Did this story get discussed yesterday? I predict there will be no meaningful punishment. But it is nonetheless impressive the way that labour have taken the issue up. The right are starting to make gains in the 'war on woke'; the people that carry out these acts are helping the opposition, but the radical mindset is such that they will keep going.
It's criminal damage. So there could be a prosecution. It may possibly also amount to burglary. Just because you have general permission to enter a property does not give you permission to enter to steal or damage. The college could also take civil action for the value of the painting and the repair costs (assuming it can be repaired).
And if the person who did it and the one filming it are students of the college, presumably the college can also take disciplinary action.
The question is: a. does the law get enforced b. Is there any punishment. Or is it a case that reasons are found not to pursue either of the above in any meaningful way - which would be percieved as evidence of favouritism from the authorities towards progressive causes. That is why it is interesting to hear labour get on to this issue.
Come to think of it, it would be interesting to compare the responses to
1) people damaging ULEZ cameras 2) people doing the above protest
For the record both are arseholes, whose punishment should be determined by the level of damage and injury/risk of injury to others.
Agreed - I would argue however that spraying paint on an ulez CCTV camera is less damaging than what happened in the example above (destruction of a work of art) - the latter did result in a prosecution last year.
One thing that is positive is that left wing vandals are increasingly being put in the same category as right wing vandals, which I would say is evidence that people are tiring of 'woke'.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
Better off pensioners should be paying more tax.
Be grateful no-one will come for arrears on the extra they should have been paying for years.
Are you deranged, pensioners pay the same taxes as everyone else and majority of them would love to be paying tax as it would mean they had more money
Pensioners don't pay the same taxes. Ni being the case in point.
You halfwit most people don't pay CGT, or various other taxes as they are NOT eligible for them. What do you nutters on here not understand about fact that people on stste pension are no longer eligible for NI. Do people on benefits pay NI , do children pay NI, FFS how stupid can people be.
Not quite correct. People of State pension age or more don't pay NI. So if you carry on working, perhaps deferring the Lloyd George for another couple of years or so, then you still dont pay NI.
That is because you are NOT eligible to pay it, NI does not apply after you are on state pension, regardless. You don't pay IHT till your dead, what bit of that is hard to understand and why not whinge about that as well.
NI is just a form of income tax though, as recognised by HMRC in international tax treaties, so the fact you're not eligible to pay for it is a political choice not a law of nature.
Merge NI into Income Tax, align the bands appropriately, and that gets fixed and everyone can pay the same rate of tax. What's wrong with that?
Why should someone on a defined benefit public sector pension not be paying NI while someone working for a living does?
Every tax is a political choice , nothing about being born means you should have your belongings taken off you by strangers. What bit of the fact they have paid their NI as per the tax rules. Again easy to pick out one thing, why should people get child benefit free school meals, childcare , tax credits etc when millions are not eligible. Explain that one.
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
I'd like to challenge the idea that everyone going to University in the 60s and 70s got full student grant. The grants were means tested so if your parents were affluent you just got the minium grant and your parents had to support you.
So you still got a grant though?
Rather than no grant and tens of thousands of pounds of "debt" leading to an effectively permanent 9% tax rise for many people?
40 years ago 10% went to university, 90% never went to university, never got a degree or got a grant. Now nearly 40% go to university and get a degree so the grants bill would be vastly higher
Observer reporting on problems with the electric grid and connections and new energy infrastructure.
Interesting stuff.
49GW worth of proposed new supply was put in as an application to national grid in January alone.
They are swamped with so many applications they can't cope.
Meanwhile housing developments on hold because they can't get a connection.
What a bloody mess this country is in after 14 years of the clown show.
This is one of the consequences of the "build, build, build" mantra from some. It's not just a question of building houses or flats or whatever - it's the whole infrastructure which supports them. This is why those who hate planning just don't get it - it all has to be thought through and organised before a single spade is put in the ground.
Interesting clip from the London protest yesterday.
Amidst the crowd of demonstrators a man has the temerity to hold up a sign saying Hamas are terrorists. Soon enough a courageous figure in the crowd decides to tear the poster down and a small scuffle emerges. Thankfully the police are soon on hand to remove the troublemaker and make sure he is quickly on his way to the police station for a breach of the peace.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
Better off pensioners should be paying more tax.
Be grateful no-one will come for arrears on the extra they should have been paying for years.
Are you deranged, pensioners pay the same taxes as everyone else and majority of them would love to be paying tax as it would mean they had more money
Pensioners don't pay the same taxes. Ni being the case in point.
You halfwit most people don't pay CGT, or various other taxes as they are NOT eligible for them. What do you nutters on here not understand about fact that people on stste pension are no longer eligible for NI. Do people on benefits pay NI , do children pay NI, FFS how stupid can people be.
Not quite correct. People of State pension age or more don't pay NI. So if you carry on working, perhaps deferring the Lloyd George for another couple of years or so, then you still dont pay NI.
That is because you are NOT eligible to pay it, NI does not apply after you are on state pension, regardless. You don't pay IHT till your dead, what bit of that is hard to understand and why not whinge about that as well.
NI is just a form of income tax though, as recognised by HMRC in international tax treaties, so the fact you're not eligible to pay for it is a political choice not a law of nature.
Merge NI into Income Tax, align the bands appropriately, and that gets fixed and everyone can pay the same rate of tax. What's wrong with that?
Why should someone on a defined benefit public sector pension not be paying NI while someone working for a living does?
Every tax is a political choice , nothing about being born means you should have your belongings taken off you by strangers. What bit of the fact they have paid their NI as per the tax rules. Again easy to pick out one thing, why should people get child benefit free school meals, childcare , tax credits etc when millions are not eligible. Explain that one.
Because those are benefits based upon need of the child, some of which are the children of pensioners, what part of that are you struggling to comprehend?
You seem to have developed a rather bizarre hatred of children lately, when actually the amount of benefits given to children is miniscule within the overall welfare budget and those are all means-tested unlike the pension so I'm struggling to see what point you think you are making with that analogy. It rather works against you, not in your favour.
Taxing some people less than others, who have the same earnings, is a bad and immoral choice. It is indefensible.
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
My wife and I are both pensioners, we have two incomes both from contributory pensions and we are not yet old enough to have a state pension (thanks to the qualifying date for this being raised.)
We both pay a marginal rate of 20% on our incomes. Income tax, nothing else. We were paid to go to university, so no student loans ever. We have no housing costs, having long ago paid off our mortgage (having been fortunate to start out on the housing ladder when properties were cheap, we never had a mortgage of more than £50k.) We have no family to raise. So our incomes are more than enough to live on, indeed our savings our going up and we spend freely.
Now compare that to my son and his wife, in their early thirties, whose gross income is about the same as ours. They both pay 20% income tax, 10% NI currently, 9% student loan repayments (probably lasting 30 years) and pension contributions of 5% and 6% respectively. So they face a marginal rate of 44%-45% deductions from their income. Whats left goes on a £200k mortgage for a very modest house and raising one child so far. They struggle to make ends meet and have to watch every penny. Luckily for them they have Bank of Mum and Dad to fall back on, but others are not so lucky.
If this Chancellor and any future Chancellor want to level the playing field between my privileged retired generation and a generation of young adults in work who are struggling to make ends meet, through cutting NI and raising income tax by stealth, then I am all for it. The principle for me is that two people on the same income should pay the same rate of tax on it, regardless of the source of that income.
