What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
THEY DID NOT PAY TAX ON THAT INCOME FROM MASSIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Look at how estates are de facto immune from CGT.
CGT allowance when you are alive - 6k, 3K next year.
Dead, effectively 500k for many.
They paid council tax on it, stamp duty when they bought it and income tax on the income which bought it and paid for the mortgage
Interesting you are arguing they paid income tax on the income which bought it, when you want 2 million handed down tax free to you to buy a property
The present allowances are more than generous and I do not support increasing them, just as I do not support the triple lock
Forget allowances, inheritance tax should be abolished altogether.
Inheritance should just be liable to income tax on the entire inheritance instead. Which should include National Insurance as should all incomes, not just salaried ones.
I have no issue of applying income tax to estates though I doubt any politician is brave enough to propose it
Estates are wealth and assets not income, unless let out and you get rent from them
I struggle with your justification for your position. Consider the following. My sister in law and husband are not high earners but bought a flat many decades ago in SW London to live in, upgraded to a terraced house and since now down sized to a flat again and will soon move out of SW London. The capital gains they have made on their homes exceed any income they have made in their entire lives and they will live on that for the rest of their lives and not a penny of tax has been paid on it.
Well good for them, they invested wisely in a sensible asset. That is why I am a Tory and you are a Liberal.
Though they will of course have paid increased council tax on it
Many who inherit a property will inherit property that their parents tenants will have paid Council Tax on, not their parents.
So should the tenants get the property tax free instead of the recipient in your eyes, if that's the killer tax that's relevant?
Most with second homes they let out are in their 40s or 50s, not their 70s or 80s. That will be the parents main residence
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
OK, off the top of my head I think there's something wrong there as follows:
Point 1: we don't orbit the Moon. The Moon orbits us. We orbit the Sun. I know you know that, but given the sentence "...the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the Moon within 50-60 years..." it needs stating, because
i) why would the Earth's orbital speed around the Sun slow down at all, and
ii) I'm not sure what the phrase "our orbit becomes tidally locked to the Moon" means. Do you mean the Moon orbits Earth geosynchronously, so only one hemisphere sees it?
Point 2: from the Moon's point of view we are a black box. Whether its gravitational pull results in Earth water sloshing up and down as tides, or sloshing up and down powering generators, is irrelevant to the Moon. The Moon doesn't know what's going on on the surface of Earth (provided the mass of the Earth remains constant?)
Point 3: how many tidal generators etc is 5%? Is there even a chance we can achieve this? Is this a conceivably real concern? It's just that I'm pretty sure we haven't reached the "planetary engineering" stage of the Kardashev scale yet.
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
Do you really think your rentier attitude is good for the country generally or in particular for the Conservative party ?
Unless you Conservatives stop looking upon workers as if they were serfs then you'll be spending a long time in opposition.
Well there are millions and millions of voters who own property and want their relatives to inherit it and for it to go up in value.
Osborne's IHT cut was one of the biggest factors in the Tory victories of 2010 and 2015, though regardless of electoral appeal there is no point being in government if you aren't pushing Tory principles like cutting IHT
In the tax year 2020 to 2021, 3.73% of UK deaths resulted in an Inheritance Tax (IHT) charge, decreasing by 0.03 percentage points since the tax year 2019 to 2020. This means the proportion has been relatively flat since the tax year 2017 to 2018 - likely as a result of the introduction of a new tax-free allowance known as the Residence Nil-Rate Band (RNRB) from that year onwards. The RNRB is available to those estates that transfer their main UK residence to direct descendants on their death.
The total number of UK deaths that resulted in an IHT charge has increased. In the tax year 2020 to 2021, there were 27,000 taxpaying IHT estates, an increase of 4,000 (17%) since the previous tax year, 2019 to 2020.
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
The principle makes sense, the question would be the orders of magnitude and the maths. It could either be a figurative drop in the ocean, or it could be catastrophic.
I wouldn't want to judge the maths either way personally, but it is certainly something that perhaps should be looked into.
The Earth’s angular rotational energy is around 10^30 joules, we use less than a millionth of that per year.
I’d be more worried about the motives of the author than slowing down the Earth.
Even if Fiji lose I can see them giving Australia a torrid time
On another subject - on your tour of the English side of the border with Wales, you missed out the city I visited today: Chester. Which, it feels, is just as attractive as ever and is in rude health. I think Chester gets a bit overlooked; the instinctive reaction to it always seems to be "it's not as good as York". Which is true, but 99% of England also fails on that metric. There certainly isn't as much for the touristin Chester as in York. But there are few more pleasant cities to be in. The city walls, the rows and the riverside are all remarkable, the cathedral as fine as any; the city is awash with Roman ruins, and there are more interesting historical buildings than you can shake a stick at (I'm sure a curious visitor accompanying fewer children could have found out a bit more about this but that's all I can give you.) In common with Hereford, Shrewsbury and so on, it feels a long way west, but isn't really remote; it's only 45 minutes from Manchester and less from Liverpool, but doesn't feel like a satellite of either. Mainly, it's a very pleasant place to be. We fantasised vaguely of retiring there.
All of which makes me wonder which is the best (non-capital*) tourist city in Britain? York, Bath, Oxford, Cambridge?
I'd plump for Bath, Oxford, York and Cambridge in that order. Then you've got Chester, Canterbury, Lincoln, Salisbury, Shrewsbury, Durham, Norwich, Windsor and a whole host of also-rans.
My list is all England, what am I missing from the other nations?
(*I'd suggest London and Edinburgh are in a different league, and I am excluding the big commercial industrial cities, Manchester, Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle, etc. though they do get a fair few tourists.)
What we don’t have in Britain is many towns and cities famous entirely for containing one globally famous bucket list tourist attraction, and not otherwise important in their own right. York minster is impressive but people visit York to see York, not just the minster. Like they visit Venice for Venice, not just St Mark’s.
Compare with
Granada: Alhambra Lourdes: magic stuff Bethlehem: church of the nativity Agra: Taj Mahal Xian: Terracotta Army Zermatt: Matterhorn Luxor: temples Alice Springs: Uluru Orlando: disneyworld Orange: Roman theatre Etc
Actually I thought of a couple, but they are B list world tourist attractions: Windsor for the castle, Bicester for the outlet village, Hay and Glastonbury for the festivals.
Oxford/Cambridge - the universities sport tourists - Anfield, Wembley , old Trafford , Wimbledon , St Andrews, Cheltenham (irish) , motorbikes (isle of man - yes i know)
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
THEY DID NOT PAY TAX ON THAT INCOME FROM MASSIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Look at how estates are de facto immune from CGT.
CGT allowance when you are alive - 6k, 3K next year.
Dead, effectively 500k for many.
They paid council tax on it, stamp duty when they bought it and income tax on the income which bought it and paid for the mortgage
Interesting you are arguing they paid income tax on the income which bought it, when you want 2 million handed down tax free to you to buy a property
The present allowances are more than generous and I do not support increasing them, just as I do not support the triple lock
It's the whining and sense of entitlement that gets me. Where's the self-reliance and self-respect of Mrs Thatcher? But I forget, she wasn't a True Tory in the 2023 sense.
No Thatcher wasn't a true Tory in the 1823 sense
Which is why she was a good Prime Minister.
And why the true 1823 Tory party went out of business in 1834. Good riddance to that.
No, Rees Mogg, Bill Cash, the Marquess of Salisbury, even Boris and Sunak sometimes would have been 19th century Tories.
Yes, they would have been, but that's not the party they're in so perhaps those entryists should be kicked out and form a real "true Tory" party. And it is also why Mogg and Cash* are regarded as eccentrics and weirdos, the Marquess of Salisbury is not even worth mentioning, and Sunak is going to deliver the Tories to a well deserved period of Opposition.
Boris isn't an 1820s Tory by any stretch of the definition. Boris is interested in Boris, not obsolete 19th century philosophies.
* Actually to be fair to Cash, as eccentric and weird as he can be, he's not as bad as that. Mogg is, yes.
Yes it is the party they are in, the original Tory Party is still there, it just added on some free market liberals.
Indeed the impact of Brexit eg leaving the single market free trade area and restricting immigration has seen the electoral map shift in a more late 19th century direction. Conservatives strongest in rural areas and patriotic working class areas and Liberals making gains in commuter belt
No, the original Tory Party died.
Peel's Conservative Party killed it. Good riddance, no flowers.
Nope, Peel left the Conservative Party he himself created to form a Peelite faction which ultimately merged with the Whigs to form the Liberal Party.
Just as the franchise expanded and faced with the threat of a rising Labour party many of those free market Liberals joined the Conservatives to form today's Conservative Party in the early 20th century
Which is just all the more evidence that their is no continuity of the Conservative Party from the 1820s to today, there isn't even continuity from Peel's day to today.
Either way though, the modern Conservative Party traces its history back to either Disraeli in 1912 or Peel in 1834, not Rees Mogg in the 1820s.
There has been no continuity of purity in that time, and if there had been, the party would have died ages ago. The party has thrived by adapting to the times in the principles Peel and Disraeli etc set out, being updated for then-modern times.
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
Do you really think your rentier attitude is good for the country generally or in particular for the Conservative party ?
Unless you Conservatives stop looking upon workers as if they were serfs then you'll be spending a long time in opposition.
Well there are millions and millions of voters who own property and want their relatives to inherit it and for it to go up in value.
Osborne's IHT cut was one of the biggest factors in the Tory victories of 2010 and 2015, though regardless of electoral appeal there is no point being in government if you aren't pushing Tory principles like cutting IHT
In the tax year 2020 to 2021, 3.73% of UK deaths resulted in an Inheritance Tax (IHT) charge, decreasing by 0.03 percentage points since the tax year 2019 to 2020. This means the proportion has been relatively flat since the tax year 2017 to 2018 - likely as a result of the introduction of a new tax-free allowance known as the Residence Nil-Rate Band (RNRB) from that year onwards. The RNRB is available to those estates that transfer their main UK residence to direct descendants on their death.
The total number of UK deaths that resulted in an IHT charge has increased. In the tax year 2020 to 2021, there were 27,000 taxpaying IHT estates, an increase of 4,000 (17%) since the previous tax year, 2019 to 2020.
“ The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. This kind of exponential growth leads to outlandish estimates for the amount of tidal energy that society will demand.”
“ I'm not sure the author realized this, but they're actually making a statement about how crazy exponential growth is. Not about the sustainability of tidal power. This becomes obvious once you look closer at what that 2% growth rate (as assumed in the post) implies.”
“ An important caveat: this article assumes that energy consumption will continue to increase exponentially to get the 1000 year timeline of draining the rotational energy of the Earth.”
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
THEY DID NOT PAY TAX ON THAT INCOME FROM MASSIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Look at how estates are de facto immune from CGT.
CGT allowance when you are alive - 6k, 3K next year.
Dead, effectively 500k for many.
They paid council tax on it, stamp duty when they bought it and income tax on the income which bought it and paid for the mortgage
Interesting you are arguing they paid income tax on the income which bought it, when you want 2 million handed down tax free to you to buy a property
The present allowances are more than generous and I do not support increasing them, just as I do not support the triple lock
Forget allowances, inheritance tax should be abolished altogether.
Inheritance should just be liable to income tax on the entire inheritance instead. Which should include National Insurance as should all incomes, not just salaried ones.
I have no issue of applying income tax to estates though I doubt any politician is brave enough to propose it
Estates are wealth and assets not income, unless let out and you get rent from them
Then why is IHT paid on them
As it is an inheritance tax on assets not an income tax
I'm reading Robert Nozick's "The Examined Life". It's very good.
In it, he supports the idea of people who create wealth passing it on to their loved ones tax free. There is a bond. Emotionally it feels right. The problem is that it then can get passed down through generations, unknown to the original donor, creating unfair inequalities.
His solution is that only the first inheritance eg to children or grandchildren, is tax free. Subsequent legacies by the recipients of the original inheritance have any original inheritance taxed at 100%.
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
THEY DID NOT PAY TAX ON THAT INCOME FROM MASSIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Look at how estates are de facto immune from CGT.
CGT allowance when you are alive - 6k, 3K next year.
Dead, effectively 500k for many.
They paid council tax on it, stamp duty when they bought it and income tax on the income which bought it and paid for the mortgage
Interesting you are arguing they paid income tax on the income which bought it, when you want 2 million handed down tax free to you to buy a property
The present allowances are more than generous and I do not support increasing them, just as I do not support the triple lock
Forget allowances, inheritance tax should be abolished altogether.
