@HYUFD's understanding of the ERM crisis is completely upside down. The interest rate rises on Black Wednesday were done to defend the exchange rate band we had committed to, and when that failed, we withdrew and cut rates.
We withdrew but rates at the end of the day were still higher than before Black Wednesday began...
Edit by Thursday night the rate had returned to 10%...
"There’s a mortgage catastrophe coming – and it will prove Liz Truss right The ‘sensibles’ believed higher taxes would stop interest rate hikes. They were calamitously wrong Allister Heath"
WRT IHT, it was certainly a mistake to push up main residence relief to £1m. But, we are where we are.
I'd scrap the exemptions for business property relief, farmland, woodland, works of art, country houses etc., and end the practice whereby life assurance and pensions can be placed in trust for named individuals, rather than forming part of the estate. All of those allowances are tax shelters, which inflate asset prices for that very reason.
No it wasn't, without that IHT main residence relief policy announced at the 2007 Tory conference by Osborne there would have been no Tory poll bounce post conference and Brown would have called a snap general election in late 2007 and probably won a small majority. Cameron may even then have been replaced as Conservative leader by David Davis.
It was not introduced by Osborne until 2015. What you're thinking of is the transferable nil rate band (which only reflected good IHT planning in the first place). There was never any need to to increase main residence relief to £1m. An allowance of £650,000 was quite enough to inherit a good sum.
One of things that baffle me is the hostility to the possibility of paying even small amounts of inheritance tax at some future date compared with the lack of concern about paying many hundreds in income tax and NI every month through PAYE.
IHT is one of the things I’ve moved steadily leftwards on over the years.
Frankly, for a hell of a lot of people in this country it would be a nice problem to have.
How many estates actually pay any IHT?
The threshold for IHT is £325k, the average UK house price is now £372,812
The meaning of "average" is important here. "Arithmetic mean" (which is inflated by a long tail of mansions), "median" (the one in the middle) or "mode" (the one that occurs most often)?
I very much doubt that is the mode price!
The modal price is probably zero as a result of simple transfers of ownership.
Are those transfers aren't included in house price averages? I suspect not.
But you are surely correct that the most common transfer price is zero.
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
The interviewees should have trolled them by using lots of Scots dialect.
Very closely related to Dutch. A friend of mine from the Borders could understand what the Boers were saying about him in Afrikaans when he was on fieldwork in SA.
WRT IHT, it was certainly a mistake to push up main residence relief to £1m. But, we are where we are.
I'd scrap the exemptions for business property relief, farmland, woodland, works of art, country houses etc., and end the practice whereby life assurance and pensions can be placed in trust for named individuals, rather than forming part of the estate. All of those allowances are tax shelters, which inflate asset prices for that very reason.
No it wasn't, without that IHT main residence relief policy announced at the 2007 Tory conference by Osborne there would have been no Tory poll bounce post conference and Brown would have called a snap general election in late 2007 and probably won a small majority. Cameron may even then have been replaced as Conservative leader by David Davis.
It was not introduced by Osborne until 2015. What you're thinking of is the transferable nil rate band (which only reflected good IHT planning in the first place). There was never any need to to increase main residence relief to £1m. An allowance of £650,000 was quite enough to inherit a good sum.
One of things that baffle me is the hostility to the possibility of paying even small amounts of inheritance tax at some future date compared with the lack of concern about paying many hundreds in income tax and NI every month through PAYE.
IHT is one of the things I’ve moved steadily leftwards on over the years.
Frankly, for a hell of a lot of people in this country it would be a nice problem to have.
How many estates actually pay any IHT?
The threshold for IHT is £325k, the average UK house price is now £372,812
The meaning of "average" is important here. "Arithmetic mean" (which is inflated by a long tail of mansions), "median" (the one in the middle) or "mode" (the one that occurs most often)?
I very much doubt that is the mode price!
The modal price is probably zero as a result of simple transfers of ownership.
Are those transfers aren't included in house price averages? I suspect not.
But you are surely correct that the most common transfer price is zero.
Don’t transfers have to take place at an assessed price for Stamp Duty?
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
It is down to corporations to increase pay for those in the bottom 50% of earners, beyond ensuring a reasonable minimum wage that is not the role of government.
Yes government can cut tax for lower earners and put some funds to subsidise apprenticeships and skills training to make workers more productive and higher paid buy it is corporations who are responsible for making their profits and distributing them fairly amongst their workforce
There is a lot of money available to subsidize apprenticeships - the issue is that a lot of companies don't wish to invest the time and money training people up because another firm will instantly grab the trained workers.
For instance Hitachi no longer train welders because as soon as they do Bombardier and Siemens offer them more money to leave...
Yet BA still trains pilots, because they have a training bond scheme. We’ll train you on plane type X, at a cost of £25k, but you need to work for us for three years afterwards.
Bombardier and Siemens also train apprentices, some of whom will go to work for Hitachi.
Not sure which Bombardier it is because they sold their rail division to Alstom in 2021. Litchurch Lane and all the depots are now part of the Alstom empire.
Of course Hitachi could simply make it worth their while to stay rather than run up,the white flag.
Guess the one thing Hitachi can't do - because if they did the other skills would be insisting on similar pay.
Medium term the Hitachi factory will be closing but they won't say that while there are contracts still be won (the consequence of messing round with HS2 is that the WCML needs new trains in the near future).
WRT IHT, it was certainly a mistake to push up main residence relief to £1m. But, we are where we are.
I'd scrap the exemptions for business property relief, farmland, woodland, works of art, country houses etc., and end the practice whereby life assurance and pensions can be placed in trust for named individuals, rather than forming part of the estate. All of those allowances are tax shelters, which inflate asset prices for that very reason.
No it wasn't, without that IHT main residence relief policy announced at the 2007 Tory conference by Osborne there would have been no Tory poll bounce post conference and Brown would have called a snap general election in late 2007 and probably won a small majority. Cameron may even then have been replaced as Conservative leader by David Davis.
It was not introduced by Osborne until 2015. What you're thinking of is the transferable nil rate band (which only reflected good IHT planning in the first place). There was never any need to to increase main residence relief to £1m. An allowance of £650,000 was quite enough to inherit a good sum.
The average property price in London is now over £650k at £737,512
So, someone with a 90% mortgage on an *average* home in London, is looking at an extra £1,500 *per month* in repayments. That’s £18,000 per year, which requires £30k in income assuming 40% marginal income tax.
Someone in the average home in London, is about to need to earn an extra £30k per year, just to afford mortgage interest rates going from 2% to 6%. Those numbers are totally horrific.
My take on this is that the government won't help people in this position. They aren't going to help rich people with high incomes who will be able to find somewhere to live, they will just help people at risk of ending up in the homeless queue.
If you think about London... they all vote Labour anyway. And in the home counties, most tory supporters have paid off their mortgages.
Whenever this comes up there is a consensus of opinion that high earning professionals are politically insignificant, there is little support for their causes (the 100k marginal tax thing, private school fees). People with expensive houses and large mortgages are in for a very difficult few years.
Private schools are an interesting one. There’s a lot of private schools in the Home Counties, mostly charging day fees in the £10k-£12k range. So many people are going to have to make the choice between downsizing the house or paying the school fees, with the resultant increase in pressure on state schools in these areas.
It won't be a massive problem for the state sector since the number of kids is trending down (meaning they will probably have physical space) and they get funding for staffing and other costs on a per pupil basis.
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
Sounds a bit of a niche subject for the listeners though.
WRT IHT, it was certainly a mistake to push up main residence relief to £1m. But, we are where we are.
I'd scrap the exemptions for business property relief, farmland, woodland, works of art, country houses etc., and end the practice whereby life assurance and pensions can be placed in trust for named individuals, rather than forming part of the estate. All of those allowances are tax shelters, which inflate asset prices for that very reason.
No it wasn't, without that IHT main residence relief policy announced at the 2007 Tory conference by Osborne there would have been no Tory poll bounce post conference and Brown would have called a snap general election in late 2007 and probably won a small majority. Cameron may even then have been replaced as Conservative leader by David Davis.
It was not introduced by Osborne until 2015. What you're thinking of is the transferable nil rate band (which only reflected good IHT planning in the first place). There was never any need to to increase main residence relief to £1m. An allowance of £650,000 was quite enough to inherit a good sum.
One of things that baffle me is the hostility to the possibility of paying even small amounts of inheritance tax at some future date compared with the lack of concern about paying many hundreds in income tax and NI every month through PAYE.
I think it's a deep psychic thing combining 'the money's already been taxed' and 'I live on through the money I leave my kids' and 'you work hard all your life then they come and swipe it off you on your deathbed'. Those are the sentiments in the mix. It's the most disliked of all taxes when rationally it should be the least objectionable. But the very fact that the hatred of it is irrational makes it all the stronger and difficult (I'd say almost impossible) to dislodge. Even people who won't be impacted by it in a million years hate the idea of IHT. My Uncle Albert (car mechanic) used to rail against it on a regular basis. I would try and explain, contextualize, but to no avail. It was like a brick wall. Unlike on many other topics where he'd listen to me and sometimes be influenced for the better. But not on IHT. No sir.
The point is, for many of us, there isn't a 'good' tax. But I recognise that the state needs money to do stuff. I can't defend IHT philosophically, but nor can I defend income tax or VAT. So glumly I frame it as something up with which I must put.
Well the philosophy is about enabling the collectivist strand of society. CGT is my favourite tax, IHT a close 2nd, but of course they are only minor players. VAT is regressive and not at all likeable but I have a sneaking regard for it because it's so sleek and efficient. Raises big sums with little fuss or overhead. It's the Daddy in that respect. In general I prefer simple open honest taxes to the devious stealth variety. Eg I'd merge IT and NI into one. UBI appeals to me but I'm not convinced it's affordable.
NOELREPORTS 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @NOELreports · 1h Wagner could lead attack on Kyiv from Belarus, British General Dannatt warns, speaking to Sky News
"If he has kept an effective fighting force around him then he presents a threat again to the Ukrainian flank closest to Kyiv where it all began," he said
Yes, an attempt to turn a moment of high weakness for Putin into uncertainty and distraction for Ukraine - all he has to do is sit there and they have to worry, since even if he lacked effective fighting force we know he will send human waves in to eat up resources, so they cannot discount it.
Aside from the fact that Wagner is *supposed* to being absorbed into the Russian Army. Which leaves you with Grant Mitchel on his own.
And the lack of logistics via Belarus.
If the Russian could create even *a threat* via Belarus, they would have done so, a long time back.
There are a surprisingly large number of people who can not give up the idea that Putin is some sort of Machiavellian genius, rather than a paranoid mid-rank spook who rose to the top of a criminal clique, and that he has taken one military adventure too far and now is stuck between escalating and being destroyed, or retreating and being lynched.
So these Putin-fans always find some barmy way of looking at Putin's latest debacle in a positive light.
WRT IHT, it was certainly a mistake to push up main residence relief to £1m. But, we are where we are.
I'd scrap the exemptions for business property relief, farmland, woodland, works of art, country houses etc., and end the practice whereby life assurance and pensions can be placed in trust for named individuals, rather than forming part of the estate. All of those allowances are tax shelters, which inflate asset prices for that very reason.
No it wasn't, without that IHT main residence relief policy announced at the 2007 Tory conference by Osborne there would have been no Tory poll bounce post conference and Brown would have called a snap general election in late 2007 and probably won a small majority. Cameron may even then have been replaced as Conservative leader by David Davis.
It was not introduced by Osborne until 2015. What you're thinking of is the transferable nil rate band (which only reflected good IHT planning in the first place). There was never any need to to increase main residence relief to £1m. An allowance of £650,000 was quite enough to inherit a good sum.
The average property price in London is now over £650k at £737,512
So, someone with a 90% mortgage on an *average* home in London, is looking at an extra £1,500 *per month* in repayments. That’s £18,000 per year, which requires £30k in income assuming 40% marginal income tax.
Someone in the average home in London, is about to need to earn an extra £30k per year, just to afford mortgage interest rates going from 2% to 6%. Those numbers are totally horrific.
My take on this is that the government won't help people in this position. They aren't going to help rich people with high incomes who will be able to find somewhere to live, they will just help people at risk of ending up in the homeless queue.
If you think about London... they all vote Labour anyway. And in the home counties, most tory supporters have paid off their mortgages.
Whenever this comes up there is a consensus of opinion that high earning professionals are politically insignificant, there is little support for their causes (the 100k marginal tax thing, private school fees). People with expensive houses and large mortgages are in for a very difficult few years.
Private schools are an interesting one. There’s a lot of private schools in the Home Counties, mostly charging day fees in the £10k-£12k range. So many people are going to have to make the choice between downsizing the house or paying the school fees, with the resultant increase in pressure on state schools in these areas.
And you can well imagine how much wailing that's going to cause when the parents discover that Fauntleroy Grammar 300 yards down the road is hopelessly oversubscribed, and the news is therefore that little Jemima and Octavius have to spend half an hour on a grotty bus every morning to get to Dumpsville Comp (Ofsted rating: Shit) in the poorest part of the poorest town in the district, because there's nowhere else left for them to go.
Upper middle class Mummies and Daddies with lots of privileges vote Conservative because they expect their privileges to be maintained. Cue mass voter defections to the Liberal Democrats.
Reform on 10% now just 2% off of UKIP's voteshare in 2015, Farage may be tempted to return to lead them if that becomes consistent.
However plenty of time for Sunak and Hunt to win back voters from Reform with tax cuts and reductions in immigration
Except in reality... neither of those works, does it?
There is less than no money. So tax cuts are out of the question- the frozen thresholds means that taxes are going up, if anything. And immigration is the only thing keeping health, social care and the economy moving.
So what does Rishi do?
If inflation falls through the government's tight control of spending then that would allow for a cut in the basic rate especially, perhaps promise of raising the IHT threshold to £1 million for all estates if the Tories are re elected.
Economic migrants are certainly not all working in the NHS and migration remains a key concern for Tory to RefUK swing voters
If strawberry plants achieve sentience and send intergalactic starships to the Magellanic Clouds, and if Boris Johnson solves the P versus NP problem, the Tories might be re-elected.
Edit: ... and in any case most estates are 1m free of IHT, if they are of the Tory-approved nuclear family un-woke variety. So why bother changing?
Only the main property of married couples via transfer, not assets beyond the main property or for children of divorced couples or where one died before Osborne's tax reform.
The IHT threshold is still £325k, it should be raised to £1 million in my view and that should be in the Tory manifesto next year as a promise if they are re elected
The practical limit is 1m for approved politically correct families as far as most people realise - IHT is only ever an issue with the second death of the married couple.
£1M per person woiuld be absolutely outrageous and a further kick in the teeth of working people and a further sign that Tories and their elderly voters are parasitic leeches on society.
Only a whinging far left socialist like you would think removing decent middle class families out of IHT whether the parents are married or not and for all assets not just the main residence and leaving it only for the very rich was somehow 'outrageous.'
No that’s not true. I am a long way from being a far left socialist (although I like the occasional whinge) and I think capital is not taxed nearly enough and income, specifically earned income, far too much. We need to address this balance and cutting IHT is a step in the wrong direction.
If you want to tax wealth and capital far more and income less then you are a Liberal ideogically not a Conservative Tory really even if still not a Socialist (who would want to tax capital and income more to fund an expansion of the welfare state and public sector)
But, but I don’t wear sandals, even in this heat.
Sometimes @HYUFD , you should think about the size of tent you want your party to pitch. Right now it’s looking smaller than most of those at Glasto.
You are an Orange Book LD not a Tory.
63% want to raise the IHT threshold. 48% even want to scrap IHT completely, far higher than the current Tory poll rating
I think we need to tax inheritance properly to help out with the national debt. So no more transfer of the IHT tax free threshold to the surviving partner's estate. No more £1m threshold for those with children
Get rid of all the exemptions like 'gifts out of income'
To be clear I support IHT free transfers between the widowed spouse/civil partnership relationship etc but beyond the inheritors need to pay.
And let's make it 50% on anything over £200,000
👍👍👍
I'd simplify it, no tax on transfers between spouses, but every penny of inheritance gets taxed the same as money people have worked for gets taxed, including of course National Insurance.
Earned income should not be taxed less than unearned income.
Why should savers be penalised?
Person A works hard all their life and on retirement blows 3/4 of his savings on wine, women & song (the rest he wastes). His only child gets no inheritance.
Person B works hard all his life and on retirement lives modestly and leaves 1/2 his savings to his only child.
Why should the government want to discourage thriftiness and saving?