The truly scary thing is that if your son and daughter in law had one single income between them of the same amount as they currently earn jointly the situation would be even worse.
The truly scary thing is how stupid he is and the bollox he is spouting. Apart from NI which he will have paid for 50 years to get his miserly pension and his son and wife only need pay for 35 years , all other taxes are the same. They must be on good salaries if having to pay their student loans. Sounds like the usual whining of the well off , chances are if same as in his day they would not have got into university and be toiling in a factory ot Tesco and staying in a housing association rented house. My heart bleeds for them when I think of all those who could not go to uni, are in crap jobs working all hours while living in a dump with no pension and no hope of ever owning a modest 200K house. There is sure an incredible amount of rich whining bollox on here by green cheesed arseholes.
You start paying a student loan off if you income is above £28,600...
So both over 30K and therefore over 60K joint income. Hardly on the breadline or in bottom 50% of the population at generous minimum. Double the median UK income.
You can't add 2 incomes together and claim its double the median income.
And you're wrong about the graduate tax threshold being on good salaries. The threshold varies depending upon what plan you're on with the lowest threshold being £22,015 which is less than full time minimum wage from next month!
Current students will hit the threshold at just £25k salary. Not a good salary and barely over full time minimum wage.
The graduate tax, along with National Insurance should be abolished and you, I, the young and everyone else should be on the same tax rates.
All your benefits should be abolished so you pay the same as me sunshine, no whining about them from spongers like you.
You don't have much in common with your political hero, former Socialist firebrand and maverick Alex Salmond do you Malcolm?
I am not one for double standards Pete. Whinging spongers like bart Simpson what other people to pay everything whilst he hoovers up benefits etc which he will claim are not taxes etc. greedy greencheese arsehole extrodinaire. Probably charges his children for toothpaste etc as they don't pay NI.
I'd like to challenge the idea that everyone going to University in the 60s and 70s got full student grant. The grants were means tested so if your parents were affluent you just got the minium grant and your parents had to support you.
So you still got a grant though?
Rather than no grant and tens of thousands of pounds of "debt" leading to an effectively permanent 9% tax rise for many people?
40 years ago 10% went to university, 90% never went to university, never got a degree or got a grant. Now nearly 40% go to university and get a degree so the grants bill would be vastly higher
As would the taxes paid by graduates, but taxes should be equal no matter how old you are or what you earn or how you were educated.
A newly graduated teacher on 30k as an example who needs to pay rent or save for a deposit is currently on a higher real marginal tax rate than a retired final salary head teacher on a 95k salary who has paid off their home.
Do you really, honestly, think that is appropriate?
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
My wife and I are both pensioners, we have two incomes both from contributory pensions and we are not yet old enough to have a state pension (thanks to the qualifying date for this being raised.)
We both pay a marginal rate of 20% on our incomes. Income tax, nothing else. We were paid to go to university, so no student loans ever. We have no housing costs, having long ago paid off our mortgage (having been fortunate to start out on the housing ladder when properties were cheap, we never had a mortgage of more than £50k.) We have no family to raise. So our incomes are more than enough to live on, indeed our savings our going up and we spend freely.
Now compare that to my son and his wife, in their early thirties, whose gross income is about the same as ours. They both pay 20% income tax, 10% NI currently, 9% student loan repayments (probably lasting 30 years) and pension contributions of 5% and 6% respectively. So they face a marginal rate of 44%-45% deductions from their income. Whats left goes on a £200k mortgage for a very modest house and raising one child so far. They struggle to make ends meet and have to watch every penny. Luckily for them they have Bank of Mum and Dad to fall back on, but others are not so lucky.
If this Chancellor and any future Chancellor want to level the playing field between my privileged retired generation and a generation of young adults in work who are struggling to make ends meet, through cutting NI and raising income tax by stealth, then I am all for it. The principle for me is that two people on the same income should pay the same rate of tax on it, regardless of the source of that income.
The truly scary thing is that if your son and daughter in law had one single income between them of the same amount as they currently earn jointly the situation would be even worse.
The truly scary thing is how stupid he is and the bollox he is spouting. Apart from NI which he will have paid for 50 years to get his miserly pension and his son and wife only need pay for 35 years , all other taxes are the same. They must be on good salaries if having to pay their student loans. Sounds like the usual whining of the well off , chances are if same as in his day they would not have got into university and be toiling in a factory ot Tesco and staying in a housing association rented house. My heart bleeds for them when I think of all those who could not go to uni, are in crap jobs working all hours while living in a dump with no pension and no hope of ever owning a modest 200K house. There is sure an incredible amount of rich whining bollox on here by green cheesed arseholes.
You start paying a student loan off if you income is above £28,600...
So both over 30K and therefore over 60K joint income. Hardly on the breadline or in bottom 50% of the population at generous minimum. Double the median UK income.
You can't add 2 incomes together and claim its double the median income.
And you're wrong about the graduate tax threshold being on good salaries. The threshold varies depending upon what plan you're on with the lowest threshold being £22,015 which is less than full time minimum wage from next month!
Current students will hit the threshold at just £25k salary. Not a good salary and barely over full time minimum wage.
The graduate tax, along with National Insurance should be abolished and you, I, the young and everyone else should be on the same tax rates.
All your benefits should be abolished so you pay the same as me sunshine, no whining about them from spongers like you.
You don't have much in common with your political hero, former Socialist firebrand and maverick Alex Salmond do you Malcolm?
I am not one for double standards Pete. Whinging spongers like bart Simpson what other people to pay everything whilst he hoovers up benefits etc which he will claim are not taxes etc. greedy greencheese arsehole extrodinaire. Probably charges his children for toothpaste etc as they don't pay NI.
PS I am perfectly happy funding people's benefits with a shedload of my hard earned cash , you don't see me complaining about anyone earning too much , not paying this or that. Like everyone else I believe we should all pay less tax to these crooks but such is life.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
My wife and I are both pensioners, we have two incomes both from contributory pensions and we are not yet old enough to have a state pension (thanks to the qualifying date for this being raised.)
We both pay a marginal rate of 20% on our incomes. Income tax, nothing else. We were paid to go to university, so no student loans ever. We have no housing costs, having long ago paid off our mortgage (having been fortunate to start out on the housing ladder when properties were cheap, we never had a mortgage of more than £50k.) We have no family to raise. So our incomes are more than enough to live on, indeed our savings our going up and we spend freely.
Now compare that to my son and his wife, in their early thirties, whose gross income is about the same as ours. They both pay 20% income tax, 10% NI currently, 9% student loan repayments (probably lasting 30 years) and pension contributions of 5% and 6% respectively. So they face a marginal rate of 44%-45% deductions from their income. Whats left goes on a £200k mortgage for a very modest house and raising one child so far. They struggle to make ends meet and have to watch every penny. Luckily for them they have Bank of Mum and Dad to fall back on, but others are not so lucky.
If this Chancellor and any future Chancellor want to level the playing field between my privileged retired generation and a generation of young adults in work who are struggling to make ends meet, through cutting NI and raising income tax by stealth, then I am all for it. The principle for me is that two people on the same income should pay the same rate of tax on it, regardless of the source of that income.
The truly scary thing is that if your son and daughter in law had one single income between them of the same amount as they currently earn jointly the situation would be even worse.