Inheritance should just be liable to income tax on the entire inheritance instead. Which should include National Insurance as should all incomes, not just salaried ones.
I have no issue of applying income tax to estates though I doubt any politician is brave enough to propose it
Estates are wealth and assets not income, unless let out and you get rent from them
I struggle with your justification for your position. Consider the following. My sister in law and husband are not high earners but bought a flat many decades ago in SW London to live in, upgraded to a terraced house and since now down sized to a flat again and will soon move out of SW London. The capital gains they have made on their homes exceed any income they have made in their entire lives and they will live on that for the rest of their lives and not a penny of tax has been paid on it.
Well good for them, they invested wisely in a sensible asset. That is why I am a Tory and you are a Liberal.
Though they will of course have paid increased council tax on it
No they didn't . They bought a house to live in. They didn't speculate. They were lucky as to where they bought, yet paid not a penny of tax on huge gains, whereas people working or investing pay tax on their gains/profits/earnings.
And what the hell had Council tax got to do with it. We all pay that. It isn't a tax on gains or earnings it is a payment for services. That is a complete red herring.
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
Do you really think your rentier attitude is good for the country generally or in particular for the Conservative party ?
Unless you Conservatives stop looking upon workers as if they were serfs then you'll be spending a long time in opposition.
Well there are millions and millions of voters who own property and want their relatives to inherit it and for it to go up in value.
Osborne's IHT cut was one of the biggest factors in the Tory victories of 2010 and 2015, though regardless of electoral appeal there is no point being in government if you aren't pushing Tory principles like cutting IHT
In the tax year 2020 to 2021, 3.73% of UK deaths resulted in an Inheritance Tax (IHT) charge, decreasing by 0.03 percentage points since the tax year 2019 to 2020. This means the proportion has been relatively flat since the tax year 2017 to 2018 - likely as a result of the introduction of a new tax-free allowance known as the Residence Nil-Rate Band (RNRB) from that year onwards. The RNRB is available to those estates that transfer their main UK residence to direct descendants on their death.
The total number of UK deaths that resulted in an IHT charge has increased. In the tax year 2020 to 2021, there were 27,000 taxpaying IHT estates, an increase of 4,000 (17%) since the previous tax year, 2019 to 2020.
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
OK, off the top of my head I think there's something wrong there as follows:
Point 1: we don't orbit the Moon. The Moon orbits us. We orbit the Sun. I know you know that, but given the sentence "...the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the Moon within 50-60 years..." it needs stating, because
i) why would the Earth's orbital speed around the Sun slow down at all, and
ii) I'm not sure what the phrase "our orbit becomes tidally locked to the Moon" means. Do you mean the Moon orbits Earth geosynchronously, so only one hemisphere sees it?
Point 2: from the Moon's point of view we are a black box. Whether its gravitational pull results in Earth water sloshing up and down as tides, or sloshing up and down powering generators, is irrelevant to the Moon. The Moon doesn't know what's going on on the surface of Earth (provided the mass of the Earth remains constant?)
Point 3: how many tidal generators etc is 5%? Is there even a chance we can achieve this? Is this a conceivably real concern? It's just that I'm pretty sure we haven't reached the "planetary engineering" stage of the Kardashev scale yet.
Orbital speed and momentum are two different things, the length of a year would stay the same but the length of a day would become the same as the number of days it takes the moon to orbit the earth.
This phenomenon is observable, hence the introduction of the leap second once we stayed measuring time using atomic clocks rather than solar time.
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
THEY DID NOT PAY TAX ON THAT INCOME FROM MASSIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Look at how estates are de facto immune from CGT.
CGT allowance when you are alive - 6k, 3K next year.
Dead, effectively 500k for many.
They paid council tax on it, stamp duty when they bought it and income tax on the income which bought it and paid for the mortgage
Interesting you are arguing they paid income tax on the income which bought it, when you want 2 million handed down tax free to you to buy a property
The present allowances are more than generous and I do not support increasing them, just as I do not support the triple lock
It's the whining and sense of entitlement that gets me. Where's the self-reliance and self-respect of Mrs Thatcher? But I forget, she wasn't a True Tory in the 2023 sense.
No Thatcher wasn't a true Tory in the 1823 sense
Which is why she was a good Prime Minister.
And why the true 1823 Tory party went out of business in 1834. Good riddance to that.
No, Rees Mogg, Bill Cash, the Marquess of Salisbury, even Boris and Sunak sometimes would have been 19th century Tories.
Yes, they would have been, but that's not the party they're in so perhaps those entryists should be kicked out and form a real "true Tory" party. And it is also why Mogg and Cash* are regarded as eccentrics and weirdos, the Marquess of Salisbury is not even worth mentioning, and Sunak is going to deliver the Tories to a well deserved period of Opposition.
Boris isn't an 1820s Tory by any stretch of the definition. Boris is interested in Boris, not obsolete 19th century philosophies.
* Actually to be fair to Cash, as eccentric and weird as he can be, he's not as bad as that. Mogg is, yes.
Yes it is the party they are in, the original Tory Party is still there, it just added on some free market liberals.
Indeed the impact of Brexit eg leaving the single market free trade area and restricting immigration has seen the electoral map shift in a more late 19th century direction. Conservatives strongest in rural areas and patriotic working class areas and Liberals making gains in commuter belt
No, the original Tory Party died.
Peel's Conservative Party killed it. Good riddance, no flowers.
Nope, Peel left the Conservative Party he himself created to form a Peelite faction which ultimately merged with the Whigs to form the Liberal Party.
Just as the franchise expanded and faced with the threat of a rising Labour party many of those free market Liberals joined the Conservatives to form today's Conservative Party in the early 20th century
Which is just all the more evidence that their is no continuity of the Conservative Party from the 1820s to today, there isn't even continuity from Peel's day to today.
Either way though, the modern Conservative Party traces its history back to either Disraeli in 1912 or Peel in 1834, not Rees Mogg in the 1820s.
There has been no continuity of purity in that time, and if there had been, the party would have died ages ago. The party has thrived by adapting to the times in the principles Peel and Disraeli etc set out, being updated for then-modern times.
Disraeli was dead by 1912.
Truss might have been a Peelite, however the disaster of her premiership means the Conservative Party is unlikely to return to a largely pure free market liberal agenda anytime soon
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
Do you really think your rentier attitude is good for the country generally or in particular for the Conservative party ?
Unless you Conservatives stop looking upon workers as if they were serfs then you'll be spending a long time in opposition.
Well there are millions and millions of voters who own property and want their relatives to inherit it and for it to go up in value.
Osborne's IHT cut was one of the biggest factors in the Tory victories of 2010 and 2015, though regardless of electoral appeal there is no point being in government if you aren't pushing Tory principles like cutting IHT
In the tax year 2020 to 2021, 3.73% of UK deaths resulted in an Inheritance Tax (IHT) charge, decreasing by 0.03 percentage points since the tax year 2019 to 2020. This means the proportion has been relatively flat since the tax year 2017 to 2018 - likely as a result of the introduction of a new tax-free allowance known as the Residence Nil-Rate Band (RNRB) from that year onwards. The RNRB is available to those estates that transfer their main UK residence to direct descendants on their death.
The total number of UK deaths that resulted in an IHT charge has increased. In the tax year 2020 to 2021, there were 27,000 taxpaying IHT estates, an increase of 4,000 (17%) since the previous tax year, 2019 to 2020.
“ The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. This kind of exponential growth leads to outlandish estimates for the amount of tidal energy that society will demand.”
“ I'm not sure the author realized this, but they're actually making a statement about how crazy exponential growth is. Not about the sustainability of tidal power. This becomes obvious once you look closer at what that 2% growth rate (as assumed in the post) implies.”
“ An important caveat: this article assumes that energy consumption will continue to increase exponentially to get the 1000 year timeline of draining the rotational energy of the Earth.”
But energy usage growth is way bigger than 2% a year. 2% would be a huge slowdown.
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
Even Thatcher fails the HYUFD 'True Tory' test.
HYUFD can't be a 'True Tory '- he voted REMAIN!
Every Tory MP who tried to put their speeding fines on expenses (afaicr there were 3) voted for Remain. Says it all.
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
Do you really think your rentier attitude is good for the country generally or in particular for the Conservative party ?
Unless you Conservatives stop looking upon workers as if they were serfs then you'll be spending a long time in opposition.
Well there are millions and millions of voters who own property and want their relatives to inherit it and for it to go up in value.
Osborne's IHT cut was one of the biggest factors in the Tory victories of 2010 and 2015, though regardless of electoral appeal there is no point being in government if you aren't pushing Tory principles like cutting IHT
In the tax year 2020 to 2021, 3.73% of UK deaths resulted in an Inheritance Tax (IHT) charge, decreasing by 0.03 percentage points since the tax year 2019 to 2020. This means the proportion has been relatively flat since the tax year 2017 to 2018 - likely as a result of the introduction of a new tax-free allowance known as the Residence Nil-Rate Band (RNRB) from that year onwards. The RNRB is available to those estates that transfer their main UK residence to direct descendants on their death.
The total number of UK deaths that resulted in an IHT charge has increased. In the tax year 2020 to 2021, there were 27,000 taxpaying IHT estates, an increase of 4,000 (17%) since the previous tax year, 2019 to 2020.
You are obsessional about a fringe issue which affects a tiny proportion of the population.
An obsession which is damaging not only to the country as a whole but to the Conservative party in particular.
Only because of the Osborne tax cut which ended IHT being paid on family homes under £1 million.
Otherwise even the average property in London and the SE is now above the IHT threshold of £325k
Your last sentence is irrelevant and the I million threshold is too high in the current economic position
No it isn't, reversing it would be even more unpopular than May's dementia tax which lost the Conservative majority Osborne's IHT cut proposal played a key part in winning in 2015
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
OK, off the top of my head I think there's something wrong there as follows:
Point 1: we don't orbit the Moon. The Moon orbits us. We orbit the Sun. I know you know that, but given the sentence "...the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the Moon within 50-60 years..." it needs stating, because
i) why would the Earth's orbital speed around the Sun slow down at all, and
ii) I'm not sure what the phrase "our orbit becomes tidally locked to the Moon" means. Do you mean the Moon orbits Earth geosynchronously, so only one hemisphere sees it?
Point 2: from the Moon's point of view we are a black box. Whether its gravitational pull results in Earth water sloshing up and down as tides, or sloshing up and down powering generators, is irrelevant to the Moon. The Moon doesn't know what's going on on the surface of Earth (provided the mass of the Earth remains constant?)
Point 3: how many tidal generators etc is 5%? Is there even a chance we can achieve this? Is this a conceivably real concern? It's just that I'm pretty sure we haven't reached the "planetary engineering" stage of the Kardashev scale yet.
Orbital speed and momentum are two different things, the length of a year would stay the same but the length of a day would become the same as the number of days it takes the moon to orbit the earth.
This phenomenon is observable, hence the introduction of the leap second once we stayed measuring time using atomic clocks rather than solar time.
A day is the time the earth rotates around the sun, not the moon.
Why would the earth rotate around the sun in the same time as it takes the moon to rotate around the earth?
That seems like a very dramatic change, and the numbers intuitively don't feel right.
Yes, Stratford upon Avon is the one. I’d overlooked it despite family living round the corner.
As for my list being weird: I appreciate Lourdes isn’t on most people’s bucket list but there are some crazy (and very ill) people for whom it is indeed the trip of a lifetime.
Orange: fair point. It’s B list, like Salisbury
Orlando: I disagree. UNESCO isn’t going to list it anytime soon but for the sheer number of tourists whose biggest holiday outlay of their lives is a trip there, for a small selection of theme parks dominated by the big Disneyworld, it surely more than qualifies. Certainly more than the Surrey village of Chessington, where I spent a hot and queuey day today that reaffirmed I’ll never go willingly to Orlando.
But there is a massive Disneyland in SoCa and also in Paris (and Japan) etc. People don't single out Orlando the way they do the Taj Mahal. There aren't five Taj Mahals, with one a bit older than the others. Get a grip
Lourdes isn't even B list, it's D, only a few nutters care
But anyroad your criterion is deeply eccentric. A "place that is entirely known for just one world class site but only that one"
Even if Fiji lose I can see them giving Australia a torrid time
On another subject - on your tour of the English side of the border with Wales, you missed out the city I visited today: Chester. Which, it feels, is just as attractive as ever and is in rude health. I think Chester gets a bit overlooked; the instinctive reaction to it always seems to be "it's not as good as York". Which is true, but 99% of England also fails on that metric. There certainly isn't as much for the touristin Chester as in York. But there are few more pleasant cities to be in. The city walls, the rows and the riverside are all remarkable, the cathedral as fine as any; the city is awash with Roman ruins, and there are more interesting historical buildings than you can shake a stick at (I'm sure a curious visitor accompanying fewer children could have found out a bit more about this but that's all I can give you.) In common with Hereford, Shrewsbury and so on, it feels a long way west, but isn't really remote; it's only 45 minutes from Manchester and less from Liverpool, but doesn't feel like a satellite of either. Mainly, it's a very pleasant place to be. We fantasised vaguely of retiring there.
