody.
That's a sweet spot for a politician.

He’s wrestling with a pig, there’s no way he can keep it up for more than a few weeks, and the policy he’s talking about is a blatant and unpopular exercise in Gerrymandering, to make California worse than it is already.

Meanwhile, as he’s playing Twitter games with Texas and the president, his own State is a total mess. Make America California Again really isn’t a popular message.

A week or 2 ago you were claiming that California was already gerrymandered to the max by Dems, despite the fact that redistricting is done by an independent commission in California.

Californians seem to like their independent redistricting, so Newsom's proposed map starts off at a disadvantage. If he can frame it as retaliation for Republican dirty tricks, and a referendum on Trump, I guess he can win the vote on the proposition - so it makes sense to get as much attention for this framing as possible, as early as possible.

'Independent' California - Dem 43 GOP 9
'Gerrymandered' Texas - GOP25 Dem 13

Judge an organisation by its actions not its name.

California has an independent commission in the same way that East Germany was a Democratic Republic.

It’s fine when the Democrats do it as they’re the good guys here.

As I've noted before, it's complicated.

Districts are FPTP, so you get all the unrepresentative effects of that*, even if you have an entirely independent, non partisan redistricting commission. When a state is strongly GOP or Democrat, then it's not going to be representative at all.

That on its own is not gerrymandering.

When a state decides its going to redistrict, with the stated intention of giving the governing party extra seats in Congress, outside of the normal schedule, than you can fairly label that gerrymandering.

Where to draw the line between those two extremes is, as you say, a charged political debate.
But I'd note that Newsom's move in California is entirely contingent on the Texas gerrymander. If that doesn't happen, then neither will the CA proposal.

*As an aside, if Democrats were offered proportional representation across the nation they take it; the GOP almost certainly wouldn't

Thanks. The devil of course is in the detail.

Two issues: WRT paying care workers, oddly, unlike with bankers and CEOs of FTSE 100 companies we tend not to be told 'you have to pay the rate for the job (eg £15 million pa for CEOs) to get thr right people'. I wonder why?

Secondly, taper. How is this to be dealt with. Every government all my life has said it is dealing with it. But there is a conceptual fundamental problem, as described here:

The rate for the care worker job is £X per year
Before being a care worker unemployed single parent A received £Y per year in the total value of benefits. Y is less than X but still enough for the family to live on because it has to be.
The extra A gets for working at best is £X-Y, which isn't very much in the great scheme of things.
If they are allowed to keep a good proportion of £Y in addition, this is unfair on single parent care worker B who has always worked and never claimed benefits.

Answers on a postcard to Ian Duncan Smith and Torsten Bell.

fpt

Former deputy Green leader:


Shahrar Ali
@ShahrarAli

Prediction: Reform will win the next General election and Farage will be PM. Not because I want it but the left liberal kumbaya types continue to bury their heads in sand in complete denial of the absurdity that our asylum system has become. The more they refuse to listen to ordinary people with ordinary legitimate concerns, the more they try to stigmatise protest and generalise protestors as right wing racist xenophobes, the more they will do Reform's work for them as the only party prepared to listen...

https://x.com/ShahrarAli/status/1957542545543819699

Ali is... an interesting figure. He was thrown out of the Green Party for being anti-trans. He may be right, but he's not representative of Green Party thought.

I believe he is right. This is the best warning anyone could give of what will happen if immigration isn't brought under control.

Voting RefUK will bring immigration under control in the same way that voting for Brexit made Britain Great Again.

It will be the same voters, with the same outcome