The truly scary thing is how stupid he is and the bollox he is spouting. Apart from NI which he will have paid for 50 years to get his miserly pension and his son and wife only need pay for 35 years , all other taxes are the same. They must be on good salaries if having to pay their student loans. Sounds like the usual whining of the well off , chances are if same as in his day they would not have got into university and be toiling in a factory ot Tesco and staying in a housing association rented house. My heart bleeds for them when I think of all those who could not go to uni, are in crap jobs working all hours while living in a dump with no pension and no hope of ever owning a modest 200K house. There is sure an incredible amount of rich whining bollox on here by green cheesed arseholes.
You start paying a student loan off if you income is above £28,600...
So both over 30K and therefore over 60K joint income. Hardly on the breadline or in bottom 50% of the population at generous minimum. Double the median UK income.
You can't add 2 incomes together and claim its double the median income.
And you're wrong about the graduate tax threshold being on good salaries. The threshold varies depending upon what plan you're on with the lowest threshold being £22,015 which is less than full time minimum wage from next month!
Current students will hit the threshold at just £25k salary. Not a good salary and barely over full time minimum wage.
The graduate tax, along with National Insurance should be abolished and you, I, the young and everyone else should be on the same tax rates.
All your benefits should be abolished so you pay the same as me sunshine, no whining about them from spongers like you.
You don't have much in common with your political hero, former Socialist firebrand and maverick Alex Salmond do you Malcolm?
I am not one for double standards Pete. Whinging spongers like bart Simpson what other people to pay everything whilst he hoovers up benefits etc which he will claim are not taxes etc. greedy greencheese arsehole extrodinaire. Probably charges his children for toothpaste etc as they don't pay NI.
I'm curious what benefits you think I'm claiming when I've already told you I don't claim any?
Observer reporting on problems with the electric grid and connections and new energy infrastructure.
Interesting stuff.
49GW worth of proposed new supply was put in as an application to national grid in January alone.
They are swamped with so many applications they can't cope.
Meanwhile housing developments on hold because they can't get a connection.
What a bloody mess this country is in after 14 years of the clown show.
This is one of the consequences of the "build, build, build" mantra from some. It's not just a question of building houses or flats or whatever - it's the whole infrastructure which supports them. This is why those who hate planning just don't get it - it all has to be thought through and organised before a single spade is put in the ground.
Excactly. No amount of whining that people pay water rates will get the capital construction of waterworks and sewerage installed first. Just been reading about developers trying to build more houses in a villahge where the shite is already backing up in the drains half the tim
Did this story get discussed yesterday? I predict there will be no meaningful punishment. But it is nonetheless impressive the way that labour have taken the issue up. The right are starting to make gains in the 'war on woke'; the people that carry out these acts are helping the opposition, but the radical mindset is such that they will keep going.
It's criminal damage. So there could be a prosecution. It may possibly also amount to burglary. Just because you have general permission to enter a property does not give you permission to enter to steal or damage. The college could also take civil action for the value of the painting and the repair costs (assuming it can be repaired).
And if the person who did it and the one filming it are students of the college, presumably the college can also take disciplinary action.
If the perpetrators are students at the university they should be thrown out!
This goes further than just exercising their democratic right to protest.
I suggest they try the Gilmour defence -
1) I am a history student at Cambridge and have no idea what x is 2) I am not guilty due to being off my tits on illegal drugs and alcohol, voluntarily taken. 3) Show no contrition in court, and give the distinct impression that this is another speedbump in life for my parents money to get me over.
I’m quite sure that someone will be along shortly to defend criminal damage as “the only way to protest, effectively.”.
The funny thing is that the same someone will probably go postal at protests they don’t agree with. Because My Cause Is Justice.
Didn't stop Charlie Gilmour getting a 16 month prison sentence though
I'd like to challenge the idea that everyone going to University in the 60s and 70s got full student grant. The grants were means tested so if your parents were affluent you just got the minium grant and your parents had to support you.
So you still got a grant though?
Rather than no grant and tens of thousands of pounds of "debt" leading to an effectively permanent 9% tax rise for many people?
40 years ago 10% went to university, 90% never went to university, never got a degree or got a grant. Now nearly 40% go to university and get a degree so the grants bill would be vastly higher
As would the taxes paid by graduates, but taxes should be equal no matter how old you are or what you earn or how you were educated.
A newly graduated teacher on 30k as an example who needs to pay rent or save for a deposit is currently on a higher real marginal tax rate than a retired final salary head teacher on a 95k salary who has paid off their home.
Do you really, honestly, think that is appropriate?
It is fair you idiot , nobody is entitled to anything, you earn that by hard work and obviously if you have worked 40 years you should be better off than some slacker that has just started employment. Beggar's belief how stupid you are, it must be deliberate.
Observer reporting on problems with the electric grid and connections and new energy infrastructure.
Interesting stuff.
49GW worth of proposed new supply was put in as an application to national grid in January alone.
They are swamped with so many applications they can't cope.
Meanwhile housing developments on hold because they can't get a connection.
What a bloody mess this country is in after 14 years of the clown show.
Ahem. I've mentioned this a few times on here over the years. The grid is both incredibly complex and potentially fragile.
You cannot just connect a new (medium or large) supply up to the grid; it requires a heck of planning and other systems in place - which naturally enough, the new supplier doesn't want to pay for, especially in advance. And the demandside problems are obvious enough.
Too many people think that electricity is automagically generated and just appears at the sockets in their home. In reality, there's a massive amount of complex engineering involved. Ditto water/sewage, telecoms, etc, etc.
I'd like to challenge the idea that everyone going to University in the 60s and 70s got full student grant. The grants were means tested so if your parents were affluent you just got the minium grant and your parents had to support you.
Quite so. More specifically they were graduated (so to speak) - there was a range in between where the exact ratio of council/govt dept* vs parental contribution was modulated according to parental income. No cliff edges, IIRC.
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
I'd certainly count houses that people don't live in.
How many empty houses would you have to have for that stat to make sense?
Its a rather meaningless stat.
There will be some pensioners living in the same home they lived in decades ago, but whose children and grandchildren don't live with then, but then so what? Should a grandchild or great-grandchild be shipped away from their family home to live with them so that there's full occupation of the homes?
We just need to build more houses, not try to sweat every room to its maximum potential leaving no slack in the system. Its the shortage of empty homes that is the problem, not the abundance of them.
Observer reporting on problems with the electric grid and connections and new energy infrastructure.
Interesting stuff.
49GW worth of proposed new supply was put in as an application to national grid in January alone.
They are swamped with so many applications they can't cope.
Meanwhile housing developments on hold because they can't get a connection.
What a bloody mess this country is in after 14 years of the clown show.
This is one of the consequences of the "build, build, build" mantra from some. It's not just a question of building houses or flats or whatever - it's the whole infrastructure which supports them. This is why those who hate planning just don't get it - it all has to be thought through and organised before a single spade is put in the ground.
Excactly. No amount of whining that people pay water rates will get the capital construction of waterworks and sewerage installed first. Just been reading about developers trying to build more houses in a villahge where the shite is already backing up in the drains half the tim
Good!
We need more houses.
Nothing should stop the developers from doing their own job. The water firms (which is owned by the state in your country) should pull their fingers out and do their own job. No excuses.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
Better off pensioners should be paying more tax.
Be grateful no-one will come for arrears on the extra they should have been paying for years.
Are you deranged, pensioners pay the same taxes as everyone else and majority of them would love to be paying tax as it would mean they had more money
Pensioners don't pay the same taxes. Ni being the case in point.