Chester is primarily a town to work and live in, with some blue chip employers like M&S, MBNA and Airbus, rather than a tourist destination. I suspect it's more prosperous than York, which seems to have a significant deprivation and homelessness problem.
Point of order
Airbus is not in Chester or England
It is in Wales and manufactures all Airbus wings
Indeed my son in law recently retired from a very senior position with them having joined more than 45 years ago
The Airbus factory is in Wales, but five miles out of Chester and essentially a suburb. I'm thinking if you work there that Chester is a nicer place to live than Shotton, even if it is over the border.
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
THEY DID NOT PAY TAX ON THAT INCOME FROM MASSIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Look at how estates are de facto immune from CGT.
CGT allowance when you are alive - 6k, 3K next year.
Dead, effectively 500k for many.
They paid council tax on it, stamp duty when they bought it and income tax on the income which bought it and paid for the mortgage
Interesting you are arguing they paid income tax on the income which bought it, when you want 2 million handed down tax free to you to buy a property
The present allowances are more than generous and I do not support increasing them, just as I do not support the triple lock
Forget allowances, inheritance tax should be abolished altogether.
Inheritance should just be liable to income tax on the entire inheritance instead. Which should include National Insurance as should all incomes, not just salaried ones.
I have no issue of applying income tax to estates though I doubt any politician is brave enough to propose it
Estates are wealth and assets not income, unless let out and you get rent from them
I struggle with your justification for your position. Consider the following. My sister in law and husband are not high earners but bought a flat many decades ago in SW London to live in, upgraded to a terraced house and since now down sized to a flat again and will soon move out of SW London. The capital gains they have made on their homes exceed any income they have made in their entire lives and they will live on that for the rest of their lives and not a penny of tax has been paid on it.
Well good for them, they invested wisely in a sensible asset. That is why I am a Tory and you are a Liberal.
Though they will of course have paid increased council tax on it
No they didn't . They bought a house to live in. They didn't speculate. They were lucky as to where they bought, yet paid not a penny of tax on huge gains, whereas people working or investing pay tax on their gains/profits/earnings.
And what the hell had Council tax got to do with it. We all pay that. It isn't a tax on gains or earnings it is a payment for services. That is a complete red herring.
Council tax thresholds are based on the value of the property
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
THEY DID NOT PAY TAX ON THAT INCOME FROM MASSIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Look at how estates are de facto immune from CGT.
CGT allowance when you are alive - 6k, 3K next year.
Dead, effectively 500k for many.
They paid council tax on it, stamp duty when they bought it and income tax on the income which bought it and paid for the mortgage
Interesting you are arguing they paid income tax on the income which bought it, when you want 2 million handed down tax free to you to buy a property
The present allowances are more than generous and I do not support increasing them, just as I do not support the triple lock
Forget allowances, inheritance tax should be abolished altogether.
Inheritance should just be liable to income tax on the entire inheritance instead. Which should include National Insurance as should all incomes, not just salaried ones.
I have no issue of applying income tax to estates though I doubt any politician is brave enough to propose it
Estates are wealth and assets not income, unless let out and you get rent from them
I struggle with your justification for your position. Consider the following. My sister in law and husband are not high earners but bought a flat many decades ago in SW London to live in, upgraded to a terraced house and since now down sized to a flat again and will soon move out of SW London. The capital gains they have made on their homes exceed any income they have made in their entire lives and they will live on that for the rest of their lives and not a penny of tax has been paid on it.
Well good for them, they invested wisely in a sensible asset. That is why I am a Tory and you are a Liberal.
Though they will of course have paid increased council tax on it
No they didn't . They bought a house to live in. They didn't speculate. They were lucky as to where they bought, yet paid not a penny of tax on huge gains, whereas people working or investing pay tax on their gains/profits/earnings.
And what the hell had Council tax got to do with it. We all pay that. It isn't a tax on gains or earnings it is a payment for services. That is a complete red herring.
Council tax thresholds are based on the value of the property
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
The principle makes sense, the question would be the orders of magnitude and the maths. It could either be a figurative drop in the ocean, or it could be catastrophic.
I wouldn't want to judge the maths either way personally, but it is certainly something that perhaps should be looked into.
The Earth’s angular rotational energy is around 10^30 joules, we use less than a millionth of that per year.
I’d be more worried about the motives of the author than slowing down the Earth.
I always wondered how many windmills do you need to impact the weather. I suspect we have some way to go yet 😮
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
THEY DID NOT PAY TAX ON THAT INCOME FROM MASSIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Look at how estates are de facto immune from CGT.
CGT allowance when you are alive - 6k, 3K next year.
Dead, effectively 500k for many.
They paid council tax on it, stamp duty when they bought it and income tax on the income which bought it and paid for the mortgage
Interesting you are arguing they paid income tax on the income which bought it, when you want 2 million handed down tax free to you to buy a property
The present allowances are more than generous and I do not support increasing them, just as I do not support the triple lock
Forget allowances, inheritance tax should be abolished altogether.
Inheritance should just be liable to income tax on the entire inheritance instead. Which should include National Insurance as should all incomes, not just salaried ones.
I have no issue of applying income tax to estates though I doubt any politician is brave enough to propose it
Estates are wealth and assets not income, unless let out and you get rent from them
I struggle with your justification for your position. Consider the following. My sister in law and husband are not high earners but bought a flat many decades ago in SW London to live in, upgraded to a terraced house and since now down sized to a flat again and will soon move out of SW London. The capital gains they have made on their homes exceed any income they have made in their entire lives and they will live on that for the rest of their lives and not a penny of tax has been paid on it.
Well good for them, they invested wisely in a sensible asset. That is why I am a Tory and you are a Liberal.
Though they will of course have paid increased council tax on it
No they didn't . They bought a house to live in. They didn't speculate. They were lucky as to where they bought, yet paid not a penny of tax on huge gains, whereas people working or investing pay tax on their gains/profits/earnings.
And what the hell had Council tax got to do with it. We all pay that. It isn't a tax on gains or earnings it is a payment for services. That is a complete red herring.
Council tax thresholds are based on the value of the property
Council tax thresholds do not go anywhere near far enough with several higher bands urgently needed
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
THEY DID NOT PAY TAX ON THAT INCOME FROM MASSIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Look at how estates are de facto immune from CGT.
CGT allowance when you are alive - 6k, 3K next year.
Dead, effectively 500k for many.
They paid council tax on it, stamp duty when they bought it and income tax on the income which bought it and paid for the mortgage
Interesting you are arguing they paid income tax on the income which bought it, when you want 2 million handed down tax free to you to buy a property
The present allowances are more than generous and I do not support increasing them, just as I do not support the triple lock
Forget allowances, inheritance tax should be abolished altogether.
Inheritance should just be liable to income tax on the entire inheritance instead. Which should include National Insurance as should all incomes, not just salaried ones.
I have no issue of applying income tax to estates though I doubt any politician is brave enough to propose it
Estates are wealth and assets not income, unless let out and you get rent from them
Then why is IHT paid on them
As it is an inheritance tax on assets not an income tax
I'm reading Robert Nozick's "The Examined Life". It's very good.
In it, he supports the idea of people who create wealth passing it on to their loved ones tax free. There is a bond. Emotionally it feels right. The problem is that it then can get passed down through generations, unknown to the original donor, creating unfair inequalities.
His solution is that only the first inheritance eg to children or grandchildren, is tax free. Subsequent legacies by the recipients of the original inheritance have any original inheritance taxed at 100%.
“ The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. This kind of exponential growth leads to outlandish estimates for the amount of tidal energy that society will demand.”
“ I'm not sure the author realized this, but they're actually making a statement about how crazy exponential growth is. Not about the sustainability of tidal power. This becomes obvious once you look closer at what that 2% growth rate (as assumed in the post) implies.”
“ An important caveat: this article assumes that energy consumption will continue to increase exponentially to get the 1000 year timeline of draining the rotational energy of the Earth.”
Why wouldn't energy usage continue to grow exponentially? It has done for centuries already - and if power is renewable, then there's no reason why it can't continue to do so exponentially for centuries more. That's part of the advantage of switching to renewable energies.
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
The 2% growth in energy consumption per year for a 1000 years is untenable - it would lead to global energy consumption being 400 billion times what it is today. (1.02^1000 = 398,264,651)
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
Do you really think your rentier attitude is good for the country generally or in particular for the Conservative party ?
Unless you Conservatives stop looking upon workers as if they were serfs then you'll be spending a long time in opposition.
Well there are millions and millions of voters who own property and want their relatives to inherit it and for it to go up in value.
Osborne's IHT cut was one of the biggest factors in the Tory victories of 2010 and 2015, though regardless of electoral appeal there is no point being in government if you aren't pushing Tory principles like cutting IHT
In the tax year 2020 to 2021, 3.73% of UK deaths resulted in an Inheritance Tax (IHT) charge, decreasing by 0.03 percentage points since the tax year 2019 to 2020. This means the proportion has been relatively flat since the tax year 2017 to 2018 - likely as a result of the introduction of a new tax-free allowance known as the Residence Nil-Rate Band (RNRB) from that year onwards. The RNRB is available to those estates that transfer their main UK residence to direct descendants on their death.
The total number of UK deaths that resulted in an IHT charge has increased. In the tax year 2020 to 2021, there were 27,000 taxpaying IHT estates, an increase of 4,000 (17%) since the previous tax year, 2019 to 2020.
You are obsessional about a fringe issue which affects a tiny proportion of the population.
An obsession which is damaging not only to the country as a whole but to the Conservative party in particular.
Only because of the Osborne tax cut which ended IHT being paid on family homes under £1 million.
Otherwise even the average property in London and the SE is now above the IHT threshold of £325k
Do you really think your vision of ever higher house prices and ever bigger inheritances is one in which this country prospers.
Do you really think that your belief that workers should pay higher taxes than those who receive the same income but do not work is one which does this country any good ?
Wealth is not created by inheriting it is created by working.
And if we don't create as much wealth as we consume then all that inheritance you are so obsessed with will end up in fewer and fewer hands and increasingly those hands will be foreign ones.
Well it doesn't matter because until the Conservatives purge themselves of beliefs like yours they will not be winning any more elections.
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
Do you really think your rentier attitude is good for the country generally or in particular for the Conservative party ?
Unless you Conservatives stop looking upon workers as if they were serfs then you'll be spending a long time in opposition.
Well there are millions and millions of voters who own property and want their relatives to inherit it and for it to go up in value.
Osborne's IHT cut was one of the biggest factors in the Tory victories of 2010 and 2015, though regardless of electoral appeal there is no point being in government if you aren't pushing Tory principles like cutting IHT
In the tax year 2020 to 2021, 3.73% of UK deaths resulted in an Inheritance Tax (IHT) charge, decreasing by 0.03 percentage points since the tax year 2019 to 2020. This means the proportion has been relatively flat since the tax year 2017 to 2018 - likely as a result of the introduction of a new tax-free allowance known as the Residence Nil-Rate Band (RNRB) from that year onwards. The RNRB is available to those estates that transfer their main UK residence to direct descendants on their death.
The total number of UK deaths that resulted in an IHT charge has increased. In the tax year 2020 to 2021, there were 27,000 taxpaying IHT estates, an increase of 4,000 (17%) since the previous tax year, 2019 to 2020.
You are obsessional about a fringe issue which affects a tiny proportion of the population.
An obsession which is damaging not only to the country as a whole but to the Conservative party in particular.
Only because of the Osborne tax cut which ended IHT being paid on family homes under £1 million.
Otherwise even the average property in London and the SE is now above the IHT threshold of £325k
Do you really think your vision of ever higher house prices and ever bigger inheritances is one in which this country prospers.
Do you really think that your belief that workers should pay higher taxes than those who receive the same income but do not work is one which does this country any good ?
Wealth is not created by inheriting it is created by working.
And if we don't create as much wealth as we consume then all that inheritance you are so obsessed with will end up in fewer and fewer hands and increasingly those hands will be foreign ones.