Saving isn't some unalloyed good. If everyone is thrifty all the time, the economy grinds to a halt. We need people to spend because spending creates jobs.
It's all very well saving and having your money used to invest, but investments are a bet on future spending. Spending is what drives the economy.
Besides, what's with the "penalising savers" thing?
The person who did the saving isn't getting taxed in any meaningful way, because they have gone to a place where there is no tax. (At least we assume that's the case. Maybe Hell is an eternal self assessment form.)
The people who end up with less money because of inheritance tax are the inheritors, who have generally neither saved, toiled nor spun for what they receive. That's not to be begrudged, but a world where a person's life chances depend more on inheritance and less on what they do is not a good one. You can't abolish the inheritance effect, but it's not really something to encourage, I reckon.
If your starting point is that taxes are a necessary unpleasantness to pay for a good society, then tax paid when you receive an inheritance is probably one of the less objectionable ones.
As I pointed out in the last thread for the average person unless they are in the top 10% or especially top 1% of earners capitalism is not doing much for them in terms of wage rises. House prices and capital in property and savings and shares have generally risen much more this century than average earnings.
So if the state confiscates all or most assets on the death of their owner which would have been inherited otherwise and reduces accumulation of wealth then support for capitalism beyond the top 10% of earners in the private sector will fall even further
The trouble with asset wealth, especially locked up in bricks and mortar, is you can't spend it, whereas a pay rise can pay for a new car which employs car workers or dining out which employs restaurant workers and Deliveroo riders. That is capitalism.
And capitalism and pay rises aren't delivering much for 90% of workers now, whereas assets and savings are delivering more for the average person
Capitalism is delivering for workers. We're caught in a cycle of inflation and bad policy the now, but capitalism is still good. What we're doing as a country now isn't the only way to do capitalism. We just need to adjust course, not abandon ship.
Exclude government completely and just leave the economy to the market and unless you are an investment banker, FTSE 100 company ceo or director, tech executive or Premier League footballer capitalism isn't doing a great deal for you now. For most workers their pay is rising well below inflation. At least if they own a property that still likely has a high value even if falling a bit and their savings will be boosted by rising interest rates
I'm curious to know what your solution is.
Knowing you, it's probably feudalism. It is, isn't it?
Inheritance in part and feudalism was not all bad, most peasants had a hut and a smallholding for food. There was more stability and less anxiety even if life expectancy was lower and if the work was hard in the fields it was normally there.
There was a church and inn in almost every village and town (many villages no longer even have a pub or church with services each Sunday)
If I walked across the village green to St James's church at 1100 hours I would be in a congregation of about half a dozen. As a capitalist you have to agree that church is not economically viable- close it down, deconsecrate and sell it off for housing!
No, the congregation's reward regardless of size will be eternal life with Christ who managed with just 12 followers originally
It happened to my childhood church. And it had a beautiful bell tower. The CoE were quite happy to offload that ironically during a time of massive population increase. Oh and they sold off the bells.
@HYUFD's understanding of the ERM crisis is completely upside down. The interest rate rises on Black Wednesday were done to defend the exchange rate band we had committed to, and when that failed, we withdrew and cut rates.
You are both correct.
In October 1989, the UK base rate peaked at 14.9%. it then declined to under 10% by the time of the ERM crisis, when it was jacked up to around 15% for about a day. After we dropped out the ERM (and those rises were immediately reversed) it continued its merry decline.
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
Sounds a bit of a niche subject for the listeners though.
Only from a southern British point of view. The Scots still think they are European, of course. One of the best programmes on BBC Scotland was (maybe still is) a weekly current affairs roundup, often focussing on how some European country does something of interest to Scotland from which one might learn.
Meanwhile, for complicated reasons I went to church this morning. Small village, fewer than 10 people in the congregation.
Some observations:
The vicar managed to name check three other religions, all for derogatory reasons (Jews, Brahmins, Muslims), he bewailed the fact that Christians can't wear crucifixes to work when Muslims can wear hijabs, and said that Jesus didn't come to bring peace and explained why this was.
So an interesting encounter with parochial muscular Christianity in this country.
Did you speak up or let it go?
As mentioned I let it go. I was a guest and pondered but eventually decided against. No doubt another tick in the religious debit column.
Not your PB persona then. I wonder which is the real Captain Topping. Both, I suppose. People can be incredibly complex. No, people *are* incredibly complex. One of the reasons I'm a GAI skeptic. Chances of building a 'you' that on one day throws its weight around on a discussion site, picking fights, joining fights, starting them if there isn't one, then the next day goes to church and sits there quiet as a mouse through the vicar's long and dodgy sermon? ... close to zero imo.
Yeah I thought I'd be a bit of a dick if I marched into the church as a guest and started shouting the odds. Leave them to it was my thought.
But I respect you if you would have chosen the bit of a dick route.
If they're out there in the town centre with a loudspeaker they're begging to be heckled. If it's somewhere where you'd only go to hear about Christianity, it's quite rude to speak up unless your point could be reasonably seen as a correction to a mistake within the tradition of that church.
So if your priest in church starts talking about the trinity as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spiderman, you should pipe up. If they're in Market Square with a bullhorn shouting at Muslims that they're going to hell, then a hearty "fuck off" is top of the menu.
Same rules with all religions. Their space, their rules. Your space, your rules. Shared space, everyone gets to speak.
Yeah I mean if I was going to take issue with all the things he said which I believe untrue or, say, scientifically dubious then I wouldn't have chosen the crucifix vs hijab bit.
NOELREPORTS 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @NOELreports · 1h Wagner could lead attack on Kyiv from Belarus, British General Dannatt warns, speaking to Sky News
"If he has kept an effective fighting force around him then he presents a threat again to the Ukrainian flank closest to Kyiv where it all began," he said
Yes, an attempt to turn a moment of high weakness for Putin into uncertainty and distraction for Ukraine - all he has to do is sit there and they have to worry, since even if he lacked effective fighting force we know he will send human waves in to eat up resources, so they cannot discount it.
Aside from the fact that Wagner is *supposed* to being absorbed into the Russian Army. Which leaves you with Grant Mitchel on his own.
And the lack of logistics via Belarus.
If the Russian could create even *a threat* via Belarus, they would have done so, a long time back.
There are a surprisingly large number of people who can not give up the idea that Putin is some sort of Machiavellian genius, rather than a paranoid mid-rank spook who rose to the top of a criminal clique, and that he has taken one military adventure too far and now is stuck between escalating and being destroyed, or retreating and being lynched.
So these Putin-fans always find some barmy way of looking at Putin's latest debacle in a positive light.
Some genuinely seemed to think as it was happening that it was all a set up for a moment of Putin power display, despite it being utterly ridiculous. It wasn't some trivial event which could be a false flag for him to respond to, it was an open admission of losing control of armed units, and that it was resolved quickly doesn't change that.
The other revelation I had, sitting there, was that I was a lot more terrified of starting to believe in god and religion than I might be about the prospect of dying.
'The right-on white liberals of Hamtramck, Michigan, were delighted by the symbolism when the town elected an all-Muslim council — the first in America. They are slightly less elated since the council banned the LGBT flag from public buildings and Muslim supporters tweeted their glee about living in a “fagless city”.
The dejected white liberal former mayor said: “There’s a sense of betrayal. We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened and you’re the one doing the threatening.”'
@HYUFD's understanding of the ERM crisis is completely upside down. The interest rate rises on Black Wednesday were done to defend the exchange rate band we had committed to, and when that failed, we withdrew and cut rates.
You are both correct.
In October 1989, the UK base rate peaked at 14.9%. it then declined to under 10% by the time of the ERM crisis, when it was jacked up to around 15% for about a day. After we dropped out the ERM (and those rises were immediately reversed) it continued its merry decline.
Even by 1997 rates were still higher than they are now and the negative equity from Black Wednesday and fall in house values also added to the huge swing in voters with a mortgage from Tory in 1992 to New Labour in 1997
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
Sounds a bit of a niche subject for the listeners though.
Only from a southern British point of view. The Scots still think they are European, of course. One of the best programmes on BBC Scotland was (maybe still is) a weekly current affairs roundup, often focussing on how some European country does something of interest to Scotland from which one might learn.
Yes, we are all aware of how what splendid nice chaps the Scots people are compared to the terrible oiks south of the border, thank you for the frequent reminders, frankly the place should be towed away and sunk.
WRT IHT, it was certainly a mistake to push up main residence relief to £1m. But, we are where we are.
I'd scrap the exemptions for business property relief, farmland, woodland, works of art, country houses etc., and end the practice whereby life assurance and pensions can be placed in trust for named individuals, rather than forming part of the estate. All of those allowances are tax shelters, which inflate asset prices for that very reason.
No it wasn't, without that IHT main residence relief policy announced at the 2007 Tory conference by Osborne there would have been no Tory poll bounce post conference and Brown would have called a snap general election in late 2007 and probably won a small majority. Cameron may even then have been replaced as Conservative leader by David Davis.
It was not introduced by Osborne until 2015. What you're thinking of is the transferable nil rate band (which only reflected good IHT planning in the first place). There was never any need to to increase main residence relief to £1m. An allowance of £650,000 was quite enough to inherit a good sum.
One of things that baffle me is the hostility to the possibility of paying even small amounts of inheritance tax at some future date compared with the lack of concern about paying many hundreds in income tax and NI every month through PAYE.
IHT is one of the things I’ve moved steadily leftwards on over the years.
Frankly, for a hell of a lot of people in this country it would be a nice problem to have.
How many estates actually pay any IHT?
The threshold for IHT is £325k, the average UK house price is now £372,812
The meaning of "average" is important here. "Arithmetic mean" (which is inflated by a long tail of mansions), "median" (the one in the middle) or "mode" (the one that occurs most often)?
I very much doubt that is the mode price!
The modal price is probably zero as a result of simple transfers of ownership.
Are those transfers aren't included in house price averages? I suspect not.
But you are surely correct that the most common transfer price is zero.
Don’t transfers have to take place at an assessed price for Stamp Duty?
Yes. I've just gifted a house to my daughters at zero but they have to pay tax on its assessed value.
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
The interviewees should have trolled them by using lots of Scots dialect.
Very closely related to Dutch. A friend of mine from the Borders could understand what the Boers were saying about him in Afrikaans when he was on fieldwork in SA.
Maybe there was cross-fertilisation? AIUI a lot of Scots mercenaries fought on the Protestant side in the Low Countries during the numerous religious conflicts of the Early Modern period. And I reckon Dutch must be about the closest major linguistic relative of English in any case.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Meanwhile, for complicated reasons I went to church this morning. Small village, fewer than 10 people in the congregation.
Some observations:
The vicar managed to name check three other religions, all for derogatory reasons (Jews, Brahmins, Muslims), he bewailed the fact that Christians can't wear crucifixes to work when Muslims can wear hijabs, and said that Jesus didn't come to bring peace and explained why this was.
So an interesting encounter with parochial muscular Christianity in this country.
Did you speak up or let it go?
As mentioned I let it go. I was a guest and pondered but eventually decided against. No doubt another tick in the religious debit column.
Not your PB persona then. I wonder which is the real Captain Topping. Both, I suppose. People can be incredibly complex. No, people *are* incredibly complex. One of the reasons I'm a GAI skeptic. Chances of building a 'you' that on one day throws its weight around on a discussion site, picking fights, joining fights, starting them if there isn't one, then the next day goes to church and sits there quiet as a mouse through the vicar's long and dodgy sermon? ... close to zero imo.
Yeah I thought I'd be a bit of a dick if I marched into the church as a guest and started shouting the odds. Leave them to it was my thought.
But I respect you if you would have chosen the bit of a dick route.
If they're out there in the town centre with a loudspeaker they're begging to be heckled. If it's somewhere where you'd only go to hear about Christianity, it's quite rude to speak up unless your point could be reasonably seen as a correction to a mistake within the tradition of that church.
So if your priest in church starts talking about the trinity as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spiderman, you should pipe up. If they're in Market Square with a bullhorn shouting at Muslims that they're going to hell, then a hearty "fuck off" is top of the menu.
Same rules with all religions. Their space, their rules. Your space, your rules. Shared space, everyone gets to speak.
Try criticising Islam in the town square in Saudi Arabia and you would get arrested
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
Sounds a bit of a niche subject for the listeners though.
Only from a southern British point of view. The Scots still think they are European, of course. One of the best programmes on BBC Scotland was (maybe still is) a weekly current affairs roundup, often focussing on how some European country does something of interest to Scotland from which one might learn.
You've rather grandly extrapolated from my intended point in a rather defensive way. Scotland is not a niche subject, the internal political machinations of the SNP would be. There dozens of countries in Europe, do they do regular slots on the political parties of each of them? Well done to them and the dutch generally if they do, but if they don't then I'm interested what about the SNP matter was of particular fascination that made it be chosen. General interest in separtist movements, a focus on recently newsworthy scandals, it's Scotland month for the station or something?
Meanwhile, for complicated reasons I went to church this morning. Small village, fewer than 10 people in the congregation.
Some observations:
The vicar managed to name check three other religions, all for derogatory reasons (Jews, Brahmins, Muslims), he bewailed the fact that Christians can't wear crucifixes to work when Muslims can wear hijabs, and said that Jesus didn't come to bring peace and explained why this was.
So an interesting encounter with parochial muscular Christianity in this country.
Did you speak up or let it go?
As mentioned I let it go. I was a guest and pondered but eventually decided against. No doubt another tick in the religious debit column.
Not your PB persona then. I wonder which is the real Captain Topping. Both, I suppose. People can be incredibly complex. No, people *are* incredibly complex. One of the reasons I'm a GAI skeptic. Chances of building a 'you' that on one day throws its weight around on a discussion site, picking fights, joining fights, starting them if there isn't one, then the next day goes to church and sits there quiet as a mouse through the vicar's long and dodgy sermon? ... close to zero imo.
Yeah I thought I'd be a bit of a dick if I marched into the church as a guest and started shouting the odds. Leave them to it was my thought.
But I respect you if you would have chosen the bit of a dick route.
If they're out there in the town centre with a loudspeaker they're begging to be heckled. If it's somewhere where you'd only go to hear about Christianity, it's quite rude to speak up unless your point could be reasonably seen as a correction to a mistake within the tradition of that church.
So if your priest in church starts talking about the trinity as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spiderman, you should pipe up. If they're in Market Square with a bullhorn shouting at Muslims that they're going to hell, then a hearty "fuck off" is top of the menu.
Same rules with all religions. Their space, their rules. Your space, your rules. Shared space, everyone gets to speak.
Try criticising Islam in the town square in Saudi Arabia and you would get arrested
So what? Is this what you’ve descended to? “Vote Tory to maintain better human rights standards than Saudi Arabia”
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
The interviewees should have trolled them by using lots of Scots dialect.
Very closely related to Dutch. A friend of mine from the Borders could understand what the Boers were saying about him in Afrikaans when he was on fieldwork in SA.
Maybe there was cross-fertilisation? AIUI a lot of Scots mercenaries fought on the Protestant side in the Low Countries during the numerous religious conflicts of the Early Modern period. And I reckon Dutch must be about the closest major linguistic relative of English in any case.
Latter, I think - Friesian/Anglish/Danish all in the mix. 'Mine dochter milkit ane coo' would be perfectly comprehensible in Holland, Germany, Denmark and the Scottish Lowlands.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
The Bank of England, with the Treasury’s blessing, unleashed £450bn of QE during 18 months of lockdown – more than during the previous decade, a major cause of current price pressure.
Meanwhile, for complicated reasons I went to church this morning. Small village, fewer than 10 people in the congregation.
Some observations:
The vicar managed to name check three other religions, all for derogatory reasons (Jews, Brahmins, Muslims), he bewailed the fact that Christians can't wear crucifixes to work when Muslims can wear hijabs, and said that Jesus didn't come to bring peace and explained why this was.
So an interesting encounter with parochial muscular Christianity in this country.
Did you speak up or let it go?
As mentioned I let it go. I was a guest and pondered but eventually decided against. No doubt another tick in the religious debit column.
Not your PB persona then. I wonder which is the real Captain Topping. Both, I suppose. People can be incredibly complex. No, people *are* incredibly complex. One of the reasons I'm a GAI skeptic. Chances of building a 'you' that on one day throws its weight around on a discussion site, picking fights, joining fights, starting them if there isn't one, then the next day goes to church and sits there quiet as a mouse through the vicar's long and dodgy sermon? ... close to zero imo.
Yeah I thought I'd be a bit of a dick if I marched into the church as a guest and started shouting the odds. Leave them to it was my thought.