You halfwit most people don't pay CGT, or various other taxes as they are NOT eligible for them. What do you nutters on here not understand about fact that people on stste pension are no longer eligible for NI. Do people on benefits pay NI , do children pay NI, FFS how stupid can people be.
Not quite correct. People of State pension age or more don't pay NI. So if you carry on working, perhaps deferring the Lloyd George for another couple of years or so, then you still dont pay NI.
That is because you are NOT eligible to pay it, NI does not apply after you are on state pension, regardless. You don't pay IHT till your dead, what bit of that is hard to understand and why not whinge about that as well.
NI is just a form of income tax though, as recognised by HMRC in international tax treaties, so the fact you're not eligible to pay for it is a political choice not a law of nature.
Merge NI into Income Tax, align the bands appropriately, and that gets fixed and everyone can pay the same rate of tax. What's wrong with that?
Why should someone on a defined benefit public sector pension not be paying NI while someone working for a living does?
Every tax is a political choice , nothing about being born means you should have your belongings taken off you by strangers. What bit of the fact they have paid their NI as per the tax rules. Again easy to pick out one thing, why should people get child benefit free school meals, childcare , tax credits etc when millions are not eligible. Explain that one.
Because those are benefits based upon need of the child, some of which are the children of pensioners, what part of that are you struggling to comprehend?
You seem to have developed a rather bizarre hatred of children lately, when actually the amount of benefits given to children is miniscule within the overall welfare budget and those are all means-tested unlike the pension so I'm struggling to see what point you think you are making with that analogy. It rather works against you, not in your favour.
Taxing some people less than others, who have the same earnings, is a bad and immoral choice. It is indefensible.
Typical greedy barsteward answer. What pensioner has children needing benefits you halfwit. Get out and work and stop sponging off the state and trying to get other people pay for your brood.
I'd like to challenge the idea that everyone going to University in the 60s and 70s got full student grant. The grants were means tested so if your parents were affluent you just got the minium grant and your parents had to support you.
So you still got a grant though?
Rather than no grant and tens of thousands of pounds of "debt" leading to an effectively permanent 9% tax rise for many people?
40 years ago 10% went to university, 90% never went to university, never got a degree or got a grant. Now nearly 40% go to university and get a degree so the grants bill would be vastly higher
As would the taxes paid by graduates, but taxes should be equal no matter how old you are or what you earn or how you were educated.
A newly graduated teacher on 30k as an example who needs to pay rent or save for a deposit is currently on a higher real marginal tax rate than a retired final salary head teacher on a 95k salary who has paid off their home.
Do you really, honestly, think that is appropriate?
It is fair you idiot , nobody is entitled to anything, you earn that by hard work and obviously if you have worked 40 years you should be better off than some slacker that has just started employment. Beggar's belief how stupid you are, it must be deliberate.
No it is not fair you idiot.
You would still be better off on £95k even if you paid the same tax rate as someone on £30k, let alone a higher one.
Observer reporting on problems with the electric grid and connections and new energy infrastructure.
Interesting stuff.
49GW worth of proposed new supply was put in as an application to national grid in January alone.
They are swamped with so many applications they can't cope.
Meanwhile housing developments on hold because they can't get a connection.
What a bloody mess this country is in after 14 years of the clown show.
This is one of the consequences of the "build, build, build" mantra from some. It's not just a question of building houses or flats or whatever - it's the whole infrastructure which supports them. This is why those who hate planning just don't get it - it all has to be thought through and organised before a single spade is put in the ground.
Absolutely. We would end up being like the United States without planning regs. Loads of faceless low-density towns where you have to drive everywhere. There is a balance to be struck: build, but build smart.
Did this story get discussed yesterday? I predict there will be no meaningful punishment. But it is nonetheless impressive the way that labour have taken the issue up. The right are starting to make gains in the 'war on woke'; the people that carry out these acts are helping the opposition, but the radical mindset is such that they will keep going.
It's criminal damage. So there could be a prosecution. It may possibly also amount to burglary. Just because you have general permission to enter a property does not give you permission to enter to steal or damage. The college could also take civil action for the value of the painting and the repair costs (assuming it can be repaired).
And if the person who did it and the one filming it are students of the college, presumably the college can also take disciplinary action.
If the perpetrators are students at the university they should be thrown out!
This goes further than just exercising their democratic right to protest.
I suggest they try the Gilmour defence -
1) I am a history student at Cambridge and have no idea what x is 2) I am not guilty due to being off my tits on illegal drugs and alcohol, voluntarily taken. 3) Show no contrition in court, and give the distinct impression that this is another speedbump in life for my parents money to get me over.
I’m quite sure that someone will be along shortly to defend criminal damage as “the only way to protest, effectively.”.
The funny thing is that the same someone will probably go postal at protests they don’t agree with. Because My Cause Is Justice.
Didn't stop Charlie Gilmour getting a 16 month prison sentence though
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
Better off pensioners should be paying more tax.
Be grateful no-one will come for arrears on the extra they should have been paying for years.
Are you deranged, pensioners pay the same taxes as everyone else and majority of them would love to be paying tax as it would mean they had more money
Pensioners don't pay the same taxes. Ni being the case in point.
You halfwit most people don't pay CGT, or various other taxes as they are NOT eligible for them. What do you nutters on here not understand about fact that people on stste pension are no longer eligible for NI. Do people on benefits pay NI , do children pay NI, FFS how stupid can people be.
Not quite correct. People of State pension age or more don't pay NI. So if you carry on working, perhaps deferring the Lloyd George for another couple of years or so, then you still dont pay NI.
That is because you are NOT eligible to pay it, NI does not apply after you are on state pension, regardless. You don't pay IHT till your dead, what bit of that is hard to understand and why not whinge about that as well.
NI is just a form of income tax though, as recognised by HMRC in international tax treaties, so the fact you're not eligible to pay for it is a political choice not a law of nature.
Merge NI into Income Tax, align the bands appropriately, and that gets fixed and everyone can pay the same rate of tax. What's wrong with that?
Why should someone on a defined benefit public sector pension not be paying NI while someone working for a living does?
Every tax is a political choice , nothing about being born means you should have your belongings taken off you by strangers. What bit of the fact they have paid their NI as per the tax rules. Again easy to pick out one thing, why should people get child benefit free school meals, childcare , tax credits etc when millions are not eligible. Explain that one.
Because those are benefits based upon need of the child, some of which are the children of pensioners, what part of that are you struggling to comprehend?
You seem to have developed a rather bizarre hatred of children lately, when actually the amount of benefits given to children is miniscule within the overall welfare budget and those are all means-tested unlike the pension so I'm struggling to see what point you think you are making with that analogy. It rather works against you, not in your favour.
Taxing some people less than others, who have the same earnings, is a bad and immoral choice. It is indefensible.
Typical greedy barsteward answer. What pensioner has children needing benefits you halfwit. Get out and work and stop sponging off the state and trying to get other people pay for your brood.
Pensioners with children, moron.
Were you under the idiotic belief that men are somehow incapable of procreating in their fifties or sixties?
I know pensioners with children younger than my own.
Unlike you I don't claim a penny in benefits. Unlike you I pay all taxes, including NI too.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
Better off pensioners should be paying more tax.
Be grateful no-one will come for arrears on the extra they should have been paying for years.