Well it doesn't matter because until the Conservatives purge themselves of beliefs like yours they will not be winning any more elections.
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
The 2% growth in energy consumption per year for a 1000 years is untenable - it would lead to global energy consumption being 400 billion times what it is today. (1.02^1000 = 398,264,651)
How many times is our energy usage now compared to 300 years ago?
If energy used is renewable, there's no reason why such exponential increases can't be maintained. Exponential growth is how we have our modern living standards, not medieval living standards.
Even if Fiji lose I can see them giving Australia a torrid time
On another subject - on your tour of the English side of the border with Wales, you missed out the city I visited today: Chester. Which, it feels, is just as attractive as ever and is in rude health. I think Chester gets a bit overlooked; the instinctive reaction to it always seems to be "it's not as good as York". Which is true, but 99% of England also fails on that metric. There certainly isn't as much for the touristin Chester as in York. But there are few more pleasant cities to be in. The city walls, the rows and the riverside are all remarkable, the cathedral as fine as any; the city is awash with Roman ruins, and there are more interesting historical buildings than you can shake a stick at (I'm sure a curious visitor accompanying fewer children could have found out a bit more about this but that's all I can give you.) In common with Hereford, Shrewsbury and so on, it feels a long way west, but isn't really remote; it's only 45 minutes from Manchester and less from Liverpool, but doesn't feel like a satellite of either. Mainly, it's a very pleasant place to be. We fantasised vaguely of retiring there.
Chester is primarily a town to work and live in, with some blue chip employers like M&S, MBNA and Airbus, rather than a tourist destination. I suspect it's more prosperous than York, which seems to have a significant deprivation and homelessness problem.
Point of order
Airbus is not in Chester or England
It is in Wales and manufactures all Airbus wings
Indeed my son in law recently retired from a very senior position with them having joined more than 45 years ago
The Airbus factory is in Wales, but five miles out of Chester and essentially a suburb. I'm thinking if you work there that Chester is a nicer place to live than Shotton, even if it is over the border.
My son in law lived here in North Wales and many of the workers are based across North Wales as it is much cheaper than attempting to buy in Chester
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
The 2% growth in energy consumption per year for a 1000 years is untenable - it would lead to global energy consumption being 400 billion times what it is today. (1.02^1000 = 398,264,651)
Why wouldn't it be if we become a space faring civilisation? Though I'd imagine some kind of nuclear fusion would be required for that.
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
The principle makes sense, the question would be the orders of magnitude and the maths. It could either be a figurative drop in the ocean, or it could be catastrophic.
I wouldn't want to judge the maths either way personally, but it is certainly something that perhaps should be looked into.
The Earth’s angular rotational energy is around 10^30 joules, we use less than a millionth of that per year.
I’d be more worried about the motives of the author than slowing down the Earth.
The author clearly never went to a Russel Group university. Loser.
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
THEY DID NOT PAY TAX ON THAT INCOME FROM MASSIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Look at how estates are de facto immune from CGT.
CGT allowance when you are alive - 6k, 3K next year.
Dead, effectively 500k for many.
They paid council tax on it, stamp duty when they bought it and income tax on the income which bought it and paid for the mortgage
Interesting you are arguing they paid income tax on the income which bought it, when you want 2 million handed down tax free to you to buy a property
The present allowances are more than generous and I do not support increasing them, just as I do not support the triple lock
Forget allowances, inheritance tax should be abolished altogether.
Inheritance should just be liable to income tax on the entire inheritance instead. Which should include National Insurance as should all incomes, not just salaried ones.
I have no issue of applying income tax to estates though I doubt any politician is brave enough to propose it
Estates are wealth and assets not income, unless let out and you get rent from them
I struggle with your justification for your position. Consider the following. My sister in law and husband are not high earners but bought a flat many decades ago in SW London to live in, upgraded to a terraced house and since now down sized to a flat again and will soon move out of SW London. The capital gains they have made on their homes exceed any income they have made in their entire lives and they will live on that for the rest of their lives and not a penny of tax has been paid on it.
Well good for them, they invested wisely in a sensible asset. That is why I am a Tory and you are a Liberal.
Though they will of course have paid increased council tax on it
No they didn't . They bought a house to live in. They didn't speculate. They were lucky as to where they bought, yet paid not a penny of tax on huge gains, whereas people working or investing pay tax on their gains/profits/earnings.
And what the hell had Council tax got to do with it. We all pay that. It isn't a tax on gains or earnings it is a payment for services. That is a complete red herring.
Council tax thresholds are based on the value of the property
And the relevance of that is? It is still payment of services. In their case because of the size of the property and the borough they are in they pay very little. You seem to have shot your own argument down there particularly as property prices have boomed in SW London in the last 40 years but council tax valuations are very old. The value of a low band house there will buy you a high band house elsewhere. So your point is wrong in so many ways in this instance as they pay less council tax than people in cheaper houses elsewhere.
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
The 2% growth in energy consumption per year for a 1000 years is untenable - it would lead to global energy consumption being 400 billion times what it is today. (1.02^1000 = 398,264,651)
Why wouldn't it be if we become a space faring civilisation? Though I'd imagine some kind of nuclear fusion would be required for that.
If we became a space-faring nation? Faring where?
If interstellar, planet Earth would probably become some huge nature reserve - the energy consumption would be elsewhere.
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
The 2% growth in energy consumption per year for a 1000 years is untenable - it would lead to global energy consumption being 400 billion times what it is today. (1.02^1000 = 398,264,651)
How many times is our energy usage now compared to 300 years ago?
If energy used is renewable, there's no reason why such exponential increases can't be maintained. Exponential growth is how we have our modern living standards, not medieval living standards.
Where would all the energy go, since it all ends up as heat?
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
"our orbital speed"...our orbital speed around what? We orbit the sun, remember?
"Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction"...and why is this important? Remember how I keep telling PB you need three things to judge a datum: how big is it (absolute value), how big is it relevant to something else (relative value), and how big is too big (threshold). So you need to tell us how big is the friction now, how big would the friction be at 5% power, would it then cross some threshold for an effect, and how does this effect manifest?
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
The 2% growth in energy consumption per year for a 1000 years is untenable - it would lead to global energy consumption being 400 billion times what it is today. (1.02^1000 = 398,264,651)
Why wouldn't it be if we become a space faring civilisation? Though I'd imagine some kind of nuclear fusion would be required for that.
There is a limited number of locations for tidal energy facilities within the UK and everywhere else. I struggle to see even our full utilisation of these sites even nibbling on the levels required to affect the courses of the moon. I haven't seen the maths and don't know if I'd understand it if I did. But it seems like April has come early.
“ The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. This kind of exponential growth leads to outlandish estimates for the amount of tidal energy that society will demand.”
“ I'm not sure the author realized this, but they're actually making a statement about how crazy exponential growth is. Not about the sustainability of tidal power. This becomes obvious once you look closer at what that 2% growth rate (as assumed in the post) implies.”
“ An important caveat: this article assumes that energy consumption will continue to increase exponentially to get the 1000 year timeline of draining the rotational energy of the Earth.”
Why wouldn't energy usage continue to grow exponentially? It has done for centuries already - and if power is renewable, then there's no reason why it can't continue to do so exponentially for centuries more. That's part of the advantage of switching to renewable energies.
While energy usage may increase exponentially forever, energy extracted from tidal stations will not. For starters it won’t be possible to build enough to satisfy that demand, and other, cheaper forms of energy will be available.
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
Do you really think your rentier attitude is good for the country generally or in particular for the Conservative party ?
Unless you Conservatives stop looking upon workers as if they were serfs then you'll be spending a long time in opposition.
Well there are millions and millions of voters who own property and want their relatives to inherit it and for it to go up in value.
Osborne's IHT cut was one of the biggest factors in the Tory victories of 2010 and 2015, though regardless of electoral appeal there is no point being in government if you aren't pushing Tory principles like cutting IHT
In the tax year 2020 to 2021, 3.73% of UK deaths resulted in an Inheritance Tax (IHT) charge, decreasing by 0.03 percentage points since the tax year 2019 to 2020. This means the proportion has been relatively flat since the tax year 2017 to 2018 - likely as a result of the introduction of a new tax-free allowance known as the Residence Nil-Rate Band (RNRB) from that year onwards. The RNRB is available to those estates that transfer their main UK residence to direct descendants on their death.
The total number of UK deaths that resulted in an IHT charge has increased. In the tax year 2020 to 2021, there were 27,000 taxpaying IHT estates, an increase of 4,000 (17%) since the previous tax year, 2019 to 2020.
You are obsessional about a fringe issue which affects a tiny proportion of the population.
An obsession which is damaging not only to the country as a whole but to the Conservative party in particular.
Only because of the Osborne tax cut which ended IHT being paid on family homes under £1 million.
Otherwise even the average property in London and the SE is now above the IHT threshold of £325k
Do you really think your vision of ever higher house prices and ever bigger inheritances is one in which this country prospers.
Do you really think that your belief that workers should pay higher taxes than those who receive the same income but do not work is one which does this country any good ?
Wealth is not created by inheriting it is created by working.
And if we don't create as much wealth as we consume then all that inheritance you are so obsessed with will end up in fewer and fewer hands and increasingly those hands will be foreign ones.
Well it doesn't matter because until the Conservatives purge themselves of beliefs like yours they will not be winning any more elections.
The fervour of pro-grammar school advocates is all we need to power the planet. That and burning some public sector workers. The traitors.
I should really unsubscribe from The Telegraph podcasts...
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
THEY DID NOT PAY TAX ON THAT INCOME FROM MASSIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Look at how estates are de facto immune from CGT.
CGT allowance when you are alive - 6k, 3K next year.
Dead, effectively 500k for many.
They paid council tax on it, stamp duty when they bought it and income tax on the income which bought it and paid for the mortgage
Interesting you are arguing they paid income tax on the income which bought it, when you want 2 million handed down tax free to you to buy a property
The present allowances are more than generous and I do not support increasing them, just as I do not support the triple lock
Forget allowances, inheritance tax should be abolished altogether.
Inheritance should just be liable to income tax on the entire inheritance instead. Which should include National Insurance as should all incomes, not just salaried ones.
I have no issue of applying income tax to estates though I doubt any politician is brave enough to propose it
Estates are wealth and assets not income, unless let out and you get rent from them
Then why is IHT paid on them
As it is an inheritance tax on assets not an income tax
I'm reading Robert Nozick's "The Examined Life". It's very good.
In it, he supports the idea of people who create wealth passing it on to their loved ones tax free. There is a bond. Emotionally it feels right. The problem is that it then can get passed down through generations, unknown to the original donor, creating unfair inequalities.
His solution is that only the first inheritance eg to children or grandchildren, is tax free. Subsequent legacies by the recipients of the original inheritance have any original inheritance taxed at 100%.
How on earth is that policeable?
The executer of an estate has to make a return to HMRC. If you inherit, that goes on your tax record. You pay no tax on the first inheritance. When you die, your executor makes a return to HMRC. Your estate has to pay the value of the first inheritance to HMRC. The rest, if there is any, can be passed on tax free. It's no more complicated than the current setup.
There are details, such as whether to correct for inflation etc, that need to be worked out. But the principle is clear.
“ The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. This kind of exponential growth leads to outlandish estimates for the amount of tidal energy that society will demand.”
“ I'm not sure the author realized this, but they're actually making a statement about how crazy exponential growth is. Not about the sustainability of tidal power. This becomes obvious once you look closer at what that 2% growth rate (as assumed in the post) implies.”
“ An important caveat: this article assumes that energy consumption will continue to increase exponentially to get the 1000 year timeline of draining the rotational energy of the Earth.”
Why wouldn't energy usage continue to grow exponentially? It has done for centuries already - and if power is renewable, then there's no reason why it can't continue to do so exponentially for centuries more. That's part of the advantage of switching to renewable energies.
While energy usage may increase exponentially forever, energy extracted from tidal stations will not. For starters it won’t be possible to build enough to satisfy that demand, and other, cheaper forms of energy will be available.
Given that most estimates predict global population to peak soon and then start reducing, I think it's unlikely energy consumption will grow exponentially for 1000 years.
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
The 2% growth in energy consumption per year for a 1000 years is untenable - it would lead to global energy consumption being 400 billion times what it is today. (1.02^1000 = 398,264,651)
Why wouldn't it be if we become a space faring civilisation? Though I'd imagine some kind of nuclear fusion would be required for that.
If we became a space-faring nation? Faring where?