But I respect you if you would have chosen the bit of a dick route.
If they're out there in the town centre with a loudspeaker they're begging to be heckled. If it's somewhere where you'd only go to hear about Christianity, it's quite rude to speak up unless your point could be reasonably seen as a correction to a mistake within the tradition of that church.
So if your priest in church starts talking about the trinity as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spiderman, you should pipe up. If they're in Market Square with a bullhorn shouting at Muslims that they're going to hell, then a hearty "fuck off" is top of the menu.
Same rules with all religions. Their space, their rules. Your space, your rules. Shared space, everyone gets to speak.
Try criticising Islam in the town square in Saudi Arabia and you would get arrested
You always try this sort of line, and the response is always the same - just because they do it worse, doesn't mean we should not aspire to be better than that. Take the compliment that is due that your faith co-adherenets do not react in such a way.
Some genuinely seemed to think as it was happening that it was all a set up for a moment of Putin power display, despite it being utterly ridiculous. It wasn't some trivial event which could be a false flag for him to respond to, it was an open admission of losing control of armed units, and that it was resolved quickly doesn't change that.
I'm fairly sure that if Putin wanted to have Wagner in Belarus to threaten Kyiv he could do so without Wagner threatening to kill his military chiefs and depose Putin himself.
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
Sounds a bit of a niche subject for the listeners though.
Only from a southern British point of view. The Scots still think they are European, of course. One of the best programmes on BBC Scotland was (maybe still is) a weekly current affairs roundup, often focussing on how some European country does something of interest to Scotland from which one might learn.
You've rather grandly extrapolated from my intended point in a rather defensive way. Scotland is not a niche subject, the internal political machinations of the SNP would be. There dozens of countries in Europe, do they do regular slots on the political parties of each of them? Well done to them and the dutch generally if they do, but if they don't then I'm interested what about the SNP matter was of particular fascination that made it be chosen. General interest in separtist movements, a focus on recently newsworthy scandals, it's Scotland month for the station or something?
Fair enough, but the basic underlying foundation stands - the Scots and especially the SNP are seen as pro-European, hence the interest. Whatever the detailed reasons are, as you say.
Meanwhile, for complicated reasons I went to church this morning. Small village, fewer than 10 people in the congregation.
Some observations:
The vicar managed to name check three other religions, all for derogatory reasons (Jews, Brahmins, Muslims), he bewailed the fact that Christians can't wear crucifixes to work when Muslims can wear hijabs, and said that Jesus didn't come to bring peace and explained why this was.
So an interesting encounter with parochial muscular Christianity in this country.
Did you speak up or let it go?
As mentioned I let it go. I was a guest and pondered but eventually decided against. No doubt another tick in the religious debit column.
Not your PB persona then. I wonder which is the real Captain Topping. Both, I suppose. People can be incredibly complex. No, people *are* incredibly complex. One of the reasons I'm a GAI skeptic. Chances of building a 'you' that on one day throws its weight around on a discussion site, picking fights, joining fights, starting them if there isn't one, then the next day goes to church and sits there quiet as a mouse through the vicar's long and dodgy sermon? ... close to zero imo.
Yeah I thought I'd be a bit of a dick if I marched into the church as a guest and started shouting the odds. Leave them to it was my thought.
But I respect you if you would have chosen the bit of a dick route.
If they're out there in the town centre with a loudspeaker they're begging to be heckled. If it's somewhere where you'd only go to hear about Christianity, it's quite rude to speak up unless your point could be reasonably seen as a correction to a mistake within the tradition of that church.
So if your priest in church starts talking about the trinity as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spiderman, you should pipe up. If they're in Market Square with a bullhorn shouting at Muslims that they're going to hell, then a hearty "fuck off" is top of the menu.
Same rules with all religions. Their space, their rules. Your space, your rules. Shared space, everyone gets to speak.
Try criticising Islam in the town square in Saudi Arabia and you would get arrested
So what? Is this what you’ve descended to? “Vote Tory to maintain better human rights standards than Saudi Arabia”
I expect some Tory members and voters wouldn't mind a bit of Saudi style law and order
WRT IHT, it was certainly a mistake to push up main residence relief to £1m. But, we are where we are.
I'd scrap the exemptions for business property relief, farmland, woodland, works of art, country houses etc., and end the practice whereby life assurance and pensions can be placed in trust for named individuals, rather than forming part of the estate. All of those allowances are tax shelters, which inflate asset prices for that very reason.
No it wasn't, without that IHT main residence relief policy announced at the 2007 Tory conference by Osborne there would have been no Tory poll bounce post conference and Brown would have called a snap general election in late 2007 and probably won a small majority. Cameron may even then have been replaced as Conservative leader by David Davis.
It was not introduced by Osborne until 2015. What you're thinking of is the transferable nil rate band (which only reflected good IHT planning in the first place). There was never any need to to increase main residence relief to £1m. An allowance of £650,000 was quite enough to inherit a good sum.
One of things that baffle me is the hostility to the possibility of paying even small amounts of inheritance tax at some future date compared with the lack of concern about paying many hundreds in income tax and NI every month through PAYE.
IHT is one of the things I’ve moved steadily leftwards on over the years.
Frankly, for a hell of a lot of people in this country it would be a nice problem to have.
How many estates actually pay any IHT?
The threshold for IHT is £325k, the average UK house price is now £372,812
The meaning of "average" is important here. "Arithmetic mean" (which is inflated by a long tail of mansions), "median" (the one in the middle) or "mode" (the one that occurs most often)?
I very much doubt that is the mode price!
The modal price is probably zero as a result of simple transfers of ownership.
Are those transfers aren't included in house price averages? I suspect not.
But you are surely correct that the most common transfer price is zero.
Don’t transfers have to take place at an assessed price for Stamp Duty?
Yes. I've just gifted a house to my daughters at zero but they have to pay tax on its assessed value.
They don't have to pay stamp duty on the gift, if they have paid that is a mistake and you should tell the conveyancer to get back. If they have taken over the mortgage then there is that consideration which is chargeable.
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
The interviewees should have trolled them by using lots of Scots dialect.
Very closely related to Dutch. A friend of mine from the Borders could understand what the Boers were saying about him in Afrikaans when he was on fieldwork in SA.
A funny language, Dutch. The sound of it is unusual and sounds quite 'foreign', yet if you listen to the cadence of it and ignore the words, it is spoken with stress and emphasis very much like English; more so than any other European language, I think. And when you start to focus on the words, there are a fair few that you can guess, even through the sound of them with all that throat clearing isn't familiar. And they have the habit of dropping a fair few English words and phrases into mid-sentence almost as often as on Urdu or Welsh.
Meanwhile, for complicated reasons I went to church this morning. Small village, fewer than 10 people in the congregation.
Some observations:
The vicar managed to name check three other religions, all for derogatory reasons (Jews, Brahmins, Muslims), he bewailed the fact that Christians can't wear crucifixes to work when Muslims can wear hijabs, and said that Jesus didn't come to bring peace and explained why this was.
So an interesting encounter with parochial muscular Christianity in this country.
Did you speak up or let it go?
As mentioned I let it go. I was a guest and pondered but eventually decided against. No doubt another tick in the religious debit column.
Not your PB persona then. I wonder which is the real Captain Topping. Both, I suppose. People can be incredibly complex. No, people *are* incredibly complex. One of the reasons I'm a GAI skeptic. Chances of building a 'you' that on one day throws its weight around on a discussion site, picking fights, joining fights, starting them if there isn't one, then the next day goes to church and sits there quiet as a mouse through the vicar's long and dodgy sermon? ... close to zero imo.
Yeah I thought I'd be a bit of a dick if I marched into the church as a guest and started shouting the odds. Leave them to it was my thought.
But I respect you if you would have chosen the bit of a dick route.
If they're out there in the town centre with a loudspeaker they're begging to be heckled. If it's somewhere where you'd only go to hear about Christianity, it's quite rude to speak up unless your point could be reasonably seen as a correction to a mistake within the tradition of that church.
So if your priest in church starts talking about the trinity as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spiderman, you should pipe up. If they're in Market Square with a bullhorn shouting at Muslims that they're going to hell, then a hearty "fuck off" is top of the menu.
Same rules with all religions. Their space, their rules. Your space, your rules. Shared space, everyone gets to speak.
Try criticising Islam in the town square in Saudi Arabia and you would get arrested
So what? Is this what you’ve descended to “Vote Tory to maintain better human rights standards than Saudi Arabia”
It's in keeping with his previously expressed views that the SNP, for example, should count themselves fortunate not to be arrested and banned for sedition.
I think he has very low expectations of what people deserve, and so long as you are not being subjected to torture and arrest for political and religious views you should be damned greatful.
But also stop being mean about Christianity or something.
Edit:
Does remind me of that dystopic future in that Red Dwarf episode
Vote Fascist for a third glorious decade of total law enforcement. Be a government informer: betray your family and friends, fabulous prizes to be won.
Meanwhile, for complicated reasons I went to church this morning. Small village, fewer than 10 people in the congregation.
Some observations:
The vicar managed to name check three other religions, all for derogatory reasons (Jews, Brahmins, Muslims), he bewailed the fact that Christians can't wear crucifixes to work when Muslims can wear hijabs, and said that Jesus didn't come to bring peace and explained why this was.
So an interesting encounter with parochial muscular Christianity in this country.
Did you speak up or let it go?
As mentioned I let it go. I was a guest and pondered but eventually decided against. No doubt another tick in the religious debit column.
Not your PB persona then. I wonder which is the real Captain Topping. Both, I suppose. People can be incredibly complex. No, people *are* incredibly complex. One of the reasons I'm a GAI skeptic. Chances of building a 'you' that on one day throws its weight around on a discussion site, picking fights, joining fights, starting them if there isn't one, then the next day goes to church and sits there quiet as a mouse through the vicar's long and dodgy sermon? ... close to zero imo.
Yeah I thought I'd be a bit of a dick if I marched into the church as a guest and started shouting the odds. Leave them to it was my thought.
But I respect you if you would have chosen the bit of a dick route.
If they're out there in the town centre with a loudspeaker they're begging to be heckled. If it's somewhere where you'd only go to hear about Christianity, it's quite rude to speak up unless your point could be reasonably seen as a correction to a mistake within the tradition of that church.
So if your priest in church starts talking about the trinity as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spiderman, you should pipe up. If they're in Market Square with a bullhorn shouting at Muslims that they're going to hell, then a hearty "fuck off" is top of the menu.
Same rules with all religions. Their space, their rules. Your space, your rules. Shared space, everyone gets to speak.
Try criticising Islam in the town square in Saudi Arabia and you would get arrested
So what? Is this what you’ve descended to? “Vote Tory to maintain better human rights standards than Saudi Arabia”
I expect some Tory members and voters wouldn't mind a bit of Saudi style law and order
That’s either amusing self-deprecation or a terrifying admission.
The other revelation I had, sitting there, was that I was a lot more terrified of starting to believe in god and religion than I might be about the prospect of dying.
I agree, that would be a sad end indeed to a life of rationality and freethinking.
Meanwhile, for complicated reasons I went to church this morning. Small village, fewer than 10 people in the congregation.
Some observations:
The vicar managed to name check three other religions, all for derogatory reasons (Jews, Brahmins, Muslims), he bewailed the fact that Christians can't wear crucifixes to work when Muslims can wear hijabs, and said that Jesus didn't come to bring peace and explained why this was.
So an interesting encounter with parochial muscular Christianity in this country.
Did you speak up or let it go?
As mentioned I let it go. I was a guest and pondered but eventually decided against. No doubt another tick in the religious debit column.
Not your PB persona then. I wonder which is the real Captain Topping. Both, I suppose. People can be incredibly complex. No, people *are* incredibly complex. One of the reasons I'm a GAI skeptic. Chances of building a 'you' that on one day throws its weight around on a discussion site, picking fights, joining fights, starting them if there isn't one, then the next day goes to church and sits there quiet as a mouse through the vicar's long and dodgy sermon? ... close to zero imo.
Yeah I thought I'd be a bit of a dick if I marched into the church as a guest and started shouting the odds. Leave them to it was my thought.
But I respect you if you would have chosen the bit of a dick route.
If they're out there in the town centre with a loudspeaker they're begging to be heckled. If it's somewhere where you'd only go to hear about Christianity, it's quite rude to speak up unless your point could be reasonably seen as a correction to a mistake within the tradition of that church.
So if your priest in church starts talking about the trinity as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spiderman, you should pipe up. If they're in Market Square with a bullhorn shouting at Muslims that they're going to hell, then a hearty "fuck off" is top of the menu.
Same rules with all religions. Their space, their rules. Your space, your rules. Shared space, everyone gets to speak.
Try criticising Islam in the town square in Saudi Arabia and you would get arrested
So what? Is this what you’ve descended to? “Vote Tory to maintain better human rights standards than Saudi Arabia”
I expect some Tory members and voters wouldn't mind a bit of Saudi style law and order
That’s either amusing self-deprecation or a terrifying admission.
Some genuinely seemed to think as it was happening that it was all a set up for a moment of Putin power display, despite it being utterly ridiculous. It wasn't some trivial event which could be a false flag for him to respond to, it was an open admission of losing control of armed units, and that it was resolved quickly doesn't change that.
I'm fairly sure that if Putin wanted to have Wagner in Belarus to threaten Kyiv he could do so without Wagner threatening to kill his military chiefs and depose Putin himself.
Most definitely. Perhaps they'll try to make an omelette out of this broken egg, but they sure did not intend to smash it in the first place.
The Bank of England, with the Treasury’s blessing, unleashed £450bn of QE during 18 months of lockdown – more than during the previous decade, a major cause of current price pressure.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
The interviewees should have trolled them by using lots of Scots dialect.
Opinions vary, but I'm strongly minded to call Scots a language, not a dialect. The clincher for me is that Scots itself has a number of dialects and trust me when I say that as someone in Aberdeenshire who didn't grow up here, Doric might as well be Dutch for all I can understand. Can dialects have subdialects? Well, maybe, but I find it easier to just think of Scots as a separate language.
Fit like? Foore ye deein the day?
Standard practice is indeed as you say. Apart from anything else, there is very strong and varying linguistic influence on different dialects - Scandinavian in O, S and Caithness for instance.
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
The interviewees should have trolled them by using lots of Scots dialect.
Very closely related to Dutch. A friend of mine from the Borders could understand what the Boers were saying about him in Afrikaans when he was on fieldwork in SA.
Maybe there was cross-fertilisation? AIUI a lot of Scots mercenaries fought on the Protestant side in the Low Countries during the numerous religious conflicts of the Early Modern period. And I reckon Dutch must be about the closest major linguistic relative of English in any case.
TEFL students occasionally ask this and the answer is Frisian.
Brea, buter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.
The other revelation I had, sitting there, was that I was a lot more terrified of starting to believe in god and religion than I might be about the prospect of dying.
I think David Baddiel's latest short book touches on a similar theme.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
The interviewees should have trolled them by using lots of Scots dialect.
Very closely related to Dutch. A friend of mine from the Borders could understand what the Boers were saying about him in Afrikaans when he was on fieldwork in SA.
A funny language, Dutch. The sound of it is unusual and sounds quite 'foreign', yet if you listen to the cadence of it and ignore the words, it is spoken with stress and emphasis very much like English; more so than any other European language, I think. And when you start to focus on the words, there are a fair few that you can guess, even through the sound of them with all that throat clearing isn't familiar. And they have the habit of dropping a fair few English words and phrases into mid-sentence almost as often as on Urdu or Welsh.
Interesting, that's close to what my friend said. Though obviously in his case the vocabulary would be much closer to his local form of English than what they speak on South Island.
NOELREPORTS 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @NOELreports · 1h Wagner could lead attack on Kyiv from Belarus, British General Dannatt warns, speaking to Sky News
"If he has kept an effective fighting force around him then he presents a threat again to the Ukrainian flank closest to Kyiv where it all began," he said
Yes, an attempt to turn a moment of high weakness for Putin into uncertainty and distraction for Ukraine - all he has to do is sit there and they have to worry, since even if he lacked effective fighting force we know he will send human waves in to eat up resources, so they cannot discount it.
Aside from the fact that Wagner is *supposed* to being absorbed into the Russian Army. Which leaves you with Grant Mitchel on his own.
And the lack of logistics via Belarus.
If the Russian could create even *a threat* via Belarus, they would have done so, a long time back.
There are a surprisingly large number of people who can not give up the idea that Putin is some sort of Machiavellian genius, rather than a paranoid mid-rank spook who rose to the top of a criminal clique, and that he has taken one military adventure too far and now is stuck between escalating and being destroyed, or retreating and being lynched.