Are you deranged, pensioners pay the same taxes as everyone else and majority of them would love to be paying tax as it would mean they had more money
Pensioners don't pay the same taxes. Ni being the case in point.
You halfwit most people don't pay CGT, or various other taxes as they are NOT eligible for them. What do you nutters on here not understand about fact that people on stste pension are no longer eligible for NI. Do people on benefits pay NI , do children pay NI, FFS how stupid can people be.
Not quite correct. People of State pension age or more don't pay NI. So if you carry on working, perhaps deferring the Lloyd George for another couple of years or so, then you still dont pay NI.
That is because you are NOT eligible to pay it, NI does not apply after you are on state pension, regardless. You don't pay IHT till your dead, what bit of that is hard to understand and why not whinge about that as well.
NI is just a form of income tax though, as recognised by HMRC in international tax treaties, so the fact you're not eligible to pay for it is a political choice not a law of nature.
Merge NI into Income Tax, align the bands appropriately, and that gets fixed and everyone can pay the same rate of tax. What's wrong with that?
Why should someone on a defined benefit public sector pension not be paying NI while someone working for a living does?
Every tax is a political choice , nothing about being born means you should have your belongings taken off you by strangers. What bit of the fact they have paid their NI as per the tax rules. Again easy to pick out one thing, why should people get child benefit free school meals, childcare , tax credits etc when millions are not eligible. Explain that one.
Because those are benefits based upon need of the child, some of which are the children of pensioners, what part of that are you struggling to comprehend?
You seem to have developed a rather bizarre hatred of children lately, when actually the amount of benefits given to children is miniscule within the overall welfare budget and those are all means-tested unlike the pension so I'm struggling to see what point you think you are making with that analogy. It rather works against you, not in your favour.
Taxing some people less than others, who have the same earnings, is a bad and immoral choice. It is indefensible.
It is you I am talking about , happy to avoid taxes by taking big payouts for your brood whilst wanting extra punitive taxes on pensioners. You personify the state of hte UK with your whining greedy grasping desperation to get other people's money rather than working hard for your own. Sponger extrodinaire.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
Better off pensioners should be paying more tax.
Be grateful no-one will come for arrears on the extra they should have been paying for years.
Are you deranged, pensioners pay the same taxes as everyone else and majority of them would love to be paying tax as it would mean they had more money
Pensioners don't pay the same taxes. Ni being the case in point.
You halfwit most people don't pay CGT, or various other taxes as they are NOT eligible for them. What do you nutters on here not understand about fact that people on stste pension are no longer eligible for NI. Do people on benefits pay NI , do children pay NI, FFS how stupid can people be.
Not quite correct. People of State pension age or more don't pay NI. So if you carry on working, perhaps deferring the Lloyd George for another couple of years or so, then you still dont pay NI.
That is because you are NOT eligible to pay it, NI does not apply after you are on state pension, regardless. You don't pay IHT till your dead, what bit of that is hard to understand and why not whinge about that as well.
NI is just a form of income tax though, as recognised by HMRC in international tax treaties, so the fact you're not eligible to pay for it is a political choice not a law of nature.
Merge NI into Income Tax, align the bands appropriately, and that gets fixed and everyone can pay the same rate of tax. What's wrong with that?
Why should someone on a defined benefit public sector pension not be paying NI while someone working for a living does?
Every tax is a political choice , nothing about being born means you should have your belongings taken off you by strangers. What bit of the fact they have paid their NI as per the tax rules. Again easy to pick out one thing, why should people get child benefit free school meals, childcare , tax credits etc when millions are not eligible. Explain that one.
Because those are benefits based upon need of the child, some of which are the children of pensioners, what part of that are you struggling to comprehend?
You seem to have developed a rather bizarre hatred of children lately, when actually the amount of benefits given to children is miniscule within the overall welfare budget and those are all means-tested unlike the pension so I'm struggling to see what point you think you are making with that analogy. It rather works against you, not in your favour.
Taxing some people less than others, who have the same earnings, is a bad and immoral choice. It is indefensible.
It is you I am talking about , happy to avoid taxes by taking big payouts for your brood whilst wanting extra punitive taxes on pensioners. You personify the state of hte UK with your whining greedy grasping desperation to get other people's money rather than working hard for your own. Sponger extrodinaire.
I don't claim any benefits.
I do pay all taxes, including NI.
Can you say the same? To either of those questions? Entitled sponger.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
Better off pensioners should be paying more tax.
Be grateful no-one will come for arrears on the extra they should have been paying for years.
Are you deranged, pensioners pay the same taxes as everyone else and majority of them would love to be paying tax as it would mean they had more money
Pensioners don't pay the same taxes. Ni being the case in point.
You halfwit most people don't pay CGT, or various other taxes as they are NOT eligible for them. What do you nutters on here not understand about fact that people on stste pension are no longer eligible for NI. Do people on benefits pay NI , do children pay NI, FFS how stupid can people be.
Not quite correct. People of State pension age or more don't pay NI. So if you carry on working, perhaps deferring the Lloyd George for another couple of years or so, then you still dont pay NI.
That is because you are NOT eligible to pay it, NI does not apply after you are on state pension, regardless. You don't pay IHT till your dead, what bit of that is hard to understand and why not whinge about that as well.
NI is just a form of income tax though, as recognised by HMRC in international tax treaties, so the fact you're not eligible to pay for it is a political choice not a law of nature.
Merge NI into Income Tax, align the bands appropriately, and that gets fixed and everyone can pay the same rate of tax. What's wrong with that?
Why should someone on a defined benefit public sector pension not be paying NI while someone working for a living does?
Every tax is a political choice , nothing about being born means you should have your belongings taken off you by strangers. What bit of the fact they have paid their NI as per the tax rules. Again easy to pick out one thing, why should people get child benefit free school meals, childcare , tax credits etc when millions are not eligible. Explain that one.
Because those are benefits based upon need of the child, some of which are the children of pensioners, what part of that are you struggling to comprehend?
You seem to have developed a rather bizarre hatred of children lately, when actually the amount of benefits given to children is miniscule within the overall welfare budget and those are all means-tested unlike the pension so I'm struggling to see what point you think you are making with that analogy. It rather works against you, not in your favour.
Taxing some people less than others, who have the same earnings, is a bad and immoral choice. It is indefensible.
It is you I am talking about , happy to avoid taxes by taking big payouts for your brood whilst wanting extra punitive taxes on pensioners. You personify the state of hte UK with your whining greedy grasping desperation to get other people's money rather than working hard for your own. Sponger extrodinaire.
I don't claim any benefits.
I do pay all taxes, including NI.
Can you say the same? To either of those questions? Entitled sponger.
Not getting tax cut because you don’t pay that particular tax - why is that an issue?
I don’t get to buy much productivity increasing industrial equipment at home, so I don’t benefit from tax allowances for that. Is that an attack on me?
Pensioners are getting an above inflation increase in the pension, as well.
Pope's are not on the whole known for being that concerned with fighting evil. They are far more concerned with preserving the power and wealth of the Church and advancing their personal interpretations of doctrine, it has ever been thus.
If that entails cooperating with evil or turning a blind eye to it, or even just lecturing people who have the temerity to not accept violent domination by others that they should share blame for trying to preserve their own lives, then so be it.
If some actual good elsewhere can be done along the way then that is enough to convince them the whole must be good too.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
Not just pensioners. I'm assuming you refer to the inaction of raising tax bands in line with inflation but let me know if that isn't the case. That affects everyone including the lowest paid.