If interstellar, planet Earth would probably become some huge nature reserve - the energy consumption would be elsewhere.
In 1820 global energy consumption was 6,264 TWh Roughly 2 centuries later it was 178,899 TWh
So that's a 2755% increase in that time.
If power is generated renewably, why shouldn't such growth continue at a comparable rate? That's part of the purpose of renewable energy, we can use it renewably and continue to use it if it is renewable.
“ The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. This kind of exponential growth leads to outlandish estimates for the amount of tidal energy that society will demand.”
“ I'm not sure the author realized this, but they're actually making a statement about how crazy exponential growth is. Not about the sustainability of tidal power. This becomes obvious once you look closer at what that 2% growth rate (as assumed in the post) implies.”
“ An important caveat: this article assumes that energy consumption will continue to increase exponentially to get the 1000 year timeline of draining the rotational energy of the Earth.”
Why wouldn't energy usage continue to grow exponentially? It has done for centuries already - and if power is renewable, then there's no reason why it can't continue to do so exponentially for centuries more. That's part of the advantage of switching to renewable energies.
While energy usage may increase exponentially forever, energy extracted from tidal stations will not. For starters it won’t be possible to build enough to satisfy that demand, and other, cheaper forms of energy will be available.
Given that most estimates predict global population to peak soon and then start reducing, I think it's unlikely energy consumption will grow exponentially for 1000 years.
I wouldn’t be as confident as you on that. As energy gets cheaper we can find new uses for it.
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
THEY DID NOT PAY TAX ON THAT INCOME FROM MASSIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Look at how estates are de facto immune from CGT.
CGT allowance when you are alive - 6k, 3K next year.
Dead, effectively 500k for many.
They paid council tax on it, stamp duty when they bought it and income tax on the income which bought it and paid for the mortgage
Interesting you are arguing they paid income tax on the income which bought it, when you want 2 million handed down tax free to you to buy a property
The present allowances are more than generous and I do not support increasing them, just as I do not support the triple lock
Forget allowances, inheritance tax should be abolished altogether.
Inheritance should just be liable to income tax on the entire inheritance instead. Which should include National Insurance as should all incomes, not just salaried ones.
I have no issue of applying income tax to estates though I doubt any politician is brave enough to propose it
Estates are wealth and assets not income, unless let out and you get rent from them
I struggle with your justification for your position. Consider the following. My sister in law and husband are not high earners but bought a flat many decades ago in SW London to live in, upgraded to a terraced house and since now down sized to a flat again and will soon move out of SW London. The capital gains they have made on their homes exceed any income they have made in their entire lives and they will live on that for the rest of their lives and not a penny of tax has been paid on it.
Well good for them, they invested wisely in a sensible asset. That is why I am a Tory and you are a Liberal.
Though they will of course have paid increased council tax on it
No they didn't . They bought a house to live in. They didn't speculate. They were lucky as to where they bought, yet paid not a penny of tax on huge gains, whereas people working or investing pay tax on their gains/profits/earnings.
And what the hell had Council tax got to do with it. We all pay that. It isn't a tax on gains or earnings it is a payment for services. That is a complete red herring.
Council tax thresholds are based on the value of the property
And the relevance of that is? It is still payment of services. In their case because of the size of the property and the borough they are in they pay very little. You seem to have shot your own argument down there particularly as property prices have boomed in SW London in the last 40 years but council tax valuations are very old. The value of a low band house there will buy you a high band house elsewhere. So your point is wrong in so many ways in this instance as they pay less council tax than people in cheaper houses elsewhere.
Well that is a case for re valuing council tax thresholds not for increasing IHT
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
THEY DID NOT PAY TAX ON THAT INCOME FROM MASSIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Look at how estates are de facto immune from CGT.
CGT allowance when you are alive - 6k, 3K next year.
Dead, effectively 500k for many.
They paid council tax on it, stamp duty when they bought it and income tax on the income which bought it and paid for the mortgage
Interesting you are arguing they paid income tax on the income which bought it, when you want 2 million handed down tax free to you to buy a property
The present allowances are more than generous and I do not support increasing them, just as I do not support the triple lock
Forget allowances, inheritance tax should be abolished altogether.
Inheritance should just be liable to income tax on the entire inheritance instead. Which should include National Insurance as should all incomes, not just salaried ones.
I have no issue of applying income tax to estates though I doubt any politician is brave enough to propose it
Estates are wealth and assets not income, unless let out and you get rent from them
I struggle with your justification for your position. Consider the following. My sister in law and husband are not high earners but bought a flat many decades ago in SW London to live in, upgraded to a terraced house and since now down sized to a flat again and will soon move out of SW London. The capital gains they have made on their homes exceed any income they have made in their entire lives and they will live on that for the rest of their lives and not a penny of tax has been paid on it.
Well good for them, they invested wisely in a sensible asset. That is why I am a Tory and you are a Liberal.
Though they will of course have paid increased council tax on it
No they didn't . They bought a house to live in. They didn't speculate. They were lucky as to where they bought, yet paid not a penny of tax on huge gains, whereas people working or investing pay tax on their gains/profits/earnings.
And what the hell had Council tax got to do with it. We all pay that. It isn't a tax on gains or earnings it is a payment for services. That is a complete red herring.
Council tax thresholds are based on the value of the property
Council tax thresholds do not go anywhere near far enough with several higher bands urgently needed
It was a fundamental flaw when they first came in
I for one am glad they spotted that after introducing it to Scotland a year earlier. Saved a lot of bother for Mrs Thatcher. Blessed be her name.
Left wing lunatics at the Bank of England brought her down?
Bonkers on stilts.
I'm slightly concerned with the title of her book that she thinks we need to suffer her for ten years while she "saves the West". 49 days was more than enough, as far as I'm concerned.
On the contrary Liz Truss's various stances seem to be vindicated more with each passing day. For example, her firm stance on China both during and after her Premiership. Now we find that China have had a spy active within Westminster. Sunak and Cleverly's soft-soap approach looks crap.
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
Do you really think your rentier attitude is good for the country generally or in particular for the Conservative party ?
Unless you Conservatives stop looking upon workers as if they were serfs then you'll be spending a long time in opposition.
Well there are millions and millions of voters who own property and want their relatives to inherit it and for it to go up in value.
Osborne's IHT cut was one of the biggest factors in the Tory victories of 2010 and 2015, though regardless of electoral appeal there is no point being in government if you aren't pushing Tory principles like cutting IHT
In the tax year 2020 to 2021, 3.73% of UK deaths resulted in an Inheritance Tax (IHT) charge, decreasing by 0.03 percentage points since the tax year 2019 to 2020. This means the proportion has been relatively flat since the tax year 2017 to 2018 - likely as a result of the introduction of a new tax-free allowance known as the Residence Nil-Rate Band (RNRB) from that year onwards. The RNRB is available to those estates that transfer their main UK residence to direct descendants on their death.
The total number of UK deaths that resulted in an IHT charge has increased. In the tax year 2020 to 2021, there were 27,000 taxpaying IHT estates, an increase of 4,000 (17%) since the previous tax year, 2019 to 2020.
You are obsessional about a fringe issue which affects a tiny proportion of the population.
An obsession which is damaging not only to the country as a whole but to the Conservative party in particular.
Only because of the Osborne tax cut which ended IHT being paid on family homes under £1 million.
Otherwise even the average property in London and the SE is now above the IHT threshold of £325k
Do you really think your vision of ever higher house prices and ever bigger inheritances is one in which this country prospers.
Do you really think that your belief that workers should pay higher taxes than those who receive the same income but do not work is one which does this country any good ?
Wealth is not created by inheriting it is created by working.
And if we don't create as much wealth as we consume then all that inheritance you are so obsessed with will end up in fewer and fewer hands and increasingly those hands will be foreign ones.
Well it doesn't matter because until the Conservatives purge themselves of beliefs like yours they will not be winning any more elections.
He doesn't want the country to prosper.
He wants to prosper off the work of others.
Anyone else can go swivel.
A like for triggering that I hadn't heard the phrase 'go swivel' in years, and hadn't fully realised it was a dialect phrase.
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
THEY DID NOT PAY TAX ON THAT INCOME FROM MASSIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Look at how estates are de facto immune from CGT.
CGT allowance when you are alive - 6k, 3K next year.
Dead, effectively 500k for many.
They paid council tax on it, stamp duty when they bought it and income tax on the income which bought it and paid for the mortgage
Interesting you are arguing they paid income tax on the income which bought it, when you want 2 million handed down tax free to you to buy a property
The present allowances are more than generous and I do not support increasing them, just as I do not support the triple lock
Forget allowances, inheritance tax should be abolished altogether.
Inheritance should just be liable to income tax on the entire inheritance instead. Which should include National Insurance as should all incomes, not just salaried ones.
I have no issue of applying income tax to estates though I doubt any politician is brave enough to propose it
Estates are wealth and assets not income, unless let out and you get rent from them
I struggle with your justification for your position. Consider the following. My sister in law and husband are not high earners but bought a flat many decades ago in SW London to live in, upgraded to a terraced house and since now down sized to a flat again and will soon move out of SW London. The capital gains they have made on their homes exceed any income they have made in their entire lives and they will live on that for the rest of their lives and not a penny of tax has been paid on it.
Well good for them, they invested wisely in a sensible asset. That is why I am a Tory and you are a Liberal.
Though they will of course have paid increased council tax on it
No they didn't . They bought a house to live in. They didn't speculate. They were lucky as to where they bought, yet paid not a penny of tax on huge gains, whereas people working or investing pay tax on their gains/profits/earnings.
And what the hell had Council tax got to do with it. We all pay that. It isn't a tax on gains or earnings it is a payment for services. That is a complete red herring.
Council tax thresholds are based on the value of the property
And the relevance of that is? It is still payment of services. In their case because of the size of the property and the borough they are in they pay very little. You seem to have shot your own argument down there particularly as property prices have boomed in SW London in the last 40 years but council tax valuations are very old. The value of a low band house there will buy you a high band house elsewhere. So your point is wrong in so many ways in this instance as they pay less council tax than people in cheaper houses elsewhere.
Well that is a case for re valuing council tax thresholds not for increasing IHT
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
Do you really think your rentier attitude is good for the country generally or in particular for the Conservative party ?
Unless you Conservatives stop looking upon workers as if they were serfs then you'll be spending a long time in opposition.
Well there are millions and millions of voters who own property and want their relatives to inherit it and for it to go up in value.
Osborne's IHT cut was one of the biggest factors in the Tory victories of 2010 and 2015, though regardless of electoral appeal there is no point being in government if you aren't pushing Tory principles like cutting IHT
In the tax year 2020 to 2021, 3.73% of UK deaths resulted in an Inheritance Tax (IHT) charge, decreasing by 0.03 percentage points since the tax year 2019 to 2020. This means the proportion has been relatively flat since the tax year 2017 to 2018 - likely as a result of the introduction of a new tax-free allowance known as the Residence Nil-Rate Band (RNRB) from that year onwards. The RNRB is available to those estates that transfer their main UK residence to direct descendants on their death.
The total number of UK deaths that resulted in an IHT charge has increased. In the tax year 2020 to 2021, there were 27,000 taxpaying IHT estates, an increase of 4,000 (17%) since the previous tax year, 2019 to 2020.
You are obsessional about a fringe issue which affects a tiny proportion of the population.
An obsession which is damaging not only to the country as a whole but to the Conservative party in particular.
Only because of the Osborne tax cut which ended IHT being paid on family homes under £1 million.
Otherwise even the average property in London and the SE is now above the IHT threshold of £325k
Do you really think your vision of ever higher house prices and ever bigger inheritances is one in which this country prospers.
Do you really think that your belief that workers should pay higher taxes than those who receive the same income but do not work is one which does this country any good ?
Wealth is not created by inheriting it is created by working.
And if we don't create as much wealth as we consume then all that inheritance you are so obsessed with will end up in fewer and fewer hands and increasingly those hands will be foreign ones.
Well it doesn't matter because until the Conservatives purge themselves of beliefs like yours they will not be winning any more elections.
If the Conservatives purge themselves of those who want low or abolished inheritance tax then they will be overtaken by ReformUK as the main party of the right.
Just 16% of voters want to increase the IHT threshold and only 10% of Conservatives.
63% of voters and 77% of Conservative voters want to increase the IHT threshold above £325k.
If you want to stop foreign ownership of wealth in the UK stop foreign takeovers of FTSE companies and restrict or heavily tax foreign ownership of London properties, don't raise IHT
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
The 2% growth in energy consumption per year for a 1000 years is untenable - it would lead to global energy consumption being 400 billion times what it is today. (1.02^1000 = 398,264,651)
Why wouldn't it be if we become a space faring civilisation? Though I'd imagine some kind of nuclear fusion would be required for that.