So these Putin-fans always find some barmy way of looking at Putin's latest debacle in a positive light.
The parallel to people who still believe that every move by Trump is nth dimensional chess is telling.
In the Games of Thrones analogy, the question is the levels of betrayal - I could easily see Grant Mitchell setting off to Moscow, with a pocketful of assurances that The Big Boys would be with him. The Big Boys then ditch him, after using him to achieve their goal of reducing Putin’s power, so that they can further their goals. Said goals are probably stupid, self serving and bound to fail, of course.
Meanwhile, for complicated reasons I went to church this morning. Small village, fewer than 10 people in the congregation.
Some observations:
The vicar managed to name check three other religions, all for derogatory reasons (Jews, Brahmins, Muslims), he bewailed the fact that Christians can't wear crucifixes to work when Muslims can wear hijabs, and said that Jesus didn't come to bring peace and explained why this was.
So an interesting encounter with parochial muscular Christianity in this country.
Did you speak up or let it go?
As mentioned I let it go. I was a guest and pondered but eventually decided against. No doubt another tick in the religious debit column.
Not your PB persona then. I wonder which is the real Captain Topping. Both, I suppose. People can be incredibly complex. No, people *are* incredibly complex. One of the reasons I'm a GAI skeptic. Chances of building a 'you' that on one day throws its weight around on a discussion site, picking fights, joining fights, starting them if there isn't one, then the next day goes to church and sits there quiet as a mouse through the vicar's long and dodgy sermon? ... close to zero imo.
Yeah I thought I'd be a bit of a dick if I marched into the church as a guest and started shouting the odds. Leave them to it was my thought.
But I respect you if you would have chosen the bit of a dick route.
Me? Be a dick in a holy place? No chance. Absolutely no upside to that.
But anyway I wasn't slighting you. Quite the opposite. What I was doing was marvelling at the complex brain chemistry of a person (you in this case) who can be like that in church but be totally different elsewhere. The finetuning of speech and behaviour depending on environment and situation that people are capable of. Indeed to a large extent do instinctively rather than even having to try.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Yes. We've got a caste system. One caste, the Havhouzis, have engineered an arrangement whereby their children don't have to save a deposit. Or even in some cases pay a mortgage at all. They are then able to enjoy the finest things in life without much stress. The other caste, the Ferrentis, have a weekly struggle to pay the bills, and not much in the way of disposable income. This is decided by accident of birth. The Havhouzis are keen that the Ferrentis pay a disproportionate amount of the tax to keep the show on the road. It is possible to become an Havhouzi. But it costs a fair bit. Do you think this is the basis for a stable society?
Trump: Whatever documents a President decides to take with him, he has the absolute right to take them. He has the absolute right to keep them or he can give them back.. that’s the law https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1672763070421106695
He's totally barmy - he genuinely seems to believe, based on other remarks, that a President can do anything, and his own statements on the documents indicates this whole stupid affair comes down to him believing that if it was provided to him that makes it his now, and he doesn't want anyone touching his stuff. People joke about it but he has the mentality of a toddler.
I don’t think he does believe that. Or, rather, I don’t think he consistently believes it, but he changes his views willy-nilly. If he thought he could keep the documents, he could have sued to keep them. Instead, he indulged in subterfuge, hiding the documents he wanted. That implies at some level he knew he couldn’t keep them.
Some fools might, though, and it only takes a perverse juror or two - and it’s a Florida jury.
Reform on 10% now just 2% off of UKIP's voteshare in 2015, Farage may be tempted to return to lead them if that becomes consistent.
However plenty of time for Sunak and Hunt to win back voters from Reform with tax cuts and reductions in immigration
Except in reality... neither of those works, does it?
There is less than no money. So tax cuts are out of the question- the frozen thresholds means that taxes are going up, if anything. And immigration is the only thing keeping health, social care and the economy moving.
So what does Rishi do?
If inflation falls through the government's tight control of spending then that would allow for a cut in the basic rate especially, perhaps promise of raising the IHT threshold to £1 million for all estates if the Tories are re elected.
Economic migrants are certainly not all working in the NHS and migration remains a key concern for Tory to RefUK swing voters
If strawberry plants achieve sentience and send intergalactic starships to the Magellanic Clouds, and if Boris Johnson solves the P versus NP problem, the Tories might be re-elected.
Edit: ... and in any case most estates are 1m free of IHT, if they are of the Tory-approved nuclear family un-woke variety. So why bother changing?
Only the main property of married couples via transfer, not assets beyond the main property or for children of divorced couples or where one died before Osborne's tax reform.
The IHT threshold is still £325k, it should be raised to £1 million in my view and that should be in the Tory manifesto next year as a promise if they are re elected
The practical limit is 1m for approved politically correct families as far as most people realise - IHT is only ever an issue with the second death of the married couple.
£1M per person woiuld be absolutely outrageous and a further kick in the teeth of working people and a further sign that Tories and their elderly voters are parasitic leeches on society.
Only a whinging far left socialist like you would think removing decent middle class families out of IHT whether the parents are married or not and for all assets not just the main residence and leaving it only for the very rich was somehow 'outrageous.'
No that’s not true. I am a long way from being a far left socialist (although I like the occasional whinge) and I think capital is not taxed nearly enough and income, specifically earned income, far too much. We need to address this balance and cutting IHT is a step in the wrong direction.
If you want to tax wealth and capital far more and income less then you are a Liberal ideogically not a Conservative Tory really even if still not a Socialist (who would want to tax capital and income more to fund an expansion of the welfare state and public sector)
But, but I don’t wear sandals, even in this heat.
Sometimes @HYUFD , you should think about the size of tent you want your party to pitch. Right now it’s looking smaller than most of those at Glasto.
You are an Orange Book LD not a Tory.
63% want to raise the IHT threshold. 48% even want to scrap IHT completely, far higher than the current Tory poll rating
I think we need to tax inheritance properly to help out with the national debt. So no more transfer of the IHT tax free threshold to the surviving partner's estate. No more £1m threshold for those with children
Get rid of all the exemptions like 'gifts out of income'
To be clear I support IHT free transfers between the widowed spouse/civil partnership relationship etc but beyond the inheritors need to pay.
And let's make it 50% on anything over £200,000
👍👍👍
I'd simplify it, no tax on transfers between spouses, but every penny of inheritance gets taxed the same as money people have worked for gets taxed, including of course National Insurance.
Earned income should not be taxed less than unearned income.
Why should savers be penalised?
Person A works hard all their life and on retirement blows 3/4 of his savings on wine, women & song (the rest he wastes). His only child gets no inheritance.
Person B works hard all his life and on retirement lives modestly and leaves 1/2 his savings to his only child.
Why should the government want to discourage thriftiness and saving?
Saving isn't some unalloyed good. If everyone is thrifty all the time, the economy grinds to a halt. We need people to spend because spending creates jobs.
It's all very well saving and having your money used to invest, but investments are a bet on future spending. Spending is what drives the economy.
Besides, what's with the "penalising savers" thing?
The person who did the saving isn't getting taxed in any meaningful way, because they have gone to a place where there is no tax. (At least we assume that's the case. Maybe Hell is an eternal self assessment form.)
The people who end up with less money because of inheritance tax are the inheritors, who have generally neither saved, toiled nor spun for what they receive. That's not to be begrudged, but a world where a person's life chances depend more on inheritance and less on what they do is not a good one. You can't abolish the inheritance effect, but it's not really something to encourage, I reckon.
If your starting point is that taxes are a necessary unpleasantness to pay for a good society, then tax paid when you receive an inheritance is probably one of the less objectionable ones.
As I pointed out in the last thread for the average person unless they are in the top 10% or especially top 1% of earners capitalism is not doing much for them in terms of wage rises. House prices and capital in property and savings and shares have generally risen much more this century than average earnings.
So if the state confiscates all or most assets on the death of their owner which would have been inherited otherwise and reduces accumulation of wealth then support for capitalism beyond the top 10% of earners in the private sector will fall even further
The trouble with asset wealth, especially locked up in bricks and mortar, is you can't spend it, whereas a pay rise can pay for a new car which employs car workers or dining out which employs restaurant workers and Deliveroo riders. That is capitalism.
And capitalism and pay rises aren't delivering much for 90% of workers now, whereas assets and savings are delivering more for the average person
Capitalism is delivering for workers. We're caught in a cycle of inflation and bad policy the now, but capitalism is still good. What we're doing as a country now isn't the only way to do capitalism. We just need to adjust course, not abandon ship.
Exclude government completely and just leave the economy to the market and unless you are an investment banker, FTSE 100 company ceo or director, tech executive or Premier League footballer capitalism isn't doing a great deal for you now. For most workers their pay is rising well below inflation. At least if they own a property that still likely has a high value even if falling a bit and their savings will be boosted by rising interest rates
I'm curious to know what your solution is.
Knowing you, it's probably feudalism. It is, isn't it?
Inheritance in part and feudalism was not all bad, most peasants had a hut and a smallholding for food. There was more stability and less anxiety even if life expectancy was lower and if the work was hard in the fields it was normally there.
There was a church and inn in almost every village and town (many villages no longer even have a pub or church with services each Sunday)
If I walked across the village green to St James's church at 1100 hours I would be in a congregation of about half a dozen. As a capitalist you have to agree that church is not economically viable- close it down, deconsecrate and sell it off for housing!
No, the congregation's reward regardless of size will be eternal life with Christ who managed with just 12 followers originally
It happened to my childhood church. And it had a beautiful bell tower. The CoE were quite happy to offload that ironically during a time of massive population increase. Oh and they sold off the bells.
Appalling, one reason I am a supporter of the Save the Parish movement which has now elected members to the C of E Synod
I would've thought you of all people would be delighted to see redundant ecclesiastical relics being transformed into character properties for minted buyers? After all, every chapel conversion that's done up to the nines as if ready for a World of Interiors photoshoot, followed swiftly by an appearance on Escape to the Country valued at £850,000, is another newly created opportunity for the children of the not-at-all meek to inherit a small chunk of the Earth at some point further down the line.
Trump: Whatever documents a President decides to take with him, he has the absolute right to take them. He has the absolute right to keep them or he can give them back.. that’s the law https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1672763070421106695
He's totally barmy - he genuinely seems to believe, based on other remarks, that a President can do anything, and his own statements on the documents indicates this whole stupid affair comes down to him believing that if it was provided to him that makes it his now, and he doesn't want anyone touching his stuff. People joke about it but he has the mentality of a toddler.
I don’t think he does believe that. Or, rather, I don’t think he consistently believes it, but he changes his views willy-nilly. If he thought he could keep the documents, he could have sued to keep them. Instead, he indulged in subterfuge, hiding the documents he wanted. That implies at some level he knew he couldn’t keep them.
Some fools might, though, and it only takes a perverse juror or two - and it’s a Florida jury.
Might not even get that far with the judge running things. She's made up stuff to help him before, and not everything she rules on will be appealable apparently.
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
The interviewees should have trolled them by using lots of Scots dialect.
Very closely related to Dutch. A friend of mine from the Borders could understand what the Boers were saying about him in Afrikaans when he was on fieldwork in SA.
A funny language, Dutch. The sound of it is unusual and sounds quite 'foreign', yet if you listen to the cadence of it and ignore the words, it is spoken with stress and emphasis very much like English; more so than any other European language, I think. And when you start to focus on the words, there are a fair few that you can guess, even through the sound of them with all that throat clearing isn't familiar. And they have the habit of dropping a fair few English words and phrases into mid-sentence almost as often as on Urdu or Welsh.
Bill Bryson:
Dutch sounds like nothing so much as a peculiar version of English (…) We would be walking down the street when a stranger would step from the shadows and say ‘Hello, sailors, care to grease my flanks?’’ or something, and all he would want was a light for his cigarette. It was disconcerting. I found this again when I presented myself at a small hotel on Prinsengracht and asked the kind-faced proprietor if he had a single room. ‘Oh, I don’t believe so’, he said (in English), ‘but let me check with my wife.’ He thrust his head through a doorway of beaded curtains and called, ‘Marta, what stirs in your leggings? Are you most moist?’ From the back a voice bellowed, ‘No, but I tingle when I squirt.’ ‘Are you of assorted odours?’ ‘Yes, of beans and sputum.’ ‘And what of your pits – do they exude sweetness?’ ‘Truly.’ ‘Shall I suck them at eventide?’ ‘Most heartily!’ He returned to me wearing a sad look: ‘I’m sorry, I thought there might have been a cancellation, but unfortunately not.’ “
WRT IHT, it was certainly a mistake to push up main residence relief to £1m. But, we are where we are.
I'd scrap the exemptions for business property relief, farmland, woodland, works of art, country houses etc., and end the practice whereby life assurance and pensions can be placed in trust for named individuals, rather than forming part of the estate. All of those allowances are tax shelters, which inflate asset prices for that very reason.
No it wasn't, without that IHT main residence relief policy announced at the 2007 Tory conference by Osborne there would have been no Tory poll bounce post conference and Brown would have called a snap general election in late 2007 and probably won a small majority. Cameron may even then have been replaced as Conservative leader by David Davis.
It was not introduced by Osborne until 2015. What you're thinking of is the transferable nil rate band (which only reflected good IHT planning in the first place). There was never any need to to increase main residence relief to £1m. An allowance of £650,000 was quite enough to inherit a good sum.
The average property price in London is now over £650k at £737,512
So, someone with a 90% mortgage on an *average* home in London, is looking at an extra £1,500 *per month* in repayments. That’s £18,000 per year, which requires £30k in income assuming 40% marginal income tax.
Someone in the average home in London, is about to need to earn an extra £30k per year, just to afford mortgage interest rates going from 2% to 6%. Those numbers are totally horrific.
My take on this is that the government won't help people in this position. They aren't going to help rich people with high incomes who will be able to find somewhere to live, they will just help people at risk of ending up in the homeless queue.
If you think about London... they all vote Labour anyway. And in the home counties, most tory supporters have paid off their mortgages.
Whenever this comes up there is a consensus of opinion that high earning professionals are politically insignificant, there is little support for their causes (the 100k marginal tax thing, private school fees). People with expensive houses and large mortgages are in for a very difficult few years.
Private schools are an interesting one. There’s a lot of private schools in the Home Counties, mostly charging day fees in the £10k-£12k range. So many people are going to have to make the choice between downsizing the house or paying the school fees, with the resultant increase in pressure on state schools in these areas.
It won't be a massive problem for the state sector since the number of kids is trending down (meaning they will probably have physical space) and they get funding for staffing and other costs on a per pupil basis.
That’s a fair point. Perhaps it could actually help the state sector in areas of declining pupil numbers.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
Yes, restoring the medical pay board independence is the key demand for Consultants in the current strike ballot. Results out Tuesday, I think, first 48 hour strike on 20th July pencilled in.
I don't get a vote as not in the BMA.
Do you think they will vote to strike ? They won a key concession after the consultative ballot. Namely the pensions lifetime allowance being raised with the annual amount you can put in one increased to 60K.
Doctors are getting too greedy by far. They are among highest paid in teh country and blackmail whilst people die , live in agony is not pleasant.
I can't think of a more deserving group to get paid well. Years of hard studying and hard work, having to deal with all kinds of depressing stuff, but their work is incredibly valuable to the individual and society. If they aren't paid well, who should be?
They are well paid though already. obviously the shit bankers/finance geezers are well overpaid but compared to your average person , Doctors are at top of the tree already. Far better to pay those at the bottom who are being shat on. There are NO poor doctor's.
There certainly are poor doctors. If you're starting off on £30k and with £60k debts, are you rich?
You are average, if by the end of your career you are a surgeon or partner in a gp practice then you will very likely be rich
£30k is about median salary. The huge debt you start off with needs to be taken into account if you're judging whether there in fact "NO poor doctors".
Yes, eventually you won't be poor any more. That's a good thing. But most doctors will start their working lives very poor indeed. That's just a fact. Not one I chose to raise, but I couldn't let malcolm's comment slide because it was untrue.
It was not untrue, as I said £30K is the very basic which no-one will earn , they get shift allowances, unsocial hours , overtime , speciality payments etc etc so none of ethm ever earn £30K. There are no poor doctor's, even at the very start they are above median wage and soon miles above it with double , treble or even more.
Being poor is about wealth as well as wages. Why are you completely ignoring the not insignificant presence of a £60k debt? Because it fatally undermines your rash and silly statement, that's why.
they can pay tat off at their leisure when their salary doubles in short order and trebles at least later. It is the price of a nice car
Meanwhile, for complicated reasons I went to church this morning. Small village, fewer than 10 people in the congregation.