No.i mean giving tax breaks to workers via ni cut but f all for pensioners. My pension increase has been cut 20pc by tax before I get it.
You've got an 8.5% increase in your state pension.
Observer reporting on problems with the electric grid and connections and new energy infrastructure.
Interesting stuff.
49GW worth of proposed new supply was put in as an application to national grid in January alone.
They are swamped with so many applications they can't cope.
Meanwhile housing developments on hold because they can't get a connection.
What a bloody mess this country is in after 14 years of the clown show.
This is one of the consequences of the "build, build, build" mantra from some. It's not just a question of building houses or flats or whatever - it's the whole infrastructure which supports them. This is why those who hate planning just don't get it - it all has to be thought through and organised before a single spade is put in the ground.
Absolutely. We would end up being like the United States without planning regs. Loads of faceless low-density towns where you have to drive everywhere. There is a balance to be struck: build, but build smart.
Yes there is a balance. The 'build build build' mantra, however, is a natural reaction to us being very mich out of balance at the moment, rather than in most cases a literal cry for no regulations whatsoever.
There is a big reaction against the current system to be had before we need to worry about overreacting.
Observer reporting on problems with the electric grid and connections and new energy infrastructure.
Interesting stuff.
49GW worth of proposed new supply was put in as an application to national grid in January alone.
They are swamped with so many applications they can't cope.
Meanwhile housing developments on hold because they can't get a connection.
What a bloody mess this country is in after 14 years of the clown show.
Ahem. I've mentioned this a few times on here over the years. The grid is both incredibly complex and potentially fragile.
You cannot just connect a new (medium or large) supply up to the grid; it requires a heck of planning and other systems in place - which naturally enough, the new supplier doesn't want to pay for, especially in advance. And the demandside problems are obvious enough.
Too many people think that electricity is automagically generated and just appears at the sockets in their home. In reality, there's a massive amount of complex engineering involved. Ditto water/sewage, telecoms, etc, etc.
And there's an increasing amount of tinfoil hattery around pylons, which means that extending or reconfiguring the grid is now much, much more difficult and expensive than it was in the past.
In the HoC, John Hayes is leading the charge but he's far from the only one making trouble.
I wouldn't entirely be surprised to see some sort of sabotage/bombing campaign aimed at the grid, along the lines of the recent anti-Ulez stuff.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
My wife and I are both pensioners, we have two incomes both from contributory pensions and we are not yet old enough to have a state pension (thanks to the qualifying date for this being raised.)
We both pay a marginal rate of 20% on our incomes. Income tax, nothing else. We were paid to go to university, so no student loans ever. We have no housing costs, having long ago paid off our mortgage (having been fortunate to start out on the housing ladder when properties were cheap, we never had a mortgage of more than £50k.) We have no family to raise. So our incomes are more than enough to live on, indeed our savings our going up and we spend freely.
Now compare that to my son and his wife, in their early thirties, whose gross income is about the same as ours. They both pay 20% income tax, 10% NI currently, 9% student loan repayments (probably lasting 30 years) and pension contributions of 5% and 6% respectively. So they face a marginal rate of 44%-45% deductions from their income. Whats left goes on a £200k mortgage for a very modest house and raising one child so far. They struggle to make ends meet and have to watch every penny. Luckily for them they have Bank of Mum and Dad to fall back on, but others are not so lucky.
If this Chancellor and any future Chancellor want to level the playing field between my privileged retired generation and a generation of young adults in work who are struggling to make ends meet, through cutting NI and raising income tax by stealth, then I am all for it. The principle for me is that two people on the same income should pay the same rate of tax on it, regardless of the source of that income.
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
Yes, it's "All Households" from the ONS. 1.01 spare bedrooms per household, even after netting off against the 1 million households that are overcrowded.
(It's probably even higher - I've assumed that households with "2+" extra bedrooms just have 2.)
Not getting tax cut because you don’t pay that particular tax - why is that an issue?
I don’t get to buy much productivity increasing industrial equipment at home, so I don’t benefit from tax allowances for that. Is that an attack on me?
Pensioners are getting an above inflation increase in the pension, as well.
Not to mention that the increases in government spending have predominantly benefitted pensioners as well.
NEW: Hold a Referendum on quitting the ECHR on the same day as the Election - and have Boris Johnson lead the campaign, Tory MPs say
Referendums, we have learnt, rarely hinge on the question asked and tend to become about something else. Often they’re a referendum on the government’s performance. A referendum on quitting the ECHR headed by Johnson would be a referendum on 14 years of Conservative rule and on Johnson’s behaviour (Partygate, lying to Parliament, etc.). It would be an absolute bloodbath. Bring it on.
Conservatives are suffering from a generation of MPs who can't do politics.
Is that a round about way of calling for the return of the consummate campaigner and national treasure Alexander Johnson? Would your man in uber-safe Totnes stand aside?
It's condemnation of a whole raft of pillocks who somehow became MPs. I guess it is what happens when you get large majorities.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
Not just pensioners. I'm assuming you refer to the inaction of raising tax bands in line with inflation but let me know if that isn't the case. That affects everyone including the lowest paid.
No.i mean giving tax breaks to workers via ni cut but f all for pensioners. My pension increase has been cut 20pc by tax before I get it.
You've got an 8.5% increase in your state pension.
I'd like to challenge the idea that everyone going to University in the 60s and 70s got full student grant. The grants were means tested so if your parents were affluent you just got the minium grant and your parents had to support you.
So you still got a grant though?
Rather than no grant and tens of thousands of pounds of "debt" leading to an effectively permanent 9% tax rise for many people?
Not wishing to disagree with you on the unfairness of now and then but just to clarify the 'still got a grant though' in my day the grant was £500 which you could live on with holiday jobs and living at home in vacations, but the means tested element was £450 of that £500 so what you got ranged from £50 to £500. So you might only get 10% of the grant.
Of course there was also not the £9000+ student fees per year which really is the killer.
It might be OK, if students were able to finance and refinance that debt however they liked.
But the way the Government have set it up it's like Bob Marley's chains and anchor.
But look at the statistics on public sector employment. The majority of people coming through the system and retiring now will have defined benefit pensions. Beyond this, in the private sector, almost all of the working population will have some kind of contributory pension to supplement the state pension.
For the last 15 years I have been working in the public sector and observing colleagues go part time in their 50's and in many cases retire early as they have calculated that they don't need the money in retirement; the mortgage has been paid off, the kids have left home; they can take a lump sum early and then fall back on the state pension when they are eligible for it.
Whilst this is a minority of pensioners as a whole, it is not an insignificant fraction of the working population, it is a significant amount of people. People are incentivised to quit work early or build up fortunes to pass on.
Indeed Darkage, however it is still a fact that the majority of pensioners are not rich and have big DB pensions. Only public sector have them nowadays and i private sector ethe average pot is not enough to feed a cat. There are as many poor pensioners as workers if not more. The obsession on here that pensioners all live a rosy life on 50K+ pensions, mortgage free mansions etc is mainly a deluded view of their own rich parents and no idea of real life.
I don't think anyone is suggesting all pensioners are well off.
I think what many are suggesting, I know I am, is that those pensioners who are well off should pay the same tax rate as anyone who is working for a living.
Maybe we should extend NI to pensioners and then @squareroot2 could benefit from the tax cut just like everyone else?