That's the consumption on Earth. If we become a spacefaring civilisation, that would be off-Earth
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
"our orbital speed"...our orbital speed around what? We orbit the sun, remember?
"Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction"...and why is this important? Remember how I keep telling PB you need three things to judge a datum: how big is it (absolute value), how big is it relevant to something else (relative value), and how big is too big (threshold). So you need to tell us how big is the friction now, how big would the friction be at 5% power, would it then cross some threshold for an effect, and how does this effect manifest?
Before ChatGPT takes over, have you ever considered a short career in listicles?
Left wing lunatics at the Bank of England brought her down?
Bonkers on stilts.
Are you actually familiar with the make up and modus operandi of the current MPC, or are you deriving your knowledge of the institution from the scenes featuring it in Mary Poppins?
“ The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. This kind of exponential growth leads to outlandish estimates for the amount of tidal energy that society will demand.”
“ I'm not sure the author realized this, but they're actually making a statement about how crazy exponential growth is. Not about the sustainability of tidal power. This becomes obvious once you look closer at what that 2% growth rate (as assumed in the post) implies.”
“ An important caveat: this article assumes that energy consumption will continue to increase exponentially to get the 1000 year timeline of draining the rotational energy of the Earth.”
But energy usage growth is way bigger than 2% a year. 2% would be a huge slowdown.
But compound growth over 1000 years is mega, and most of the meganess is in year 999.
According to OWID, total energy consumption per head has gone from 12978 kWh in 1965 to 21039 kWh in 2022. So not quite doubling in not quite 60 years. Law of seventy says that's a bit more than 1.15% per year.
(Total energy consumption per planet has increased faster, because population has increased faster, but that seems to be near to topping out.)
But let's run with 2%. That's doubling in 35 years, so about an eightfold increase per century, and that's a billionfold increase after 1000 years.
Putting it another way, that 21039 kWh is spread over 8760 hours per year. So about 3 kW per person. One way or another, that all ends up as heat. Increase that by a factor of a billion, and we have other problems than tidal locking.
I mean, there is an issue here, and there are ecological issues about what we do to tidal locations. And solar (either directly, or through wind) feels safer, it's a bit more obvious where that energy is coming from.
But yeah, mostly compound growth.
(Whilst one should always play the ball not the man, a essay based on a presentation delivered in 1990, sent to arXiv in 2019 and not published elsewhere doesn't scream "solid science" to me. Doesn't mean it's wrong, but it doesn't have the ring of confidence either.)
James Heale @JAHeale Latest Conservative leaflets for the Mid Beds by election - light on the blue, heavy on the green. New candidate Festus Akinbusoye billed as a “local Green Belt champion.”
On the contrary Liz Truss's various stances seem to be vindicated more with each passing day. For example, her firm stance on China both during and after her Premiership. Now we find that China have had a spy active within Westminster. Sunak and Cleverly's soft-soap approach looks crap.
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
The 2% growth in energy consumption per year for a 1000 years is untenable - it would lead to global energy consumption being 400 billion times what it is today. (1.02^1000 = 398,264,651)
How many times is our energy usage now compared to 300 years ago?
If energy used is renewable, there's no reason why such exponential increases can't be maintained. Exponential growth is how we have our modern living standards, not medieval living standards.
Until recently energy growth mirrored GDP growth at say 3% pa. That link has now decoupled as the big growth components of GDP (digital) are not as energy intensive as the base. Population growth is also slowing so a 400 billion fold increase in energy use is a little unlikely.
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
"our orbital speed"...our orbital speed around what? We orbit the sun, remember?
"Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction"...and why is this important? Remember how I keep telling PB you need three things to judge a datum: how big is it (absolute value), how big is it relevant to something else (relative value), and how big is too big (threshold). So you need to tell us how big is the friction now, how big would the friction be at 5% power, would it then cross some threshold for an effect, and how does this effect manifest?
Before ChatGPT takes over, have you ever considered a short career in listicles?
James Heale @JAHeale Latest Conservative leaflets for the Mid Beds by election - light on the blue, heavy on the green. New candidate Festus Akinbusoye billed as a “local Green Belt champion.”
It is a stupid leaflet because most only last the 10 seconds fro the letter box to the bin, so most will think they just got a leaflet from the Greens.
James Heale @JAHeale Latest Conservative leaflets for the Mid Beds by election - light on the blue, heavy on the green. New candidate Festus Akinbusoye billed as a “local Green Belt champion.”
More than anything else that could be an advert for any political party's messaging, so it's probably not even that helpful for them - they're banking a lot on remembering the first name of their candidate when it comes time to cast their vote.
Nice confusion between Green Belt and general green spaces though.
James Heale @JAHeale Latest Conservative leaflets for the Mid Beds by election - light on the blue, heavy on the green. New candidate Festus Akinbusoye billed as a “local Green Belt champion.”
It is a stupid leaflet because most only last the 10 seconds fro the letter box to the bin, so most will think they just got a leaflet from the Greens.
I've seen enough from that leaflet to know I hope he loses the election.
Just as an aside, I saw a pretty alarming bit of research on Friday calling for a global moratorium on tidal energy. It was quite compelling and essentially it outlined that tidal energy isn't renewable and using it at scale would be catastrophically bad. If we used tidal to power just 5% of global energy needs the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the moon within 50-60 years, that's 27.8 current days per rotation.
I've requested more information for the coming week but I took a cursory look at the maths on Friday and it definitely checks out.
Wtaf? Do you have a link?
(Consider me very dubious.)
PS The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, of course, so what is being referred to here?
Likewise. Makes no sense on first glance.
Yes it does, there is a net energy transfer already which is causing a very tiny slowdown in our orbital speed and that's just from natural tidal forces that create friction. Man made friction would be a few orders of magnitude higher than natural tidal friction so the net energy transfer from the moon's orbit gets a lot higher.
The 2% growth in energy consumption per year for a 1000 years is untenable - it would lead to global energy consumption being 400 billion times what it is today. (1.02^1000 = 398,264,651)
Why wouldn't it be if we become a space faring civilisation? Though I'd imagine some kind of nuclear fusion would be required for that.
If we became a space-faring nation? Faring where?
If interstellar, planet Earth would probably become some huge nature reserve - the energy consumption would be elsewhere.
In 1820 global energy consumption was 6,264 TWh Roughly 2 centuries later it was 178,899 TWh
So that's a 2755% increase in that time.
If power is generated renewably, why shouldn't such growth continue at a comparable rate? That's part of the purpose of renewable energy, we can use it renewably and continue to use it if it is renewable.
1. World population has grown eight-fold in that time, it's not going to multiply by 8 every 200 years for the next 1000.
2. Energy consumption per capita is 350% over 200 year, which implies a growth rate per capita of 0.6% pa.
It's the sort of thing you'd only attempt if you were miles ahead, and not even then now, given what happened when May tried to take advantage of a big lead to propose something difficult for older voters.
And if I were advising him politically I'd tell him not to bother as well - when you're at a low ebb you don't get credit for tough decisions, you just lose some more supporters, and he can ill afford to lose any more of the mainstream pensioner vote which, unlike you, will pillory such a move.
It probably wouldn't be believed, but massive unfunded tax cuts might be his only option to try to draw in support.
James Heale @JAHeale Latest Conservative leaflets for the Mid Beds by election - light on the blue, heavy on the green. New candidate Festus Akinbusoye billed as a “local Green Belt champion.”
More than anything else that could be an advert for any political party's messaging, so it's probably not even that helpful for them - they're banking a lot on remembering the first name of their candidate when it comes time to cast their vote.
Nice confusion between Green Belt and general green spaces though.
Unfortunately, when I read Festus, I think 'fester' and so am instantly reminded of this government.
On the contrary Liz Truss's various stances seem to be vindicated more with each passing day. For example, her firm stance on China both during and after her Premiership. Now we find that China have had a spy active within Westminster. Sunak and Cleverly's soft-soap approach looks crap.
You don't think vindication could include remaining in post for more than seven weeks when everyone, apart from yourself it seems, realised this uniquely disastrous prime minister couldn't carry on. Even she realised it. I will give her that.
The phrasing seems to suggest the global left and rise in authoritarian regimes are linked, which I don't think they are. Plenty of leftist authoritarian regimes of course, but one of the great things about being alive today is seeing all the other authoritarian regimes that don't give a sh*t about ideological posturing, and just go all in on the evil levels of control, with some confused mishmash of nationalism, anti-western imperialism, and utter craziness.
I am actually interested to see why she puts the time needed to be ten years maximum, and her suggestions, to see if they are a little more throught through than simple cliches. She has had a year to think about it.
James Heale @JAHeale Latest Conservative leaflets for the Mid Beds by election - light on the blue, heavy on the green. New candidate Festus Akinbusoye billed as a “local Green Belt champion.”
It is a stupid leaflet because most only last the 10 seconds fro the letter box to the bin, so most will think they just got a leaflet from the Greens.
I've seen enough from that leaflet to know I hope he loses the election.
Parliament needs less not more NIMBY scum.
If he said he supported building all over the greenbelt like you, not only would the NIMBY LDs win the by election by a landslide, he might even come 3rd behind Labour
James Heale @JAHeale Latest Conservative leaflets for the Mid Beds by election - light on the blue, heavy on the green. New candidate Festus Akinbusoye billed as a “local Green Belt champion.”
It is a stupid leaflet because most only last the 10 seconds fro the letter box to the bin, so most will think they just got a leaflet from the Greens.
I've seen enough from that leaflet to know I hope he loses the election.
James Heale @JAHeale Latest Conservative leaflets for the Mid Beds by election - light on the blue, heavy on the green. New candidate Festus Akinbusoye billed as a “local Green Belt champion.”
It is a stupid leaflet because most only last the 10 seconds fro the letter box to the bin, so most will think they just got a leaflet from the Greens.
I like the argument that "the maths checks out". Let's hope it does. But that's not the point. What is critical is the initial assumptions used to set up the problem - do they check out? This is not my field but I hae me doots. Once again we miss the likes of David MacKay
As far as energy growth goes, I've always thought that a Dyson sphere gives us a nice target to aim for, for the next hundred years or so. (After that, we would have to start using more than one star.) Not that we can get there, in that amount of time, but having such a target gets us moving in the right direction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
The phrasing seems to suggest the global left and rise in authoritarian regimes are linked, which I don't think they are. Plenty of leftist authoritarian regimes of course, but one of the great things about being alive today is seeing all the other authoritarian regimes that don't give a sh*t about ideological posturing, and just go all in on the evil levels of control, with some confused mishmash of nationalism, anti-western imperialism, and utter craziness.
I am actually interested to see why she puts the time needed to be ten years maximum, and her suggestions, to see if they are a little more throught through than simple cliches. She has had a year to think about it.
Yeah, it used to be 'eleven years to save the west'.
What would be the effect of removing national insurance on employment income and putting it on non-employment income ?
I suppose you could do it on a gradual basis by decreasing the first and increasing the second by 1% a year until they were level.
Obviously the rentiers and oldies would hate it but part of the reason for introducing it would be to transfer wealth to workers and the young.
Absolutely not. The whole reason national insurance was created in the first place was so workers would contribute for insurance and benefits if unemployed and that expanded to contributions to fund state pensions and also some healthcare.
National insurance should be hypothecated and return to those aims. The inheritance tax threshold should be increased to £2 million instead so older people can ultimately pass on more of their assets to their children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces
Why shouldn't non-workers contribute to those things ?
And given that only about 5% of estates pay inheritance tax your idea would be a tax cut on unearned income for the very rich.
Is this really your view as to what the Conservative party should be for ?
They did, they paid in national insurance when they were working. Now most estates in the south especially are above the IHT threshold. Absolutely the Conservative party should be about preserving wealth and inheritance in the family, that is what Toryism has always been about, even before free market liberals joined it to keep out Labour
"preserving wealth and inheritance in the family" = not paying their fair share of taxes, especially on massive capital gains orchestrated by the "Conservative" Party. Which used to be one of hard work and self-respect. Now, no longer.
They already paid tax on that estate and income and assets their working life.
The Tory party has always been a party which has supported inherited wealth, indeed even Thatcher would arguably have been a Gladstone free market Liberal rather than a Tory in the 19th century. Today's Conservative Party does indeed support hard work and the free market on the whole (certainly compared to Labour) but those are add ons from free market liberals, inheritance is more a cornerstone of Toryism
THEY DID NOT PAY TAX ON THAT INCOME FROM MASSIVE CAPITAL GAINS.