Some observations:
The vicar managed to name check three other religions, all for derogatory reasons (Jews, Brahmins, Muslims), he bewailed the fact that Christians can't wear crucifixes to work when Muslims can wear hijabs, and said that Jesus didn't come to bring peace and explained why this was.
So an interesting encounter with parochial muscular Christianity in this country.
Did you speak up or let it go?
As mentioned I let it go. I was a guest and pondered but eventually decided against. No doubt another tick in the religious debit column.
Not your PB persona then. I wonder which is the real Captain Topping. Both, I suppose. People can be incredibly complex. No, people *are* incredibly complex. One of the reasons I'm a GAI skeptic. Chances of building a 'you' that on one day throws its weight around on a discussion site, picking fights, joining fights, starting them if there isn't one, then the next day goes to church and sits there quiet as a mouse through the vicar's long and dodgy sermon? ... close to zero imo.
Yeah I thought I'd be a bit of a dick if I marched into the church as a guest and started shouting the odds. Leave them to it was my thought.
But I respect you if you would have chosen the bit of a dick route.
If they're out there in the town centre with a loudspeaker they're begging to be heckled. If it's somewhere where you'd only go to hear about Christianity, it's quite rude to speak up unless your point could be reasonably seen as a correction to a mistake within the tradition of that church.
So if your priest in church starts talking about the trinity as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spiderman, you should pipe up. If they're in Market Square with a bullhorn shouting at Muslims that they're going to hell, then a hearty "fuck off" is top of the menu.
Same rules with all religions. Their space, their rules. Your space, your rules. Shared space, everyone gets to speak.
Try criticising Islam in the town square in Saudi Arabia and you would get arrested
So what? Is this what you’ve descended to “Vote Tory to maintain better human rights standards than Saudi Arabia”
It's in keeping with his previously expressed views that the SNP, for example, should count themselves fortunate not to be arrested and banned for sedition.
I think he has very low expectations of what people deserve, and so long as you are not being subjected to torture and arrest for political and religious views you should be damned greatful.
But also stop being mean about Christianity or something.
Edit:
Does remind me of that dystopic future in that Red Dwarf episode
Vote Fascist for a third glorious decade of total law enforcement. Be a government informer: betray your family and friends, fabulous prizes to be won.
TBF those views (not the Red Dwarf bit) were UKG mainstream policy. Including Unitarians at serious risk for denying the Trinity. The problem is that they were 200+ years ago ...
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
The interviewees should have trolled them by using lots of Scots dialect.
Very closely related to Dutch. A friend of mine from the Borders could understand what the Boers were saying about him in Afrikaans when he was on fieldwork in SA.
A funny language, Dutch. The sound of it is unusual and sounds quite 'foreign', yet if you listen to the cadence of it and ignore the words, it is spoken with stress and emphasis very much like English; more so than any other European language, I think. And when you start to focus on the words, there are a fair few that you can guess, even through the sound of them with all that throat clearing isn't familiar. And they have the habit of dropping a fair few English words and phrases into mid-sentence almost as often as on Urdu or Welsh.
Speaking Dutch is easy, just follow Steve Mclaren's YouTube tutorial 😀
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
The interviewees should have trolled them by using lots of Scots dialect.
Opinions vary, but I'm strongly minded to call Scots a language, not a dialect. The clincher for me is that Scots itself has a number of dialects and trust me when I say that as someone in Aberdeenshire who didn't grow up here, Doric might as well be Dutch for all I can understand. Can dialects have subdialects? Well, maybe, but I find it easier to just think of Scots as a separate language.
Fit like? Foore ye deein the day?
Standard practice is indeed as you say. Apart from anything else, there is very strong and varying linguistic influence on different dialects - Scandinavian in O, S and Caithness for instance.
Aye, "greetin bairns" is more Scandi than English.
Trump: Whatever documents a President decides to take with him, he has the absolute right to take them. He has the absolute right to keep them or he can give them back.. that’s the law https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1672763070421106695
According to Sage/Security-Risk of Mar a Lardo's crack (in one sense) team of soon-to-be debarred lawyers?
Trump: Whatever documents a President decides to take with him, he has the absolute right to take them. He has the absolute right to keep them or he can give them back.. that’s the law https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1672763070421106695
He's totally barmy - he genuinely seems to believe, based on other remarks, that a President can do anything, and his own statements on the documents indicates this whole stupid affair comes down to him believing that if it was provided to him that makes it his now, and he doesn't want anyone touching his stuff. People joke about it but he has the mentality of a toddler.
I don’t think he does believe that. Or, rather, I don’t think he consistently believes it, but he changes his views willy-nilly. If he thought he could keep the documents, he could have sued to keep them. Instead, he indulged in subterfuge, hiding the documents he wanted. That implies at some level he knew he couldn’t keep them.
Some fools might, though, and it only takes a perverse juror or two - and it’s a Florida jury.
That's a serious barrier to conviction imo. Approx 30% of Floridians are Trump fans. The prosecution have to somehow keep them all off the jury.
Meanwhile, for complicated reasons I went to church this morning. Small village, fewer than 10 people in the congregation.
Some observations:
The vicar managed to name check three other religions, all for derogatory reasons (Jews, Brahmins, Muslims), he bewailed the fact that Christians can't wear crucifixes to work when Muslims can wear hijabs, and said that Jesus didn't come to bring peace and explained why this was.
So an interesting encounter with parochial muscular Christianity in this country.
Did you speak up or let it go?
As mentioned I let it go. I was a guest and pondered but eventually decided against. No doubt another tick in the religious debit column.
Not your PB persona then. I wonder which is the real Captain Topping. Both, I suppose. People can be incredibly complex. No, people *are* incredibly complex. One of the reasons I'm a GAI skeptic. Chances of building a 'you' that on one day throws its weight around on a discussion site, picking fights, joining fights, starting them if there isn't one, then the next day goes to church and sits there quiet as a mouse through the vicar's long and dodgy sermon? ... close to zero imo.
Yeah I thought I'd be a bit of a dick if I marched into the church as a guest and started shouting the odds. Leave them to it was my thought.
But I respect you if you would have chosen the bit of a dick route.
If they're out there in the town centre with a loudspeaker they're begging to be heckled. If it's somewhere where you'd only go to hear about Christianity, it's quite rude to speak up unless your point could be reasonably seen as a correction to a mistake within the tradition of that church.
So if your priest in church starts talking about the trinity as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spiderman, you should pipe up. If they're in Market Square with a bullhorn shouting at Muslims that they're going to hell, then a hearty "fuck off" is top of the menu.
Same rules with all religions. Their space, their rules. Your space, your rules. Shared space, everyone gets to speak.
Yeah I mean if I was going to take issue with all the things he said which I believe untrue or, say, scientifically dubious then I wouldn't have chosen the crucifix vs hijab bit.
If you consider what was said to be hate speech then contact the police.
If you think it falls short of that, then maybe contact the Bishop?
Reform on 10% now just 2% off of UKIP's voteshare in 2015, Farage may be tempted to return to lead them if that becomes consistent.
However plenty of time for Sunak and Hunt to win back voters from Reform with tax cuts and reductions in immigration
Except in reality... neither of those works, does it?
There is less than no money. So tax cuts are out of the question- the frozen thresholds means that taxes are going up, if anything. And immigration is the only thing keeping health, social care and the economy moving.
So what does Rishi do?
If inflation falls through the government's tight control of spending then that would allow for a cut in the basic rate especially, perhaps promise of raising the IHT threshold to £1 million for all estates if the Tories are re elected.
Economic migrants are certainly not all working in the NHS and migration remains a key concern for Tory to RefUK swing voters
If strawberry plants achieve sentience and send intergalactic starships to the Magellanic Clouds, and if Boris Johnson solves the P versus NP problem, the Tories might be re-elected.
Edit: ... and in any case most estates are 1m free of IHT, if they are of the Tory-approved nuclear family un-woke variety. So why bother changing?
Only the main property of married couples via transfer, not assets beyond the main property or for children of divorced couples or where one died before Osborne's tax reform.
The IHT threshold is still £325k, it should be raised to £1 million in my view and that should be in the Tory manifesto next year as a promise if they are re elected
The practical limit is 1m for approved politically correct families as far as most people realise - IHT is only ever an issue with the second death of the married couple.
£1M per person woiuld be absolutely outrageous and a further kick in the teeth of working people and a further sign that Tories and their elderly voters are parasitic leeches on society.
Only a whinging far left socialist like you would think removing decent middle class families out of IHT whether the parents are married or not and for all assets not just the main residence and leaving it only for the very rich was somehow 'outrageous.'
No that’s not true. I am a long way from being a far left socialist (although I like the occasional whinge) and I think capital is not taxed nearly enough and income, specifically earned income, far too much. We need to address this balance and cutting IHT is a step in the wrong direction.
If you want to tax wealth and capital far more and income less then you are a Liberal ideogically not a Conservative Tory really even if still not a Socialist (who would want to tax capital and income more to fund an expansion of the welfare state and public sector)
But, but I don’t wear sandals, even in this heat.
Sometimes @HYUFD , you should think about the size of tent you want your party to pitch. Right now it’s looking smaller than most of those at Glasto.
You are an Orange Book LD not a Tory.
63% want to raise the IHT threshold. 48% even want to scrap IHT completely, far higher than the current Tory poll rating
I think we need to tax inheritance properly to help out with the national debt. So no more transfer of the IHT tax free threshold to the surviving partner's estate. No more £1m threshold for those with children
Get rid of all the exemptions like 'gifts out of income'
To be clear I support IHT free transfers between the widowed spouse/civil partnership relationship etc but beyond the inheritors need to pay.
And let's make it 50% on anything over £200,000
👍👍👍
I'd simplify it, no tax on transfers between spouses, but every penny of inheritance gets taxed the same as money people have worked for gets taxed, including of course National Insurance.
Earned income should not be taxed less than unearned income.
Why should savers be penalised?
Person A works hard all their life and on retirement blows 3/4 of his savings on wine, women & song (the rest he wastes). His only child gets no inheritance.
Person B works hard all his life and on retirement lives modestly and leaves 1/2 his savings to his only child.
Why should the government want to discourage thriftiness and saving?
Saving isn't some unalloyed good. If everyone is thrifty all the time, the economy grinds to a halt. We need people to spend because spending creates jobs.
It's all very well saving and having your money used to invest, but investments are a bet on future spending. Spending is what drives the economy.
Besides, what's with the "penalising savers" thing?
The person who did the saving isn't getting taxed in any meaningful way, because they have gone to a place where there is no tax. (At least we assume that's the case. Maybe Hell is an eternal self assessment form.)
The people who end up with less money because of inheritance tax are the inheritors, who have generally neither saved, toiled nor spun for what they receive. That's not to be begrudged, but a world where a person's life chances depend more on inheritance and less on what they do is not a good one. You can't abolish the inheritance effect, but it's not really something to encourage, I reckon.
If your starting point is that taxes are a necessary unpleasantness to pay for a good society, then tax paid when you receive an inheritance is probably one of the less objectionable ones.
As I pointed out in the last thread for the average person unless they are in the top 10% or especially top 1% of earners capitalism is not doing much for them in terms of wage rises. House prices and capital in property and savings and shares have generally risen much more this century than average earnings.
So if the state confiscates all or most assets on the death of their owner which would have been inherited otherwise and reduces accumulation of wealth then support for capitalism beyond the top 10% of earners in the private sector will fall even further
The trouble with asset wealth, especially locked up in bricks and mortar, is you can't spend it, whereas a pay rise can pay for a new car which employs car workers or dining out which employs restaurant workers and Deliveroo riders. That is capitalism.
And capitalism and pay rises aren't delivering much for 90% of workers now, whereas assets and savings are delivering more for the average person
Capitalism is delivering for workers. We're caught in a cycle of inflation and bad policy the now, but capitalism is still good. What we're doing as a country now isn't the only way to do capitalism. We just need to adjust course, not abandon ship.
Exclude government completely and just leave the economy to the market and unless you are an investment banker, FTSE 100 company ceo or director, tech executive or Premier League footballer capitalism isn't doing a great deal for you now. For most workers their pay is rising well below inflation. At least if they own a property that still likely has a high value even if falling a bit and their savings will be boosted by rising interest rates
I'm curious to know what your solution is.
Knowing you, it's probably feudalism. It is, isn't it?
Inheritance in part and feudalism was not all bad, most peasants had a hut and a smallholding for food. There was more stability and less anxiety even if life expectancy was lower and if the work was hard in the fields it was normally there.
There was a church and inn in almost every village and town (many villages no longer even have a pub or church with services each Sunday)
If I walked across the village green to St James's church at 1100 hours I would be in a congregation of about half a dozen. As a capitalist you have to agree that church is not economically viable- close it down, deconsecrate and sell it off for housing!
No, the congregation's reward regardless of size will be eternal life with Christ who managed with just 12 followers originally
It happened to my childhood church. And it had a beautiful bell tower. The CoE were quite happy to offload that ironically during a time of massive population increase. Oh and they sold off the bells.
Appalling, one reason I am a supporter of the Save the Parish movement which has now elected members to the C of E Synod
I would've thought you of all people would be delighted to see redundant ecclesiastical relics being transformed into character properties for minted buyers? After all, every chapel conversion that's done up to the nines as if ready for a World of Interiors photoshoot, followed swiftly by an appearance on Escape to the Country valued at £850,000, is another newly created opportunity for the children of the not-at-all meek to inherit a small chunk of the Earth at some point further down the line.
Absolutely not. I don't think many of the Old Rectories should have been sold to private buyers either.
There are plenty of old Manor Houses or Oast Houses or big detached 20th or 21st century properties which can be bought and passed down the family line via private inheritance. Church buildings should be inherited by Church congregations and Vicars and Bishops and Deans
Meanwhile, for complicated reasons I went to church this morning. Small village, fewer than 10 people in the congregation.
Some observations:
The vicar managed to name check three other religions, all for derogatory reasons (Jews, Brahmins, Muslims), he bewailed the fact that Christians can't wear crucifixes to work when Muslims can wear hijabs, and said that Jesus didn't come to bring peace and explained why this was.
So an interesting encounter with parochial muscular Christianity in this country.
Did you speak up or let it go?
As mentioned I let it go. I was a guest and pondered but eventually decided against. No doubt another tick in the religious debit column.
Not your PB persona then. I wonder which is the real Captain Topping. Both, I suppose. People can be incredibly complex. No, people *are* incredibly complex. One of the reasons I'm a GAI skeptic. Chances of building a 'you' that on one day throws its weight around on a discussion site, picking fights, joining fights, starting them if there isn't one, then the next day goes to church and sits there quiet as a mouse through the vicar's long and dodgy sermon? ... close to zero imo.
Yeah I thought I'd be a bit of a dick if I marched into the church as a guest and started shouting the odds. Leave them to it was my thought.
But I respect you if you would have chosen the bit of a dick route.
If they're out there in the town centre with a loudspeaker they're begging to be heckled. If it's somewhere where you'd only go to hear about Christianity, it's quite rude to speak up unless your point could be reasonably seen as a correction to a mistake within the tradition of that church.
So if your priest in church starts talking about the trinity as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spiderman, you should pipe up. If they're in Market Square with a bullhorn shouting at Muslims that they're going to hell, then a hearty "fuck off" is top of the menu.
Same rules with all religions. Their space, their rules. Your space, your rules. Shared space, everyone gets to speak.
Yeah I mean if I was going to take issue with all the things he said which I believe untrue or, say, scientifically dubious then I wouldn't have chosen the crucifix vs hijab bit.
If you consider what was said to be hate speech then contact the police.
If you think it falls short of that, then maybe contact the Bishop?
I doubt he was saying much most of his rural congregation disagreed with
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Yes. We've got a caste system. One caste, the Havhouzis, have engineered an arrangement whereby their children don't have to save a deposit. Or even in some cases pay a mortgage at all. They are then able to enjoy the finest things in life without much stress. The other caste, the Ferrentis, have a weekly struggle to pay the bills, and not much in the way of disposable income. This is decided by accident of birth. The Havhouzis are keen that the Ferrentis pay a disproportionate amount of the tax to keep the show on the road. It is possible to become an Havhouzi. But it costs a fair bit. Do you think this is the basis for a stable society?
Well we are a democracy, if Labour get in at the next election and decide to whack up inheritance tax, impose a massive wealth tax and fund lots of loans for deposits and assistance for those with large mortgages and increase housing benefit for low paid renters that is up to them.