The MoS seem to be convinced Angela Rayner has broken the law despite the Police already investigating and finding no evidence of any rules being broken.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
My wife and I are both pensioners, we have two incomes both from contributory pensions and we are not yet old enough to have a state pension (thanks to the qualifying date for this being raised.)
We both pay a marginal rate of 20% on our incomes. Income tax, nothing else. We were paid to go to university, so no student loans ever. We have no housing costs, having long ago paid off our mortgage (having been fortunate to start out on the housing ladder when properties were cheap, we never had a mortgage of more than £50k.) We have no family to raise. So our incomes are more than enough to live on, indeed our savings our going up and we spend freely.
Now compare that to my son and his wife, in their early thirties, whose gross income is about the same as ours. They both pay 20% income tax, 10% NI currently, 9% student loan repayments (probably lasting 30 years) and pension contributions of 5% and 6% respectively. So they face a marginal rate of 44%-45% deductions from their income. Whats left goes on a £200k mortgage for a very modest house and raising one child so far. They struggle to make ends meet and have to watch every penny. Luckily for them they have Bank of Mum and Dad to fall back on, but others are not so lucky.
If this Chancellor and any future Chancellor want to level the playing field between my privileged retired generation and a generation of young adults in work who are struggling to make ends meet, through cutting NI and raising income tax by stealth, then I am all for it. The principle for me is that two people on the same income should pay the same rate of tax on it, regardless of the source of that income.
Very well said.
Indeed and those in labour who attack the long term objective of eliminating NI and equalising the tax rate for all, with increased personal allowance to shield poorer pensioners are perversely on the side of the pensioners v the workers who are precently paying double taxation
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
Yes, it's "All Households" from the ONS. 1.01 spare bedrooms per household, even after netting off against the 1 million households that are overcrowded.
(It's probably even higher - I've assumed that households with "2+" extra bedrooms just have 2.)
It's an irrelevant statistic though.
If a retired great grandparent has say 2 spare bedrooms, 4 adult children, 12 adult grandchildren and 20 child great grandchildren then who should be living in those "spare rooms"?
We need to build more houses so that everyone can have a family home of their own, not try and foist people into the gaps of existing households.
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
I'd certainly count houses that people don't live in.
How many empty houses would you have to have for that stat to make sense?
I don't understand this peculiar questioning.
Spare bedrooms is a basic statistic in the English Housing Survey which has been collected for years and years. I've discussed the survey fairly often here, and on occasion under-occupation.
Under-occupied means 2 or more spare bedrooms, and in the recent survey 9.3 million owner occupied dwellings were "under-occupied":
That's 18.6 million from your 26 million just for a start, plus any third spare bedrooms, and all those households that only have one spare bedroom.
26 million sounds about right, but I'd punt that that is an England-only figure.
The biggest distortion, and most gaping wound, in our housing market, remains the owner-occupied sector, its unfortunate existence as a store of wealth and tax free accumulation of wealth, and the tax breaks, politics and rhetoric that goes into justifying those practices.
Distractedly rant against pensioners and landlords as much as you like. The OO sector, and related tax breaks and market distortion, is the core problem.
Not getting tax cut because you don’t pay that particular tax - why is that an issue?
I don’t get to buy much productivity increasing industrial equipment at home, so I don’t benefit from tax allowances for that. Is that an attack on me?
Pensioners are getting an above inflation increase in the pension, as well.
It is interesting though, this reaction to the budget. I had thought the retired population realised they’d got the best of government largesse since 2010 and would be happy for their working age brethren, but it does seem that a portion of them are outraged.
It’s yet more bad news for the government but it’s also a warning to Labour that the national union of pensioners (NUP) is going to be a militant force to be reckoned with in the next parliament.
But look at the statistics on public sector employment. The majority of people coming through the system and retiring now will have defined benefit pensions. Beyond this, in the private sector, almost all of the working population will have some kind of contributory pension to supplement the state pension.
For the last 15 years I have been working in the public sector and observing colleagues go part time in their 50's and in many cases retire early as they have calculated that they don't need the money in retirement; the mortgage has been paid off, the kids have left home; they can take a lump sum early and then fall back on the state pension when they are eligible for it.
Whilst this is a minority of pensioners as a whole, it is not an insignificant fraction of the working population, it is a significant amount of people. People are incentivised to quit work early or build up fortunes to pass on.
Indeed Darkage, however it is still a fact that the majority of pensioners are not rich and have big DB pensions. Only public sector have them nowadays and i private sector ethe average pot is not enough to feed a cat. There are as many poor pensioners as workers if not more. The obsession on here that pensioners all live a rosy life on 50K+ pensions, mortgage free mansions etc is mainly a deluded view of their own rich parents and no idea of real life.
I don't think anyone is suggesting all pensioners are well off.
I think what many are suggesting, I know I am, is that those pensioners who are well off should pay the same tax rate as anyone who is working for a living.
Maybe we should extend NI to pensioners and then @squareroot2 could benefit from the tax cut just like everyone else?
I recall at Corfe Castle being told by the guide about how the houses in the village had basements that used to be the ground floor. All the chippings from the stones for the castle, slowly over the years.
The lords of the castle bought the loyalty of the locals with a steady stream of work. Paid for by the locals taxes….
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
Yes, it's "All Households" from the ONS. 1.01 spare bedrooms per household, even after netting off against the 1 million households that are overcrowded.
(It's probably even higher - I've assumed that households with "2+" extra bedrooms just have 2.)
It's an irrelevant statistic though.
If a retired great grandparent has say 2 spare bedrooms, 4 adult children, 12 adult grandchildren and 20 child great grandchildren then who should be living in those "spare rooms"?
We need to build more houses so that everyone can have a family home of their own, not try and foist people into the gaps of existing households.
With this talk of planning absurdities I quite coincidentally stumbled across an old CGP Grey video about a tangled planning permission dispute between Hackney and some artistic esatablishment putting up unathorised structures and installations, including in this case five giant inflatable sharks.
I've been a slight fan of Pope Francis during his time int he job, but after his Ukraine 'white flag' comment, I'd just like to say this:
Pope Francis, I hope you rot in Hell.
It doesn't matter how much he tries to clarify the comment; his words will have been heard and listened to. It is not up to Ukraine to 'negotiate'; it is up to Russia to withdraw.
There's also a rather important moral issue. Despite what tankies and pro-Russians say, Ukraine did not start this war. The aggressor is obvious, and the aggression unsupportable. What Pope Francis says will lead to more war, not less.
(And yes, I have read the 'clarification' (1), It's shit.
Conservative MPs are (understandably) panicking. They look back to their most recent successes: Johnson winning in 2019, Brexit referendum, Uxbridge by-election. And they think, let’s do that again.
But they make the mistake of not looking at Johnson’s polling when he left office (abysmal) or Brexit right/wrong polling now (very wrong). If they try Brexit 2 Electric Bugaloo (a.k.a. an ECHR referendum) or bringing Boris back in some way, they’ll crash and burn. Even going on about LTNs isn’t going to save them given how popular they turn out to be.
The Conservatives need to identify things they’ve done that are still popular (support during the pandemic and support on energy bills are obvious things for Sunak to talk about) or new proposals that will be popular, although even here faith in the party is so low that no-one believes they can deliver anything.
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
Yes, it's "All Households" from the ONS. 1.01 spare bedrooms per household, even after netting off against the 1 million households that are overcrowded.