Look at how estates are de facto immune from CGT.
CGT allowance when you are alive - 6k, 3K next year.
Dead, effectively 500k for many.
They paid council tax on it, stamp duty when they bought it and income tax on the income which bought it and paid for the mortgage
Interesting you are arguing they paid income tax on the income which bought it, when you want 2 million handed down tax free to you to buy a property
The present allowances are more than generous and I do not support increasing them, just as I do not support the triple lock
Forget allowances, inheritance tax should be abolished altogether.
Inheritance should just be liable to income tax on the entire inheritance instead. Which should include National Insurance as should all incomes, not just salaried ones.
I have no issue of applying income tax to estates though I doubt any politician is brave enough to propose it
Estates are wealth and assets not income, unless let out and you get rent from them
I struggle with your justification for your position. Consider the following. My sister in law and husband are not high earners but bought a flat many decades ago in SW London to live in, upgraded to a terraced house and since now down sized to a flat again and will soon move out of SW London. The capital gains they have made on their homes exceed any income they have made in their entire lives and they will live on that for the rest of their lives and not a penny of tax has been paid on it.
Well good for them, they invested wisely in a sensible asset. That is why I am a Tory and you are a Liberal.
Though they will of course have paid increased council tax on it
No they didn't . They bought a house to live in. They didn't speculate. They were lucky as to where they bought, yet paid not a penny of tax on huge gains, whereas people working or investing pay tax on their gains/profits/earnings.
And what the hell had Council tax got to do with it. We all pay that. It isn't a tax on gains or earnings it is a payment for services. That is a complete red herring.
Council tax thresholds are based on the value of the property
And the relevance of that is? It is still payment of services. In their case because of the size of the property and the borough they are in they pay very little. You seem to have shot your own argument down there particularly as property prices have boomed in SW London in the last 40 years but council tax valuations are very old. The value of a low band house there will buy you a high band house elsewhere. So your point is wrong in so many ways in this instance as they pay less council tax than people in cheaper houses elsewhere.
Well that is a case for re valuing council tax thresholds not for increasing IHT
Oh for goodness sake it wouldn't make any difference if they were revalued. If your house is revalued to a billion pounds but all other houses in the borough are 10 billion pounds you will still be on the lowest band. If you moved out elsewhere you would be on the highest band.
So the point you were making that they paid more because council tax is based on value is nonesense if you bought a cheap house and didn't move and house prices rocketed in your area. You would actually be paying the minimum so your point is completely wrong and the opposite happens.
James Heale @JAHeale Latest Conservative leaflets for the Mid Beds by election - light on the blue, heavy on the green. New candidate Festus Akinbusoye billed as a “local Green Belt champion.”
It is a stupid leaflet because most only last the 10 seconds fro the letter box to the bin, so most will think they just got a leaflet from the Greens.
I've seen enough from that leaflet to know I hope he loses the election.
Parliament needs less not more NIMBY scum.
If the Labour and LD candidates are less NIMBY I will eat my hat, leaving me only three to wear. I would like to see a NIMBY off debate, where each competes to be the most extravagantly in favour of 'protecting green spaces'.
I see from the wiki page that the 'True and Fair' Party have selected a real victor as their candidate, some dude named Alan Victor. I didn't know what the party was, but helpfully the hyperlink for the party took me straight to Gina Miller's wik, page.
On the contrary Liz Truss's various stances seem to be vindicated more with each passing day. For example, her firm stance on China both during and after her Premiership. Now we find that China have had a spy active within Westminster. Sunak and Cleverly's soft-soap approach looks crap.
You don't think vindication could include remaining in post for more than seven weeks when everyone, apart from yourself it seems, realised this uniquely disastrous prime minister couldn't carry on. Even she realised it. I will give her that.
No, because that wouldn't fit the definition of vindication.
It's the sort of thing you'd only attempt if you were miles ahead, and not even then now, given what happened when May tried to take advantage of a big lead to propose something difficult for older voters.
And if I were advising him politically I'd tell him not to bother as well - when you're at a low ebb you don't get credit for tough decisions, you just lose some more supporters, and he can ill afford to lose any more of the mainstream pensioner vote which, unlike you, will pillory such a move.
It probably wouldn't be believed, but massive unfunded tax cuts might be his only option to try to draw in support.
Alternatively, it's revealing something important and interesting about Sunak's Sycology.
I've mused before on the "You Can't Kill A Condemned Man" theory of life and politics. Nixing the triple lock at some point is the right thing to do (see earlier post on compound growth) but will always be an unpopular thing to do.
Starmer-Reeves might get away with it, if their "the books are even worse than we thought" face is good. But Sunak and Hunt can do it and get a reward in the history books. The point is for them to recognise that they have minimal public support, so it won't cost them anything they actually posess.
If they can do the right thing on the Green Belt and dumping Braverman and her pals, so much the better. But it depends on them acknowledging that they are set to lose in 2024. Maybe, just maybe, they have read the writing on the wall.
I like the argument that "the maths checks out". Let's hope it does. But that's not the point. What is critical is the initial assumptions used to set up the problem - do they check out? This is not my field but I hae me doots. Once again we miss the likes of David MacKay
I'm looking at the paper now. Yes, you are right about the assumptions.
James Heale @JAHeale Latest Conservative leaflets for the Mid Beds by election - light on the blue, heavy on the green. New candidate Festus Akinbusoye billed as a “local Green Belt champion.”
It is a stupid leaflet because most only last the 10 seconds fro the letter box to the bin, so most will think they just got a leaflet from the Greens.
I've seen enough from that leaflet to know I hope he loses the election.
Parliament needs less not more NIMBY scum.
I can remember when nearly all politicians used to support preserving the Green Belt. It wasn't that long ago.
James Heale @JAHeale Latest Conservative leaflets for the Mid Beds by election - light on the blue, heavy on the green. New candidate Festus Akinbusoye billed as a “local Green Belt champion.”
It is a stupid leaflet because most only last the 10 seconds fro the letter box to the bin, so most will think they just got a leaflet from the Greens.
I've seen enough from that leaflet to know I hope he loses the election.
Parliament needs less not more NIMBY scum.
Is he proposing tidal energy though?
I hope he proposes to implement it in Mid Beds, although with global warming that might eventually be possible
I like the argument that "the maths checks out". Let's hope it does. But that's not the point. What is critical is the initial assumptions used to set up the problem - do they check out? This is not my field but I hae me doots. Once again we miss the likes of David MacKay
I'm looking at the paper now. Yes, you are right about the assumptions.
As the earth became tidally locked to the moon the tides would cease surely? Presumably long before that tidal power would become ineffective.
Might be fair to conclude though that tidal is not strictly a 'renewable'.
James Heale @JAHeale Latest Conservative leaflets for the Mid Beds by election - light on the blue, heavy on the green. New candidate Festus Akinbusoye billed as a “local Green Belt champion.”
It is a stupid leaflet because most only last the 10 seconds fro the letter box to the bin, so most will think they just got a leaflet from the Greens.
I've seen enough from that leaflet to know I hope he loses the election.
Parliament needs less not more NIMBY scum.
I can remember when nearly all politicians used to support preserving the Green Belt. It wasn't that long ago.
Preserving the Green Belt is not really the problem, in my opinion. Or at least not as big a problem in theory as it is in practice.
For one, there are disadvantages to restricting metropolitan growth, and it'd at least be nice if that was acknowledged a little even if it was still argued it was not worth doing, and the advantages of the Green Belt were felt to be stronger.
For another, just because an area is Green Belt doesn't mean that there are not plenty of areas within it which would be suitable for development without taking away some lovely green fields, since the areas are not uniformly beauteous. Having tighter restrictions than average in such an area would be probably be ok, were it not treated as a presumption against anything occuring - countless examples exist which would enhance an area but 'oh no, this is Green Belt'.
Additionally, the real problem as I see it is that local councillors, in order to win votes, treat all areas as if they were Green Belt in terms of opposing things happening. They are supposed to weigh the planning balance, and often don't. Sure, things turned down like that will get overturned on appeal, but that just means people pander in order to win votes, cost their residents a lot of money when costs are awarded to developers, and don't even deliver for their residents!
Yes, there are some counter examples, but that is very clearly the prevailing situation.
I like the argument that "the maths checks out". Let's hope it does. But that's not the point. What is critical is the initial assumptions used to set up the problem - do they check out? This is not my field but I hae me doots. Once again we miss the likes of David MacKay
The Moon is already tidally locked to Earth. For the Earth to be also tidally locked to the Moon (ie rotate every month) the barycentre of the Earth/Moon system would have to lie outside the Earth itself. It doesn't. The Moon isn't massive enough.
Matt Chorley @MattChorley · 1h Wow. The Tory parliamentary researcher arrested on suspicion of spying for China is Chris Cash, the director the China Research Group co-founded by the security minister, Tom Tugendhat.
On the contrary Liz Truss's various stances seem to be vindicated more with each passing day. For example, her firm stance on China both during and after her Premiership. Now we find that China have had a spy active within Westminster. Sunak and Cleverly's soft-soap approach looks crap.
You don't think vindication could include remaining in post for more than seven weeks when everyone, apart from yourself it seems, realised this uniquely disastrous prime minister couldn't carry on. Even she realised it. I will give her that.
No, because that wouldn't fit the definition of vindication.
It's the sort of thing you'd only attempt if you were miles ahead, and not even then now, given what happened when May tried to take advantage of a big lead to propose something difficult for older voters.
And if I were advising him politically I'd tell him not to bother as well - when you're at a low ebb you don't get credit for tough decisions, you just lose some more supporters, and he can ill afford to lose any more of the mainstream pensioner vote which, unlike you, will pillory such a move.
It probably wouldn't be believed, but massive unfunded tax cuts might be his only option to try to draw in support.
Alternatively, it's revealing something important and interesting about Sunak's Sycology.
I've mused before on the "You Can't Kill A Condemned Man" theory of life and politics. Nixing the triple lock at some point is the right thing to do (see earlier post on compound growth) but will always be an unpopular thing to do.
Starmer-Reeves might get away with it, if their "the books are even worse than we thought" face is good. But Sunak and Hunt can do it and get a reward in the history books. The point is for them to recognise that they have minimal public support, so it won't cost them anything they actually posess.
If they can do the right thing on the Green Belt and dumping Braverman and her pals, so much the better. But it depends on them acknowledging that they are set to lose in 2024. Maybe, just maybe, they have read the writing on the wall.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I don't think we have any senior politicians willing to take a hard decision in the fag end of their time in power for the good of the country. I think they'd rather leave as big a mess as possible so 'the other lot' have to deal with it.
After all, whilst the incoming government will always blame the outgoing one (for a period of around 10-14 years no less), if the Tories do not lose too badly they will have hope of winning the election after next, and so leaivng some landmines in place will appeal to anyone still holding out hope for a return to power in their political lifetime.
Left wing lunatics at the Bank of England brought her down?
Bonkers on stilts.
Are you actually familiar with the make up and modus operandi of the current MPC, or are you deriving your knowledge of the institution from the scenes featuring it in Mary Poppins?
You don't appear to be familiar with the film Mary Poppins.
James Heale @JAHeale Latest Conservative leaflets for the Mid Beds by election - light on the blue, heavy on the green. New candidate Festus Akinbusoye billed as a “local Green Belt champion.”
It is a stupid leaflet because most only last the 10 seconds fro the letter box to the bin, so most will think they just got a leaflet from the Greens.
I've seen enough from that leaflet to know I hope he loses the election.
Parliament needs less not more NIMBY scum.
I can remember when nearly all politicians used to support preserving the Green Belt. It wasn't that long ago.
If Starmer gets a UK wide Labour majority in the Commons, even a narrow one and expands building on the green belt as he suggested he would do then we could see an anti Labour alliance from the Conservatives and LDs for the first time since the Cameron-Clegg coalition to oppose it.
Most southern Tory MPs and virtually all LD MPs are NIMBYs when it comes to building on the greenbelt and if polls suggest most redwall and Northern, Midlands and Welsh marginal seats go back to Labour the next Conservative parliamentary party will be more southern than it is now. While many bluewall Tory seats which do go will go LD not Labour
I know FoxNews is in a bind because their audience adores Trump and so they must do anything, even lie, to please them (and we know this because it was proven in discovery for the Dominion trial, which forced them to settle for the better part of a billion dollars), but it must be very humiliating that Trump is constantly mocking and insulting the corporation and they have to sit there and simp for him nonetheless. (I know they are not the main subjects of these posts, but they and Rupert are part of it).