The other revelation I had, sitting there, was that I was a lot more terrified of starting to believe in god and religion than I might be about the prospect of dying.
I agree, that would be a sad end indeed to a life of rationality and freethinking.
Plenty of kinder, inclusive churches out there. No need to choose one of hate.
Reform on 10% now just 2% off of UKIP's voteshare in 2015, Farage may be tempted to return to lead them if that becomes consistent.
However plenty of time for Sunak and Hunt to win back voters from Reform with tax cuts and reductions in immigration
Except in reality... neither of those works, does it?
There is less than no money. So tax cuts are out of the question- the frozen thresholds means that taxes are going up, if anything. And immigration is the only thing keeping health, social care and the economy moving.
So what does Rishi do?
If inflation falls through the government's tight control of spending then that would allow for a cut in the basic rate especially, perhaps promise of raising the IHT threshold to £1 million for all estates if the Tories are re elected.
Economic migrants are certainly not all working in the NHS and migration remains a key concern for Tory to RefUK swing voters
If strawberry plants achieve sentience and send intergalactic starships to the Magellanic Clouds, and if Boris Johnson solves the P versus NP problem, the Tories might be re-elected.
Edit: ... and in any case most estates are 1m free of IHT, if they are of the Tory-approved nuclear family un-woke variety. So why bother changing?
Only the main property of married couples via transfer, not assets beyond the main property or for children of divorced couples or where one died before Osborne's tax reform.
The IHT threshold is still £325k, it should be raised to £1 million in my view and that should be in the Tory manifesto next year as a promise if they are re elected
The practical limit is 1m for approved politically correct families as far as most people realise - IHT is only ever an issue with the second death of the married couple.
£1M per person woiuld be absolutely outrageous and a further kick in the teeth of working people and a further sign that Tories and their elderly voters are parasitic leeches on society.
Only a whinging far left socialist like you would think removing decent middle class families out of IHT whether the parents are married or not and for all assets not just the main residence and leaving it only for the very rich was somehow 'outrageous.'
No that’s not true. I am a long way from being a far left socialist (although I like the occasional whinge) and I think capital is not taxed nearly enough and income, specifically earned income, far too much. We need to address this balance and cutting IHT is a step in the wrong direction.
If you want to tax wealth and capital far more and income less then you are a Liberal ideogically not a Conservative Tory really even if still not a Socialist (who would want to tax capital and income more to fund an expansion of the welfare state and public sector)
But, but I don’t wear sandals, even in this heat.
Sometimes @HYUFD , you should think about the size of tent you want your party to pitch. Right now it’s looking smaller than most of those at Glasto.
You are an Orange Book LD not a Tory.
63% want to raise the IHT threshold. 48% even want to scrap IHT completely, far higher than the current Tory poll rating
I think we need to tax inheritance properly to help out with the national debt. So no more transfer of the IHT tax free threshold to the surviving partner's estate. No more £1m threshold for those with children
Get rid of all the exemptions like 'gifts out of income'
To be clear I support IHT free transfers between the widowed spouse/civil partnership relationship etc but beyond the inheritors need to pay.
And let's make it 50% on anything over £200,000
👍👍👍
I'd simplify it, no tax on transfers between spouses, but every penny of inheritance gets taxed the same as money people have worked for gets taxed, including of course National Insurance.
Earned income should not be taxed less than unearned income.
Why should savers be penalised?
Person A works hard all their life and on retirement blows 3/4 of his savings on wine, women & song (the rest he wastes). His only child gets no inheritance.
Person B works hard all his life and on retirement lives modestly and leaves 1/2 his savings to his only child.
Why should the government want to discourage thriftiness and saving?
Saving isn't some unalloyed good. If everyone is thrifty all the time, the economy grinds to a halt. We need people to spend because spending creates jobs.
It's all very well saving and having your money used to invest, but investments are a bet on future spending. Spending is what drives the economy.
Besides, what's with the "penalising savers" thing?
The person who did the saving isn't getting taxed in any meaningful way, because they have gone to a place where there is no tax. (At least we assume that's the case. Maybe Hell is an eternal self assessment form.)
The people who end up with less money because of inheritance tax are the inheritors, who have generally neither saved, toiled nor spun for what they receive. That's not to be begrudged, but a world where a person's life chances depend more on inheritance and less on what they do is not a good one. You can't abolish the inheritance effect, but it's not really something to encourage, I reckon.
If your starting point is that taxes are a necessary unpleasantness to pay for a good society, then tax paid when you receive an inheritance is probably one of the less objectionable ones.
As I pointed out in the last thread for the average person unless they are in the top 10% or especially top 1% of earners capitalism is not doing much for them in terms of wage rises. House prices and capital in property and savings and shares have generally risen much more this century than average earnings.
So if the state confiscates all or most assets on the death of their owner which would have been inherited otherwise and reduces accumulation of wealth then support for capitalism beyond the top 10% of earners in the private sector will fall even further
The trouble with asset wealth, especially locked up in bricks and mortar, is you can't spend it, whereas a pay rise can pay for a new car which employs car workers or dining out which employs restaurant workers and Deliveroo riders. That is capitalism.
And capitalism and pay rises aren't delivering much for 90% of workers now, whereas assets and savings are delivering more for the average person
Capitalism is delivering for workers. We're caught in a cycle of inflation and bad policy the now, but capitalism is still good. What we're doing as a country now isn't the only way to do capitalism. We just need to adjust course, not abandon ship.
Exclude government completely and just leave the economy to the market and unless you are an investment banker, FTSE 100 company ceo or director, tech executive or Premier League footballer capitalism isn't doing a great deal for you now. For most workers their pay is rising well below inflation. At least if they own a property that still likely has a high value even if falling a bit and their savings will be boosted by rising interest rates
I'm curious to know what your solution is.
Knowing you, it's probably feudalism. It is, isn't it?
Inheritance in part and feudalism was not all bad, most peasants had a hut and a smallholding for food. There was more stability and less anxiety even if life expectancy was lower and if the work was hard in the fields it was normally there.
There was a church and inn in almost every village and town (many villages no longer even have a pub or church with services each Sunday)
If I walked across the village green to St James's church at 1100 hours I would be in a congregation of about half a dozen. As a capitalist you have to agree that church is not economically viable- close it down, deconsecrate and sell it off for housing!
No, the congregation's reward regardless of size will be eternal life with Christ who managed with just 12 followers originally
It happened to my childhood church. And it had a beautiful bell tower. The CoE were quite happy to offload that ironically during a time of massive population increase. Oh and they sold off the bells.
Appalling, one reason I am a supporter of the Save the Parish movement which has now elected members to the C of E Synod
I would've thought you of all people would be delighted to see redundant ecclesiastical relics being transformed into character properties for minted buyers? After all, every chapel conversion that's done up to the nines as if ready for a World of Interiors photoshoot, followed swiftly by an appearance on Escape to the Country valued at £850,000, is another newly created opportunity for the children of the not-at-all meek to inherit a small chunk of the Earth at some point further down the line.
Anyone fancy a seaside pad? Just look at the C of E's own website.
"Offers in the region of £500,000 are invited for the freehold of the former church of St Leonard, which is situated along the seafront at St Leonards on Sea, just to the west of Hastings and enjoys far-reaching views over the English Channel.
St Leonard’s is a Grade II listed building standing at the foot of the cliff between West Hill Road and Undercliff. The property includes the small churchyard at the top of the cliff and an area of land to the east of the building.
The church was built in 1953-61 to designs by Sir Giles and Adrian Gilbert Scott replacing a previous church dating from 1834 which was destroyed in the Second World War. It consists of a 5 bay nave, chancel, prominent west tower, vestry and extension containing various ancillary rooms and was built of buff brick on a concrete frame with sandstone dressings. It has a gross internal area measuring some 10,221ft2. The majority of the furnishings and fittings are contemporary with the building.
Expressions of interest should be made direct to the agent detailed below."
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
The interviewees should have trolled them by using lots of Scots dialect.
Opinions vary, but I'm strongly minded to call Scots a language, not a dialect. The clincher for me is that Scots itself has a number of dialects and trust me when I say that as someone in Aberdeenshire who didn't grow up here, Doric might as well be Dutch for all I can understand. Can dialects have subdialects? Well, maybe, but I find it easier to just think of Scots as a separate language.
WRT IHT, it was certainly a mistake to push up main residence relief to £1m. But, we are where we are.
I'd scrap the exemptions for business property relief, farmland, woodland, works of art, country houses etc., and end the practice whereby life assurance and pensions can be placed in trust for named individuals, rather than forming part of the estate. All of those allowances are tax shelters, which inflate asset prices for that very reason.
No it wasn't, without that IHT main residence relief policy announced at the 2007 Tory conference by Osborne there would have been no Tory poll bounce post conference and Brown would have called a snap general election in late 2007 and probably won a small majority. Cameron may even then have been replaced as Conservative leader by David Davis.
It was not introduced by Osborne until 2015. What you're thinking of is the transferable nil rate band (which only reflected good IHT planning in the first place). There was never any need to to increase main residence relief to £1m. An allowance of £650,000 was quite enough to inherit a good sum.
The average property price in London is now over £650k at £737,512
So, someone with a 90% mortgage on an *average* home in London, is looking at an extra £1,500 *per month* in repayments. That’s £18,000 per year, which requires £30k in income assuming 40% marginal income tax.
Someone in the average home in London, is about to need to earn an extra £30k per year, just to afford mortgage interest rates going from 2% to 6%. Those numbers are totally horrific.
My take on this is that the government won't help people in this position. They aren't going to help rich people with high incomes who will be able to find somewhere to live, they will just help people at risk of ending up in the homeless queue.
If you think about London... they all vote Labour anyway. And in the home counties, most tory supporters have paid off their mortgages.
Whenever this comes up there is a consensus of opinion that high earning professionals are politically insignificant, there is little support for their causes (the 100k marginal tax thing, private school fees). People with expensive houses and large mortgages are in for a very difficult few years.
Private schools are an interesting one. There’s a lot of private schools in the Home Counties, mostly charging day fees in the £10k-£12k range. So many people are going to have to make the choice between downsizing the house or paying the school fees, with the resultant increase in pressure on state schools in these areas.
It won't be a massive problem for the state sector since the number of kids is trending down (meaning they will probably have physical space) and they get funding for staffing and other costs on a per pupil basis.
That’s a fair point. Perhaps it could actually help the state sector in areas of declining pupil numbers.
We are at peak numbers at the moment but the trend going forward is downwards with a desire to cut costs by closing schools if possible...
Re falling school roll numbers. Well yes and no. There is a significant "bulge" peaking at age 12 at the moment. This is putting pressure on Secondary Schools which are over subscribed. Primary Schools have falling rolls. See this chart which was for 2020, when the bulge was at age 9. Of course. The obsession with running everything at close to 100% capacity has resulted in too many Primary places and teachers. And not enough Secondary.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
And a countryside retreat found on the C of E website too (though the locals will insist on burying their grannies in the garden). Seriously, I am a bit startled.
Big time Jezza supporter & been a howling shitwit long before coming out as an antivaxxer...reason number 104947472 why we shouldn't take any notice of celebs opinions on politics, life, the universe, just because they are famous.
Re falling school roll numbers. Well yes and no. There is a significant "bulge" peaking at age 12 at the moment. This is putting pressure on Secondary Schools which are over subscribed. Primary Schools have falling rolls. See this chart which was for 2020, when the bulge was at age 9. Of course. The obsession with running everything at close to 100% capacity has resulted in too many Primary places and teachers. And not enough Secondary.
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
The interviewees should have trolled them by using lots of Scots dialect.
Very closely related to Dutch. A friend of mine from the Borders could understand what the Boers were saying about him in Afrikaans when he was on fieldwork in SA.
Maybe there was cross-fertilisation? AIUI a lot of Scots mercenaries fought on the Protestant side in the Low Countries during the numerous religious conflicts of the Early Modern period. And I reckon Dutch must be about the closest major linguistic relative of English in any case.
TEFL students occasionally ask this and the answer is Frisian.
Brea, buter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.
Actually, there are LOTS of Frisian langauges:
In the Netherlands ("West Frisian"):
Western Frisian (the main "West" Frisian language) Terschelling Frisian Schiermonnikoog Frisian Hindeloopen Frisian
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
That's actually another example of selection bias. HYUFD preens himself that 64% or whatever of people buying houses have been helped by mummy and daddy. But that doesn't consider what that 64% is a percentage of. The iocnrease could be caused by folk without deposits giving up in much higher numbers than before.
If it's getting to a point when only those who have well off mummies and daddies can afford, then of course it's going to be 64% or 90% or whatever the actual figure is.
Big time Jezza supporter....reason number 104947472 why we shouldn't take any notice of celebs opinions on politics, life, the universe, just because they are famous.
Doubly so if they are an actor - since projecting an idea confidently, even charismatically, and coherently, is a big part of their job, so they will be adept at talking nonsense but in a manner which seems convincing.
And a countryside retreat found on the C of E website too (though the locals will insist on burying their grannies in the garden). Seriously, I am a bit startled.
Unfortunately the current evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury and his wing of the Church are more interested in church planting in trendy areas of big cities in living rooms or backrooms of cafes and restaurants or modern halls than preserving the historic Church of England churches. While also combining sometimes as many as 5 or 6 rural churches under 1 Minister.
Hence the more Anglo Catholic wing of the C of E, liberal and conservative, formed Save the Parish and as the likely next Archbishop will be a liberal Catholic on the usual rotation that may slow down some of this sad trend https://savetheparish.com/
Re falling school roll numbers. Well yes and no. There is a significant "bulge" peaking at age 12 at the moment. This is putting pressure on Secondary Schools which are over subscribed. Primary Schools have falling rolls. See this chart which was for 2020, when the bulge was at age 9. Of course. The obsession with running everything at close to 100% capacity has resulted in too many Primary places and teachers. And not enough Secondary.
Fascinating. I wonder what happened in 2010 to provoke such a wave of procreative activity?
It's almost as if the Cleggasm was made flesh.
Or I wonder, could be a decline in procreative activity since, as people realised how shitty life as a parent was becoming? Cancellation of Sure Start and so on.
There was the thought that lockdown would result in a big uptick in birthrates, did that actually prove to be true? I would hazard a guess divorce rates went up as well.
Then add National Insurance to unearned income, while increasing income tax allowances. And, scrap the triple lock.
50% of the population will inherit substantial amounts, but work should pay for the 50% who will not inherit such sums.
I'm 56 and will likely inherit a lot of money over the next decade, but what use is to me now?
Bingo!
People dying in their 80s or 90s and passing onto their children an inheritance are leaving to "children" in their 50s, 60s or 70s themselves.
When it comes to children the people with children, actually children rather than adult children, are typically in their 20s, 30s or 40s and should not be expecting any inheritance as even if their parents have money their parents should be ideally alive for another couple of decades. They should be able to provide for their family, including their children, and getting a house, via their own wages, not an inheritance.
There's also something peculiarly nasty, like an evil version of the vultures in the Mowgli cartoons, about being told one should sit and wait till one's parents pop off. Won't be long before we see Soylent Green and Resyk 2000 AD style as part of the Conservative manifesto. Illogical I know, but no more illogical than some Tory activist saying "you just need to wait till the Tory voters closest to you die!".
Plenty of parents also gift their children deposits to buy a house in their 30s
Among the top 1%, perhaps. Among the other 99%, not so much.
Nope.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440 14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home 4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder.
Also, I want to see the methodology of that survey. Sounds like it's probably riddled with selection bias and frankly I just don't believe the real percentage is that high, but I can't see any details about who was asked.
Additional:
Our research was carried out among Zoopla users, nearly 1,100 of whom are parents to grown-up children.
Confirmed. Selection bias. Discard these "findings" as unscientific fluff.
Actually, whilst the survey may or may not have been badly done, I'd imagine that gifts from the Bank of Mum & Dad are a very common way for younger people to meet the challenge of increasingly stratospheric property prices nowadays. Prices, and by extension minimum deposits, are so huge in much of the country that I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of younger buyers have only been able to escape renting through the provision of parental gifts.
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
Or if you are on only an average income in London and the South and don't have parents who own a property and have significant assets then move North. Property prices in the North or England are less than half those in the South and just a third of those in London. That will likely remain the case even if Starmer gets in and pushes through with his plans to develop new housing all over the southern greenbelt.
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Big time Jezza supporter & been a howling shitwit long before coming out as an antivaxxer...reason number 104947472 why we shouldn't take any notice of celebs opinions on politics, life, the universe, just because they are famous.
Reform on 10% now just 2% off of UKIP's voteshare in 2015, Farage may be tempted to return to lead them if that becomes consistent.
However plenty of time for Sunak and Hunt to win back voters from Reform with tax cuts and reductions in immigration
Except in reality... neither of those works, does it?
There is less than no money. So tax cuts are out of the question- the frozen thresholds means that taxes are going up, if anything. And immigration is the only thing keeping health, social care and the economy moving.
So what does Rishi do?
If inflation falls through the government's tight control of spending then that would allow for a cut in the basic rate especially, perhaps promise of raising the IHT threshold to £1 million for all estates if the Tories are re elected.
Economic migrants are certainly not all working in the NHS and migration remains a key concern for Tory to RefUK swing voters
If strawberry plants achieve sentience and send intergalactic starships to the Magellanic Clouds, and if Boris Johnson solves the P versus NP problem, the Tories might be re-elected.
Edit: ... and in any case most estates are 1m free of IHT, if they are of the Tory-approved nuclear family un-woke variety. So why bother changing?
Only the main property of married couples via transfer, not assets beyond the main property or for children of divorced couples or where one died before Osborne's tax reform.
The IHT threshold is still £325k, it should be raised to £1 million in my view and that should be in the Tory manifesto next year as a promise if they are re elected
The practical limit is 1m for approved politically correct families as far as most people realise - IHT is only ever an issue with the second death of the married couple.
£1M per person woiuld be absolutely outrageous and a further kick in the teeth of working people and a further sign that Tories and their elderly voters are parasitic leeches on society.
Only a whinging far left socialist like you would think removing decent middle class families out of IHT whether the parents are married or not and for all assets not just the main residence and leaving it only for the very rich was somehow 'outrageous.'
No that’s not true. I am a long way from being a far left socialist (although I like the occasional whinge) and I think capital is not taxed nearly enough and income, specifically earned income, far too much. We need to address this balance and cutting IHT is a step in the wrong direction.
If you want to tax wealth and capital far more and income less then you are a Liberal ideogically not a Conservative Tory really even if still not a Socialist (who would want to tax capital and income more to fund an expansion of the welfare state and public sector)
But, but I don’t wear sandals, even in this heat.
Sometimes @HYUFD , you should think about the size of tent you want your party to pitch. Right now it’s looking smaller than most of those at Glasto.
You are an Orange Book LD not a Tory.
63% want to raise the IHT threshold. 48% even want to scrap IHT completely, far higher than the current Tory poll rating
I think we need to tax inheritance properly to help out with the national debt. So no more transfer of the IHT tax free threshold to the surviving partner's estate. No more £1m threshold for those with children
Get rid of all the exemptions like 'gifts out of income'
To be clear I support IHT free transfers between the widowed spouse/civil partnership relationship etc but beyond the inheritors need to pay.
And let's make it 50% on anything over £200,000
👍👍👍
I'd simplify it, no tax on transfers between spouses, but every penny of inheritance gets taxed the same as money people have worked for gets taxed, including of course National Insurance.
Earned income should not be taxed less than unearned income.
Why should savers be penalised?
Person A works hard all their life and on retirement blows 3/4 of his savings on wine, women & song (the rest he wastes). His only child gets no inheritance.
Person B works hard all his life and on retirement lives modestly and leaves 1/2 his savings to his only child.
Why should the government want to discourage thriftiness and saving?
Saving isn't some unalloyed good. If everyone is thrifty all the time, the economy grinds to a halt. We need people to spend because spending creates jobs.
It's all very well saving and having your money used to invest, but investments are a bet on future spending. Spending is what drives the economy.
Besides, what's with the "penalising savers" thing?
The person who did the saving isn't getting taxed in any meaningful way, because they have gone to a place where there is no tax. (At least we assume that's the case. Maybe Hell is an eternal self assessment form.)
The people who end up with less money because of inheritance tax are the inheritors, who have generally neither saved, toiled nor spun for what they receive. That's not to be begrudged, but a world where a person's life chances depend more on inheritance and less on what they do is not a good one. You can't abolish the inheritance effect, but it's not really something to encourage, I reckon.
If your starting point is that taxes are a necessary unpleasantness to pay for a good society, then tax paid when you receive an inheritance is probably one of the less objectionable ones.
As I pointed out in the last thread for the average person unless they are in the top 10% or especially top 1% of earners capitalism is not doing much for them in terms of wage rises. House prices and capital in property and savings and shares have generally risen much more this century than average earnings.
So if the state confiscates all or most assets on the death of their owner which would have been inherited otherwise and reduces accumulation of wealth then support for capitalism beyond the top 10% of earners in the private sector will fall even further
The trouble with asset wealth, especially locked up in bricks and mortar, is you can't spend it, whereas a pay rise can pay for a new car which employs car workers or dining out which employs restaurant workers and Deliveroo riders. That is capitalism.
And capitalism and pay rises aren't delivering much for 90% of workers now, whereas assets and savings are delivering more for the average person
Capitalism is delivering for workers. We're caught in a cycle of inflation and bad policy the now, but capitalism is still good. What we're doing as a country now isn't the only way to do capitalism. We just need to adjust course, not abandon ship.
Exclude government completely and just leave the economy to the market and unless you are an investment banker, FTSE 100 company ceo or director, tech executive or Premier League footballer capitalism isn't doing a great deal for you now. For most workers their pay is rising well below inflation. At least if they own a property that still likely has a high value even if falling a bit and their savings will be boosted by rising interest rates
I'm curious to know what your solution is.
Knowing you, it's probably feudalism. It is, isn't it?
Inheritance in part and feudalism was not all bad, most peasants had a hut and a smallholding for food. There was more stability and less anxiety even if life expectancy was lower and if the work was hard in the fields it was normally there.
There was a church and inn in almost every village and town (many villages no longer even have a pub or church with services each Sunday)
If I walked across the village green to St James's church at 1100 hours I would be in a congregation of about half a dozen. As a capitalist you have to agree that church is not economically viable- close it down, deconsecrate and sell it off for housing!
No, the congregation's reward regardless of size will be eternal life with Christ who managed with just 12 followers originally
It happened to my childhood church. And it had a beautiful bell tower. The CoE were quite happy to offload that ironically during a time of massive population increase. Oh and they sold off the bells.
Appalling, one reason I am a supporter of the Save the Parish movement which has now elected members to the C of E Synod
I would've thought you of all people would be delighted to see redundant ecclesiastical relics being transformed into character properties for minted buyers? After all, every chapel conversion that's done up to the nines as if ready for a World of Interiors photoshoot, followed swiftly by an appearance on Escape to the Country valued at £850,000, is another newly created opportunity for the children of the not-at-all meek to inherit a small chunk of the Earth at some point further down the line.
Absolutely not. I don't think many of the Old Rectories should have been sold to private buyers either.
There are plenty of old Manor Houses or Oast Houses or big detached 20th or 21st century properties which can be bought and passed down the family line via private inheritance. Church buildings should be inherited by Church congregations and Vicars and Bishops and Deans
The problem that you have, of course, is that many of these congregations consist of about three octogenarian spinsters who gather to receive communion every third Sunday of the month from a vicar who rotates around a circuit of half-a-dozen parishes. Funding all those piles must be a tremendous headache for the Church Commissioners.
Sell the excess buildings, on the other hand, and:
+The CofE has fewer properties to maintain, and more capital to spend on new vestments and such like - perhaps even a diocesan minibus to transport all fourteen surviving worshippers in the area to a single church to do Jesus stuff together each Sunday? +Much needed new homes are created +We get to see Nicki Chapman show Richard and Moira from Basingstoke around their dream retirement property in Herefordshire as light entertainment on a Tuesday afternoon
A full half an hour on Dutch radio this morning about the travails of and prospects for the SNP. In Dutch but with all the interviews carried in English without translation, so confident are they in their listeners' language skills.
Sounds a bit of a niche subject for the listeners though.
Only from a southern British point of view. The Scots still think they are European, of course. One of the best programmes on BBC Scotland was (maybe still is) a weekly current affairs roundup, often focussing on how some European country does something of interest to Scotland from which one might learn.
Eorpa which is/was indeed very good. Still going I think, but perhaps looked at askance by the BBC high yins as inflaming the EUrophile passions of the Scots.
Big time Jezza supporter & been a howling shitwit long before coming out as an antivaxxer...reason number 104947472 why we shouldn't take any notice of celebs opinions on politics, life, the universe, just because they are famous.
They are good at acting, nothing more.
Not sure that is even true. Seems quite a few just play a version of themselves every time...cough cough Hugh Grant.
Reform on 10% now just 2% off of UKIP's voteshare in 2015, Farage may be tempted to return to lead them if that becomes consistent.
However plenty of time for Sunak and Hunt to win back voters from Reform with tax cuts and reductions in immigration
Except in reality... neither of those works, does it?
There is less than no money. So tax cuts are out of the question- the frozen thresholds means that taxes are going up, if anything. And immigration is the only thing keeping health, social care and the economy moving.
So what does Rishi do?
If inflation falls through the government's tight control of spending then that would allow for a cut in the basic rate especially, perhaps promise of raising the IHT threshold to £1 million for all estates if the Tories are re elected.
Economic migrants are certainly not all working in the NHS and migration remains a key concern for Tory to RefUK swing voters
If strawberry plants achieve sentience and send intergalactic starships to the Magellanic Clouds, and if Boris Johnson solves the P versus NP problem, the Tories might be re-elected.
Edit: ... and in any case most estates are 1m free of IHT, if they are of the Tory-approved nuclear family un-woke variety. So why bother changing?
Only the main property of married couples via transfer, not assets beyond the main property or for children of divorced couples or where one died before Osborne's tax reform.
The IHT threshold is still £325k, it should be raised to £1 million in my view and that should be in the Tory manifesto next year as a promise if they are re elected
The practical limit is 1m for approved politically correct families as far as most people realise - IHT is only ever an issue with the second death of the married couple.
£1M per person woiuld be absolutely outrageous and a further kick in the teeth of working people and a further sign that Tories and their elderly voters are parasitic leeches on society.
Only a whinging far left socialist like you would think removing decent middle class families out of IHT whether the parents are married or not and for all assets not just the main residence and leaving it only for the very rich was somehow 'outrageous.'
No that’s not true. I am a long way from being a far left socialist (although I like the occasional whinge) and I think capital is not taxed nearly enough and income, specifically earned income, far too much. We need to address this balance and cutting IHT is a step in the wrong direction.
If you want to tax wealth and capital far more and income less then you are a Liberal ideogically not a Conservative Tory really even if still not a Socialist (who would want to tax capital and income more to fund an expansion of the welfare state and public sector)
But, but I don’t wear sandals, even in this heat.
Sometimes @HYUFD , you should think about the size of tent you want your party to pitch. Right now it’s looking smaller than most of those at Glasto.
You are an Orange Book LD not a Tory.
63% want to raise the IHT threshold. 48% even want to scrap IHT completely, far higher than the current Tory poll rating
I think we need to tax inheritance properly to help out with the national debt. So no more transfer of the IHT tax free threshold to the surviving partner's estate. No more £1m threshold for those with children
Get rid of all the exemptions like 'gifts out of income'
To be clear I support IHT free transfers between the widowed spouse/civil partnership relationship etc but beyond the inheritors need to pay.
And let's make it 50% on anything over £200,000
👍👍👍
I'd simplify it, no tax on transfers between spouses, but every penny of inheritance gets taxed the same as money people have worked for gets taxed, including of course National Insurance.
Earned income should not be taxed less than unearned income.
Why should savers be penalised?
Person A works hard all their life and on retirement blows 3/4 of his savings on wine, women & song (the rest he wastes). His only child gets no inheritance.
Person B works hard all his life and on retirement lives modestly and leaves 1/2 his savings to his only child.
Why should the government want to discourage thriftiness and saving?
Saving isn't some unalloyed good. If everyone is thrifty all the time, the economy grinds to a halt. We need people to spend because spending creates jobs.
It's all very well saving and having your money used to invest, but investments are a bet on future spending. Spending is what drives the economy.
Besides, what's with the "penalising savers" thing?
The person who did the saving isn't getting taxed in any meaningful way, because they have gone to a place where there is no tax. (At least we assume that's the case. Maybe Hell is an eternal self assessment form.)
The people who end up with less money because of inheritance tax are the inheritors, who have generally neither saved, toiled nor spun for what they receive. That's not to be begrudged, but a world where a person's life chances depend more on inheritance and less on what they do is not a good one. You can't abolish the inheritance effect, but it's not really something to encourage, I reckon.
If your starting point is that taxes are a necessary unpleasantness to pay for a good society, then tax paid when you receive an inheritance is probably one of the less objectionable ones.
As I pointed out in the last thread for the average person unless they are in the top 10% or especially top 1% of earners capitalism is not doing much for them in terms of wage rises. House prices and capital in property and savings and shares have generally risen much more this century than average earnings.
So if the state confiscates all or most assets on the death of their owner which would have been inherited otherwise and reduces accumulation of wealth then support for capitalism beyond the top 10% of earners in the private sector will fall even further
The trouble with asset wealth, especially locked up in bricks and mortar, is you can't spend it, whereas a pay rise can pay for a new car which employs car workers or dining out which employs restaurant workers and Deliveroo riders. That is capitalism.
And capitalism and pay rises aren't delivering much for 90% of workers now, whereas assets and savings are delivering more for the average person
Capitalism is delivering for workers. We're caught in a cycle of inflation and bad policy the now, but capitalism is still good. What we're doing as a country now isn't the only way to do capitalism. We just need to adjust course, not abandon ship.
Exclude government completely and just leave the economy to the market and unless you are an investment banker, FTSE 100 company ceo or director, tech executive or Premier League footballer capitalism isn't doing a great deal for you now. For most workers their pay is rising well below inflation. At least if they own a property that still likely has a high value even if falling a bit and their savings will be boosted by rising interest rates
I'm curious to know what your solution is.
Knowing you, it's probably feudalism. It is, isn't it?
Inheritance in part and feudalism was not all bad, most peasants had a hut and a smallholding for food. There was more stability and less anxiety even if life expectancy was lower and if the work was hard in the fields it was normally there.
There was a church and inn in almost every village and town (many villages no longer even have a pub or church with services each Sunday)
If I walked across the village green to St James's church at 1100 hours I would be in a congregation of about half a dozen. As a capitalist you have to agree that church is not economically viable- close it down, deconsecrate and sell it off for housing!
No, the congregation's reward regardless of size will be eternal life with Christ who managed with just 12 followers originally
It happened to my childhood church. And it had a beautiful bell tower. The CoE were quite happy to offload that ironically during a time of massive population increase. Oh and they sold off the bells.
Appalling, one reason I am a supporter of the Save the Parish movement which has now elected members to the C of E Synod
I would've thought you of all people would be delighted to see redundant ecclesiastical relics being transformed into character properties for minted buyers? After all, every chapel conversion that's done up to the nines as if ready for a World of Interiors photoshoot, followed swiftly by an appearance on Escape to the Country valued at £850,000, is another newly created opportunity for the children of the not-at-all meek to inherit a small chunk of the Earth at some point further down the line.
Absolutely not. I don't think many of the Old Rectories should have been sold to private buyers either.
There are plenty of old Manor Houses or Oast Houses or big detached 20th or 21st century properties which can be bought and passed down the family line via private inheritance. Church buildings should be inherited by Church congregations and Vicars and Bishops and Deans
The problem that you have, of course, is that many of these congregations consist of about three octogenarian spinsters who gather to receive communion every third Sunday of the month from a vicar who rotates around a circuit of half-a-dozen parishes. Funding all those piles must be a tremendous headache for the Church Commissioners.
Sell the excess buildings, on the other hand, and:
+The CofE has fewer properties to maintain, and more capital to spend on new vestments and such like - perhaps even a diocesan minibus to transport all fourteen surviving worshippers in the area to a single church to do Jesus stuff together each Sunday? +Much needed new homes are created +We get to see Nicki Chapman show Richard and Moira from Basingstoke around their dream retirement property in Herefordshire as light entertainment on a Tuesday afternoon
I mean, what's not to like?
We have 50 in our rural congregation and they aren't all pensioners.
The Church has £8 billion in assets, owns much lucrative property it rents out in central London and around the country as one of the UK's biggest landowners and also has many profitable investments in the stock market.
It should have more than enough to keep its churches going even if its congregations fell to just a handful in rural areas each.