It is telling that Trump appears to confuse energy, which he certainly has, with mental acuity.
Comments
[Puts "Gipsy Danger" on loop for dynamic typing]
OK, off the top of my head I think there's something wrong there as follows:
Point 1: we don't orbit the Moon.
The Moon orbits us. We orbit the Sun. I know you know that, but given the sentence "...the resulting slowdown in our orbital speed would mean our orbit becomes tidally locked to the Moon within 50-60 years..." it needs stating, because
- i) why would the Earth's orbital speed around the Sun slow down at all, and
- ii) I'm not sure what the phrase "our orbit becomes tidally locked to the Moon" means. Do you mean the Moon orbits Earth geosynchronously, so only one hemisphere sees it?
Point 2: from the Moon's point of view we are a black box.Whether its gravitational pull results in Earth water sloshing up and down as tides, or sloshing up and down powering generators, is irrelevant to the Moon. The Moon doesn't know what's going on on the surface of Earth (provided the mass of the Earth remains constant?)
Point 3: how many tidal generators etc is 5%?
Is there even a chance we can achieve this? Is this a conceivably real concern? It's just that I'm pretty sure we haven't reached the "planetary engineering" stage of the Kardashev scale yet.
The total number of UK deaths that resulted in an IHT charge has increased. In the tax year 2020 to 2021, there were 27,000 taxpaying IHT estates, an increase of 4,000 (17%) since the previous tax year, 2019 to 2020.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/inheritance-tax-statistics-commentary/inheritance-tax-statistics-commentary#:~:text=1.-,Key points,tax year 2019 to 2020.
You are obsessional about a fringe issue which affects a tiny proportion of the population.
An obsession which is damaging not only to the country as a whole but to the Conservative party in particular.
I’d be more worried about the motives of the author than slowing down the Earth.
sport tourists - Anfield, Wembley , old Trafford , Wimbledon , St Andrews, Cheltenham (irish) , motorbikes (isle of man - yes i know)
Either way though, the modern Conservative Party traces its history back to either Disraeli in 1912 or Peel in 1834, not Rees Mogg in the 1820s.
There has been no continuity of purity in that time, and if there had been, the party would have died ages ago. The party has thrived by adapting to the times in the principles Peel and Disraeli etc set out, being updated for then-modern times.
Otherwise even the average property in London and the SE is now above the IHT threshold of £325k
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37383283
“ The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. This kind of exponential growth leads to outlandish estimates for the amount of tidal energy that society will demand.”
“ I'm not sure the author realized this, but they're actually making a statement about how crazy exponential growth is. Not about the sustainability of tidal power. This becomes obvious once you look closer at what that 2% growth rate (as assumed in the post) implies.”
“ An important caveat: this article assumes that energy consumption will continue to increase exponentially to get the 1000 year timeline of draining the rotational energy of the Earth.”
In it, he supports the idea of people who create wealth passing it on to their loved ones tax free. There is a bond. Emotionally it feels right. The problem is that it then can get passed down through generations, unknown to the original donor, creating unfair inequalities.
His solution is that only the first inheritance eg to children or grandchildren, is tax free. Subsequent legacies by the recipients of the original inheritance have any original inheritance taxed at 100%.
And what the hell had Council tax got to do with it. We all pay that. It isn't a tax on gains or earnings it is a payment for services. That is a complete red herring.
This phenomenon is observable, hence the introduction of the leap second once we stayed measuring time using atomic clocks rather than solar time.
Truss might have been a Peelite, however the disaster of her premiership means the Conservative Party is unlikely to return to a largely pure free market liberal agenda anytime soon
Why would the earth rotate around the sun in the same time as it takes the moon to rotate around the earth?
That seems like a very dramatic change, and the numbers intuitively don't feel right.
Lourdes isn't even B list, it's D, only a few nutters care
But anyroad your criterion is deeply eccentric. A "place that is entirely known for just one world class site but only that one"
Er, OK
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22h
Biteback Publishing has acquired Ten Years to Save the West by former Prime Minister @trussliz.
Not a remote reflection of current values.
It was a fundamental flaw when they first came in
Do you really think that your belief that workers should pay higher taxes than those who receive the same income but do not work is one which does this country any good ?
Wealth is not created by inheriting it is created by working.
And if we don't create as much wealth as we consume then all that inheritance you are so obsessed with will end up in fewer and fewer hands and increasingly those hands will be foreign ones.
Well it doesn't matter because until the Conservatives purge themselves of beliefs like yours they will not be winning any more elections.
He wants to prosper off the work of others.
Anyone else can go swivel.
If energy used is renewable, there's no reason why such exponential increases can't be maintained. Exponential growth is how we have our modern living standards, not medieval living standards.
If interstellar, planet Earth would probably become some huge nature reserve - the energy consumption would be elsewhere.
https://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-12499369/Liz-Truss-reveal-inside-story-49-day-premiership-new-book-including-meeting-Queen-just-hours-monarch-died.html
https://news.sky.com/story/wednesdays-national-newspaper-front-pages-12427754?postid=6415151#liveblog-body
I should really unsubscribe from The Telegraph podcasts...
There are details, such as whether to correct for inflation etc, that need to be worked out. But the principle is clear.
Bonkers on stilts.
According to this source: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
In 1820 global energy consumption was 6,264 TWh
Roughly 2 centuries later it was 178,899 TWh
So that's a 2755% increase in that time.
If power is generated renewably, why shouldn't such growth continue at a comparable rate? That's part of the purpose of renewable energy, we can use it renewably and continue to use it if it is renewable.
Hell about to freeze over as Sunak on the brink of a terrible defeat decides to stick one to his main reliable postal voting client vote?
John Stevens
@johnestevens
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20m
Triple lock on state pensions under threat as Rishi Sunak won’t say if it will be in Tory election manifesto
https://twitter.com/johnestevens/status/1700988599909666908
https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/salc-students/2022/09/05/30-mancunian-slang-terms-you-should-know/
Should properly be accompanied by a one finger salute spun energetically enough to counteract any rotational slowing due to tidal energy consumption.
Just 16% of voters want to increase the IHT threshold and only 10% of Conservatives.
63% of voters and 77% of Conservative voters want to increase the IHT threshold above £325k.
48% of voters even want to abolish IHT altogether, a higher number than even voted Conservative in 2019 let alone are still Tory now. 60% of Conservative voters also want to abolish IHT
https://www.kingsleynapley.co.uk/our-news/press-releases/yougov-poll-shows-majority-support-raising-iht-threshold-above-325k-despite-eyewatering-public-finance-decisions-ahead
If you want to stop foreign ownership of wealth in the UK stop foreign takeovers of FTSE companies and restrict or heavily tax foreign ownership of London properties, don't raise IHT
According to OWID, total energy consumption per head has gone from 12978 kWh in 1965 to 21039 kWh in 2022. So not quite doubling in not quite 60 years. Law of seventy says that's a bit more than 1.15% per year.
(Total energy consumption per planet has increased faster, because population has increased faster, but that seems to be near to topping out.)
But let's run with 2%. That's doubling in 35 years, so about an eightfold increase per century, and that's a billionfold increase after 1000 years.
Putting it another way, that 21039 kWh is spread over 8760 hours per year. So about 3 kW per person. One way or another, that all ends up as heat. Increase that by a factor of a billion, and we have other problems than tidal locking.
I mean, there is an issue here, and there are ecological issues about what we do to tidal locations. And solar (either directly, or through wind) feels safer, it's a bit more obvious where that energy is coming from.
But yeah, mostly compound growth.
(Whilst one should always play the ball not the man, a essay based on a presentation delivered in 1990, sent to arXiv in 2019 and not published elsewhere doesn't scream "solid science" to me. Doesn't mean it's wrong, but it doesn't have the ring of confidence either.)
James Heale
@JAHeale
Latest Conservative leaflets for the Mid Beds by election - light on the blue, heavy on the green. New candidate Festus Akinbusoye billed as a “local Green Belt champion.”
https://twitter.com/JAHeale/status/1700863496919912715
That really can't be his name surely?
Nice confusion between Green Belt and general green spaces though.
Parliament needs less not more NIMBY scum.
2. Energy consumption per capita is 350% over 200 year, which implies a growth rate per capita of 0.6% pa.
It's the sort of thing you'd only attempt if you were miles ahead, and not even then now, given what happened when May tried to take advantage of a big lead to propose something difficult for older voters.
And if I were advising him politically I'd tell him not to bother as well - when you're at a low ebb you don't get credit for tough decisions, you just lose some more supporters, and he can ill afford to lose any more of the mainstream pensioner vote which, unlike you, will pillory such a move.
It probably wouldn't be believed, but massive unfunded tax cuts might be his only option to try to draw in support.
I am actually interested to see why she puts the time needed to be ten years maximum, and her suggestions, to see if they are a little more throught through than simple cliches. She has had a year to think about it.
BBC News - Mid Bedfordshire: Tory candidate Festus Akinbusoye says constituents want 'visible MP'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-65972004
Once again we miss the likes of David MacKay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
So the point you were making that they paid more because council tax is based on value is nonesense if you bought a cheap house and didn't move and house prices rocketed in your area. You would actually be paying the minimum so your point is completely wrong and the opposite happens.
I see from the wiki page that the 'True and Fair' Party have selected a real victor as their candidate, some dude named Alan Victor. I didn't know what the party was, but helpfully the hyperlink for the party took me straight to Gina Miller's wik, page.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/vindication
I've mused before on the "You Can't Kill A Condemned Man" theory of life and politics. Nixing the triple lock at some point is the right thing to do (see earlier post on compound growth) but will always be an unpopular thing to do.
Starmer-Reeves might get away with it, if their "the books are even worse than we thought" face is good. But Sunak and Hunt can do it and get a reward in the history books. The point is for them to recognise that they have minimal public support, so it won't cost them anything they actually posess.
If they can do the right thing on the Green Belt and dumping Braverman and her pals, so much the better. But it depends on them acknowledging that they are set to lose in 2024. Maybe, just maybe, they have read the writing on the wall.
Might be fair to conclude though that tidal is not strictly a 'renewable'.
For one, there are disadvantages to restricting metropolitan growth, and it'd at least be nice if that was acknowledged a little even if it was still argued it was not worth doing, and the advantages of the Green Belt were felt to be stronger.
For another, just because an area is Green Belt doesn't mean that there are not plenty of areas within it which would be suitable for development without taking away some lovely green fields, since the areas are not uniformly beauteous. Having tighter restrictions than average in such an area would be probably be ok, were it not treated as a presumption against anything occuring - countless examples exist which would enhance an area but 'oh no, this is Green Belt'.
Additionally, the real problem as I see it is that local councillors, in order to win votes, treat all areas as if they were Green Belt in terms of opposing things happening. They are supposed to weigh the planning balance, and often don't. Sure, things turned down like that will get overturned on appeal, but that just means people pander in order to win votes, cost their residents a lot of money when costs are awarded to developers, and don't even deliver for their residents!
Yes, there are some counter examples, but that is very clearly the prevailing situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking
Matt Chorley
@MattChorley
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1h
Wow. The Tory parliamentary researcher arrested on suspicion of spying for China is Chris Cash, the director the China Research Group co-founded by the security minister, Tom Tugendhat.
Why though?
The army's victory is being seen as (a) vindication of their tactics.
He claimed the vote was a vindication of his policies.
Where is Liz Truss' victory? As for people voting for her this is her trajectory:
After all, whilst the incoming government will always blame the outgoing one (for a period of around 10-14 years no less), if the Tories do not lose too badly they will have hope of winning the election after next, and so leaivng some landmines in place will appeal to anyone still holding out hope for a return to power in their political lifetime.
Most southern Tory MPs and virtually all LD MPs are NIMBYs when it comes to building on the greenbelt and if polls suggest most redwall and Northern, Midlands and Welsh marginal seats go back to Labour the next Conservative parliamentary party will be more southern than it is now. While many bluewall Tory seats which do go will go LD not Labour
Liz Truss
@trussliz
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12h
My book Ten Years To Save The West will be published in 2024 by @BitebackPub in the UK and @Regnery in the U.S.
Five Leaves Bookshop
@FiveLeavesBooks
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7h
Is it possible for a bookshop to order fewer than none?
(I know they are not the main subjects of these posts, but they and Rupert are part of it).
It is telling that Trump appears to confuse energy, which he certainly has, with mental acuity.