At most there is usually only 1 Church of England church per 500-1,000 people and more often 1 per 10,000 people in the local population so it is not as if church property sold for residential accomodation will make much difference to the housing situation anyway (and most of it would be far too expensive for first time buyers). Old Rectories are usually over £1 million each sale price and even converted churches and chapels regularly £500k+to buy
Reform on 10% now just 2% off of UKIP's voteshare in 2015, Farage may be tempted to return to lead them if that becomes consistent.
However plenty of time for Sunak and Hunt to win back voters from Reform with tax cuts and reductions in immigration
Except in reality... neither of those works, does it?
There is less than no money. So tax cuts are out of the question- the frozen thresholds means that taxes are going up, if anything. And immigration is the only thing keeping health, social care and the economy moving.
So what does Rishi do?
If inflation falls through the government's tight control of spending then that would allow for a cut in the basic rate especially, perhaps promise of raising the IHT threshold to £1 million for all estates if the Tories are re elected.
Economic migrants are certainly not all working in the NHS and migration remains a key concern for Tory to RefUK swing voters
If strawberry plants achieve sentience and send intergalactic starships to the Magellanic Clouds, and if Boris Johnson solves the P versus NP problem, the Tories might be re-elected.
Edit: ... and in any case most estates are 1m free of IHT, if they are of the Tory-approved nuclear family un-woke variety. So why bother changing?
Only the main property of married couples via transfer, not assets beyond the main property or for children of divorced couples or where one died before Osborne's tax reform.
The IHT threshold is still £325k, it should be raised to £1 million in my view and that should be in the Tory manifesto next year as a promise if they are re elected
The practical limit is 1m for approved politically correct families as far as most people realise - IHT is only ever an issue with the second death of the married couple.
£1M per person woiuld be absolutely outrageous and a further kick in the teeth of working people and a further sign that Tories and their elderly voters are parasitic leeches on society.
Only a whinging far left socialist like you would think removing decent middle class families out of IHT whether the parents are married or not and for all assets not just the main residence and leaving it only for the very rich was somehow 'outrageous.'
No that’s not true. I am a long way from being a far left socialist (although I like the occasional whinge) and I think capital is not taxed nearly enough and income, specifically earned income, far too much. We need to address this balance and cutting IHT is a step in the wrong direction.
If you want to tax wealth and capital far more and income less then you are a Liberal ideogically not a Conservative Tory really even if still not a Socialist (who would want to tax capital and income more to fund an expansion of the welfare state and public sector)
But, but I don’t wear sandals, even in this heat.
Sometimes @HYUFD , you should think about the size of tent you want your party to pitch. Right now it’s looking smaller than most of those at Glasto.
You are an Orange Book LD not a Tory.
63% want to raise the IHT threshold. 48% even want to scrap IHT completely, far higher than the current Tory poll rating
I think we need to tax inheritance properly to help out with the national debt. So no more transfer of the IHT tax free threshold to the surviving partner's estate. No more £1m threshold for those with children
Get rid of all the exemptions like 'gifts out of income'
To be clear I support IHT free transfers between the widowed spouse/civil partnership relationship etc but beyond the inheritors need to pay.
And let's make it 50% on anything over £200,000
👍👍👍
I'd simplify it, no tax on transfers between spouses, but every penny of inheritance gets taxed the same as money people have worked for gets taxed, including of course National Insurance.
Earned income should not be taxed less than unearned income.
Why should savers be penalised?
Person A works hard all their life and on retirement blows 3/4 of his savings on wine, women & song (the rest he wastes). His only child gets no inheritance.
Person B works hard all his life and on retirement lives modestly and leaves 1/2 his savings to his only child.
Why should the government want to discourage thriftiness and saving?
Saving isn't some unalloyed good. If everyone is thrifty all the time, the economy grinds to a halt. We need people to spend because spending creates jobs.
It's all very well saving and having your money used to invest, but investments are a bet on future spending. Spending is what drives the economy.
Besides, what's with the "penalising savers" thing?
The person who did the saving isn't getting taxed in any meaningful way, because they have gone to a place where there is no tax. (At least we assume that's the case. Maybe Hell is an eternal self assessment form.)
The people who end up with less money because of inheritance tax are the inheritors, who have generally neither saved, toiled nor spun for what they receive. That's not to be begrudged, but a world where a person's life chances depend more on inheritance and less on what they do is not a good one. You can't abolish the inheritance effect, but it's not really something to encourage, I reckon.
If your starting point is that taxes are a necessary unpleasantness to pay for a good society, then tax paid when you receive an inheritance is probably one of the less objectionable ones.
As I pointed out in the last thread for the average person unless they are in the top 10% or especially top 1% of earners capitalism is not doing much for them in terms of wage rises. House prices and capital in property and savings and shares have generally risen much more this century than average earnings.
So if the state confiscates all or most assets on the death of their owner which would have been inherited otherwise and reduces accumulation of wealth then support for capitalism beyond the top 10% of earners in the private sector will fall even further
The trouble with asset wealth, especially locked up in bricks and mortar, is you can't spend it, whereas a pay rise can pay for a new car which employs car workers or dining out which employs restaurant workers and Deliveroo riders. That is capitalism.
And capitalism and pay rises aren't delivering much for 90% of workers now, whereas assets and savings are delivering more for the average person
Capitalism is delivering for workers. We're caught in a cycle of inflation and bad policy the now, but capitalism is still good. What we're doing as a country now isn't the only way to do capitalism. We just need to adjust course, not abandon ship.
Exclude government completely and just leave the economy to the market and unless you are an investment banker, FTSE 100 company ceo or director, tech executive or Premier League footballer capitalism isn't doing a great deal for you now. For most workers their pay is rising well below inflation. At least if they own a property that still likely has a high value even if falling a bit and their savings will be boosted by rising interest rates
I'm curious to know what your solution is.
Knowing you, it's probably feudalism. It is, isn't it?
Inheritance in part and feudalism was not all bad, most peasants had a hut and a smallholding for food. There was more stability and less anxiety even if life expectancy was lower and if the work was hard in the fields it was normally there.
There was a church and inn in almost every village and town (many villages no longer even have a pub or church with services each Sunday)
If I walked across the village green to St James's church at 1100 hours I would be in a congregation of about half a dozen. As a capitalist you have to agree that church is not economically viable- close it down, deconsecrate and sell it off for housing!
No, the congregation's reward regardless of size will be eternal life with Christ who managed with just 12 followers originally
It happened to my childhood church. And it had a beautiful bell tower. The CoE were quite happy to offload that ironically during a time of massive population increase. Oh and they sold off the bells.
Appalling, one reason I am a supporter of the Save the Parish movement which has now elected members to the C of E Synod
I would've thought you of all people would be delighted to see redundant ecclesiastical relics being transformed into character properties for minted buyers? After all, every chapel conversion that's done up to the nines as if ready for a World of Interiors photoshoot, followed swiftly by an appearance on Escape to the Country valued at £850,000, is another newly created opportunity for the children of the not-at-all meek to inherit a small chunk of the Earth at some point further down the line.
Absolutely not. I don't think many of the Old Rectories should have been sold to private buyers either.
There are plenty of old Manor Houses or Oast Houses or big detached 20th or 21st century properties which can be bought and passed down the family line via private inheritance. Church buildings should be inherited by Church congregations and Vicars and Bishops and Deans
The problem that you have, of course, is that many of these congregations consist of about three octogenarian spinsters who gather to receive communion every third Sunday of the month from a vicar who rotates around a circuit of half-a-dozen parishes. Funding all those piles must be a tremendous headache for the Church Commissioners.
Sell the excess buildings, on the other hand, and:
+The CofE has fewer properties to maintain, and more capital to spend on new vestments and such like - perhaps even a diocesan minibus to transport all fourteen surviving worshippers in the area to a single church to do Jesus stuff together each Sunday? +Much needed new homes are created +We get to see Nicki Chapman show Richard and Moira from Basingstoke around their dream retirement property in Herefordshire as light entertainment on a Tuesday afternoon
I mean, what's not to like?
The C of E was, of course, founded in a huge act of mass Changing Rooms and the conversion of church property to homes, farms, stores, etc. So that would be very much in the tradition of Henry VIII.
There was the thought that lockdown would result in a big uptick in birthrates, did that actually prove to be true?
No, it went down. I guess whilst people had a lot more time with each other it was too stressful.
I know quite a few couples that actually having to spending time together was the end of their relationship, rather than the opposite.
Well, people can like each other very much without being able to cope with being together 24/7.
I think both birth rates and divorce rates were predicted to go up as a result of Covid lockdowns, though a quick google suggests conflicting reports on whether that turned out true in respect of divorce.
Comments
Edit by Thursday night the rate had returned to 10%...
But you are surely correct that the most common transfer price is zero.
Medium term the Hitachi factory will be closing but they won't say that while there are contracts still be won (the consequence of messing round with HS2 is that the WCML needs new trains in the near future).
So these Putin-fans always find some barmy way of looking at Putin's latest debacle in a positive light.
Upper middle class Mummies and Daddies with lots of privileges vote Conservative because they expect their privileges to be maintained. Cue mass voter defections to the Liberal Democrats.
In October 1989, the UK base rate peaked at 14.9%. it then declined to under 10% by the time of the ERM crisis, when it was jacked up to around 15% for about a day. After we dropped out the ERM (and those rises were immediately reversed) it continued its merry decline.
I think he has very low expectations of what people deserve, and so long as you are not being subjected to torture and arrest for political and religious views you should be damned greatful.
But also stop being mean about Christianity or something.
Edit:
Does remind me of that dystopic future in that Red Dwarf episode
Vote Fascist for a third glorious decade of total law enforcement. Be a government informer: betray your family and friends, fabulous prizes to be won.
Standard practice is indeed as you say. Apart from anything else, there is very strong and varying linguistic influence on different dialects - Scandinavian in O, S and Caithness for instance.
Brea, buter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.
'64% of parents have offered financial assistance to their children buying a home
The average contribution towards a grown-up child's deposit is £32,440
14% of parents gave their grown-up children more than £50k towards a home
4% of parents said they bought their child the entire home, mortgage-free'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/property/article-10288305/Bank-Mum-Dad-forking-32k-average-help-kids-buy-homes.html
In the Games of Thrones analogy, the question is the levels of betrayal - I could easily see Grant Mitchell setting off to Moscow, with a pocketful of assurances that The Big Boys would be with him. The Big Boys then ditch him, after using him to achieve their goal of reducing Putin’s power, so that they can further their goals. Said goals are probably stupid, self serving and bound to fail, of course.
But anyway I wasn't slighting you. Quite the opposite. What I was doing was marvelling at the complex brain chemistry of a person (you in this case) who can be like that in church but be totally different elsewhere. The finetuning of speech and behaviour depending on environment and situation that people are capable of. Indeed to a large extent do instinctively rather than even having to try.
We've got a caste system.
One caste, the Havhouzis, have engineered an arrangement whereby their children don't have to save a deposit. Or even in some cases pay a mortgage at all.
They are then able to enjoy the finest things in life without much stress.
The other caste, the Ferrentis, have a weekly struggle to pay the bills, and not much in the way of disposable income.
This is decided by accident of birth.
The Havhouzis are keen that the Ferrentis pay a disproportionate amount of the tax to keep the show on the road.
It is possible to become an Havhouzi. But it costs a fair bit.
Do you think this is the basis for a stable society?
Dutch sounds like nothing so much as a peculiar version of English (…) We would be walking down the street when a stranger would step from the shadows and say ‘Hello, sailors, care to grease my flanks?’’ or something, and all he would want was a light for his cigarette. It was disconcerting. I found this again when I presented myself at a small hotel on Prinsengracht and asked the kind-faced proprietor if he had a single room. ‘Oh, I don’t believe so’, he said (in English), ‘but let me check with my wife.’ He thrust his head through a doorway of beaded curtains and called, ‘Marta, what stirs in your leggings? Are you most moist?’ From the back a voice bellowed, ‘No, but I tingle when I squirt.’ ‘Are you of assorted odours?’ ‘Yes, of beans and sputum.’ ‘And what of your pits – do they exude sweetness?’ ‘Truly.’ ‘Shall I suck them at eventide?’ ‘Most heartily!’ He returned to me wearing a sad look: ‘I’m sorry, I thought there might have been a cancellation, but unfortunately not.’ “
If you think it falls short of that, then maybe contact the Bishop?
There are plenty of old Manor Houses or Oast Houses or big detached 20th or 21st century properties which can be bought and passed down the family line via private inheritance. Church buildings should be inherited by Church congregations and Vicars and Bishops and Deans
Doesn't mean Tories should be doing that however
Anyone fancy a seaside pad? Just look at the C of E's own website.
"Offers in the region of £500,000 are invited for the freehold of the former church of St Leonard, which is situated along the seafront at St Leonards on Sea, just to the west of Hastings and enjoys far-reaching views over the English Channel.
St Leonard’s is a Grade II listed building standing at the foot of the cliff between West Hill Road and Undercliff. The property includes the small churchyard at the top of the cliff and an area of land to the east of the building.
The church was built in 1953-61 to designs by Sir Giles and Adrian Gilbert Scott replacing a previous church dating from 1834 which was destroyed in the Second World War. It consists of a 5 bay nave, chancel, prominent west tower, vestry and extension containing various ancillary rooms and was built of buff brick on a concrete frame with sandstone dressings. It has a gross internal area measuring some 10,221ft2. The majority of the furnishings and fittings are contemporary with the building.
Expressions of interest should be made direct to the agent detailed below."
Well yes and no.
There is a significant "bulge" peaking at age 12 at the moment. This is putting pressure on Secondary Schools which are over subscribed.
Primary Schools have falling rolls.
See this chart which was for 2020, when the bulge was at age 9.
Of course. The obsession with running everything at close to 100% capacity has resulted in too many Primary places and teachers. And not enough Secondary.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingdom
It's all part and parcel of our regression into a neo-Hanoverian economy, stratified through inherited wealth and rent seeking. Before long, prosperity is going to be mainly restricted to a landed gentry class of people whose families already own properties. Everyone else, save for very high earners who can still accrue enough capital to enter the asset market unaided, is going to end up working until they die to generate income for a landlord, and leaving behind nothing to their equally unfortunate descendants.
https://www.sunderlands.co.uk/files/property-brochures/28375732/Brochure 1.pdf
It's almost as if the Cleggasm was made flesh.
In the Netherlands ("West Frisian"):
Western Frisian (the main "West" Frisian language)
Terschelling Frisian
Schiermonnikoog Frisian
Hindeloopen Frisian
Germany:
Saterland Frisian
North Frisian
There should be an app that silences Andrew Castle but allows the court noise and other commentators through
If it's getting to a point when only those who have well off mummies and daddies can afford, then of course it's going to be 64% or 90% or whatever the actual figure is.
Hence the more Anglo Catholic wing of the C of E, liberal and conservative, formed Save the Parish and as the likely next Archbishop will be a liberal Catholic on the usual rotation that may slow down some of this sad trend
https://savetheparish.com/
Pensioners who no longer work but rent can also still get housing benefit if they don't have big private pensions to cover it
Everyone knows that covid is spread by Reverse Vampires.
https://youtu.be/BNpmJVa10PU
Sell the excess buildings, on the other hand, and:
+The CofE has fewer properties to maintain, and more capital to spend on new vestments and such like - perhaps even a diocesan minibus to transport all fourteen surviving worshippers in the area to a single church to do Jesus stuff together each Sunday?
+Much needed new homes are created
+We get to see Nicki Chapman show Richard and Moira from Basingstoke around their dream retirement property in Herefordshire as light entertainment on a Tuesday afternoon
I mean, what's not to like?
Still going I think, but perhaps looked at askance by the BBC high yins as inflaming the EUrophile passions of the Scots.
But in great 'smug city' betting news I did Alcaraz for Wimbo before this Queens. He's miles shorter now.
Grass = Water
Alcaraz = Duck
The Church has £8 billion in assets, owns much lucrative property it rents out in central London and around the country as one of the UK's biggest landowners and also has many profitable investments in the stock market.
It should have more than enough to keep its churches going even if its congregations fell to just a handful in rural areas each.
At most there is usually only 1 Church of England church per 500-1,000 people and more often 1 per 10,000 people in the local population so it is not as if church property sold for residential accomodation will make much difference to the housing situation anyway (and most of it would be far too expensive for first time buyers). Old Rectories are usually over £1 million each sale price and even converted churches and chapels regularly £500k+to buy
I think both birth rates and divorce rates were predicted to go up as a result of Covid lockdowns, though a quick google suggests conflicting reports on whether that turned out true in respect of divorce.