(It's probably even higher - I've assumed that households with "2+" extra bedrooms just have 2.)
It's an irrelevant statistic though.
If a retired great grandparent has say 2 spare bedrooms, 4 adult children, 12 adult grandchildren and 20 child great grandchildren then who should be living in those "spare rooms"?
We need to build more houses so that everyone can have a family home of their own, not try and foist people into the gaps of existing households.
The MoS seem to be convinced Angela Rayner has broken the law despite the Police already investigating and finding no evidence of any rules being broken.
Feels a bit beergate 2.0 doesn’t it?
It’s worth reading Dan Neidle’s analysis. He thinks - and I agree - that she may well have needed to pay some tax on the sale.
It’s not up to the police to investigate. They wouldn’t have a clue about property taxation rules. It’s HMRC’s responsibility. If there’s tax due they will launch ann enquiry and issue an assessment.
The confected outrage in the Tory press, including the ever outraged (((Dan Hodges))), is very reminiscent of Beergate though.
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
I'd certainly count houses that people don't live in.
How many empty houses would you have to have for that stat to make sense?
I don't understand this peculiar questioning.
Spare bedrooms is a basic statistic in the English Housing Survey which has been collected for years and years. I've discussed the survey fairly often here, and on occasion under-occupation.
Under-occupied means 2 or more spare bedrooms, and in the recent survey 9.3 million owner occupied dwellings were "under-occupied":
That's 18.6 million from your 26 million just for a start, plus any third spare bedrooms, and all those households that only have one spare bedroom.
26 million sounds about right, but I'd punt that that is an England-only figure.
The biggest distortion, and most gaping wound, in our housing market, remains the owner-occupied sector, its unfortunate existence as a store of wealth and tax free accumulation of wealth, and the tax breaks, politics and rhetoric that goes into justifying those practices.
Distractedly rant against pensioners and landlords as much as you like. The OO sector, and related tax breaks and market distortion, is the core problem.
It's E&W. Powys has 1.3 spare bedrooms per household, for example.
I've been a slight fan of Pope Francis during his time int he job, but after his Ukraine 'white flag' comment, I'd just like to say this:
Pope Francis, I hope you rot in Hell.
It doesn't matter how much he tries to clarify the comment; his words will have been heard and listened to. It is not up to Ukraine to 'negotiate'; it is up to Russia to withdraw.
There's also a rather important moral issue. Despite what tankies and pro-Russians say, Ukraine did not start this war. The aggressor is obvious, and the aggression unsupportable. What Pope Francis says will lead to more war, not less.
(And yes, I have read the 'clarification' (1), It's shit.
Anyone who has been following Russia over the last decade will recognise this as an incredibly naive comment by the Pope - almost idiotic.
Well, he's getting on a bit and has had serious health problems. That's bound to have impaired his judgment. Indeed, his predecessor came to realise it and resigned his office (which was the smartest move of an otherwise not terribly distinguished papacy).
This is why smart nations do not elect people in their 80s to run the country.
This is why America given itself a choice of Biden or Trump suggests it is not a smart nation any more...
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
My wife and I are both pensioners, we have two incomes both from contributory pensions and we are not yet old enough to have a state pension (thanks to the qualifying date for this being raised.)
We both pay a marginal rate of 20% on our incomes. Income tax, nothing else. We were paid to go to university, so no student loans ever. We have no housing costs, having long ago paid off our mortgage (having been fortunate to start out on the housing ladder when properties were cheap, we never had a mortgage of more than £50k.) We have no family to raise. So our incomes are more than enough to live on, indeed our savings our going up and we spend freely.
Now compare that to my son and his wife, in their early thirties, whose gross income is about the same as ours. They both pay 20% income tax, 10% NI currently, 9% student loan repayments (probably lasting 30 years) and pension contributions of 5% and 6% respectively. So they face a marginal rate of 44%-45% deductions from their income. Whats left goes on a £200k mortgage for a very modest house and raising one child so far. They struggle to make ends meet and have to watch every penny. Luckily for them they have Bank of Mum and Dad to fall back on, but others are not so lucky.
If this Chancellor and any future Chancellor want to level the playing field between my privileged retired generation and a generation of young adults in work who are struggling to make ends meet, through cutting NI and raising income tax by stealth, then I am all for it. The principle for me is that two people on the same income should pay the same rate of tax on it, regardless of the source of that income.
Very well said.
Indeed and those in labour who attack the long term objective of eliminating NI and equalising the tax rate for all, with increased personal allowance to shield poorer pensioners are perversely on the side of the pensioners v the workers who are precently paying double taxation
I suggest you should be more sympathetic to those in labour. Those contractions really hurt.
I'd like to challenge the idea that everyone going to University in the 60s and 70s got full student grant. The grants were means tested so if your parents were affluent you just got the minium grant and your parents had to support you.
So you still got a grant though?
Rather than no grant and tens of thousands of pounds of "debt" leading to an effectively permanent 9% tax rise for many people?
40 years ago 10% went to university, 90% never went to university, never got a degree or got a grant. Now nearly 40% go to university and get a degree so the grants bill would be vastly higher
As would the taxes paid by graduates, but taxes should be equal no matter how old you are or what you earn or how you were educated.
A newly graduated teacher on 30k as an example who needs to pay rent or save for a deposit is currently on a higher real marginal tax rate than a retired final salary head teacher on a 95k salary who has paid off their home.
Do you really, honestly, think that is appropriate?
It is fair you idiot , nobody is entitled to anything, you earn that by hard work and obviously if you have worked 40 years you should be better off than some slacker that has just started employment. Beggar's belief how stupid you are, it must be deliberate.
No it is not fair you idiot.
You would still be better off on £95k even if you paid the same tax rate as someone on £30k, let alone a higher one.
You really are as thick as a brick. 🤦♂️
Not too bright are we Bart, struggling to grasp facts rather than just following your mumbo jumbo theory that someone just starting work should have the same money as someone who has put in 40 years of graft. As I said you are a greedy grasping money for nothing pygmy.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
My wife and I are both pensioners, we have two incomes both from contributory pensions and we are not yet old enough to have a state pension (thanks to the qualifying date for this being raised.)
We both pay a marginal rate of 20% on our incomes. Income tax, nothing else. We were paid to go to university, so no student loans ever. We have no housing costs, having long ago paid off our mortgage (having been fortunate to start out on the housing ladder when properties were cheap, we never had a mortgage of more than £50k.) We have no family to raise. So our incomes are more than enough to live on, indeed our savings our going up and we spend freely.
Now compare that to my son and his wife, in their early thirties, whose gross income is about the same as ours. They both pay 20% income tax, 10% NI currently, 9% student loan repayments (probably lasting 30 years) and pension contributions of 5% and 6% respectively. So they face a marginal rate of 44%-45% deductions from their income. Whats left goes on a £200k mortgage for a very modest house and raising one child so far. They struggle to make ends meet and have to watch every penny. Luckily for them they have Bank of Mum and Dad to fall back on, but others are not so lucky.
If this Chancellor and any future Chancellor want to level the playing field between my privileged retired generation and a generation of young adults in work who are struggling to make ends meet, through cutting NI and raising income tax by stealth, then I am all for it. The principle for me is that two people on the same income should pay the same rate of tax on it, regardless of the source of that income.
Very well said.
Indeed and those in labour who attack the long term objective of eliminating NI and equalising the tax rate for all, with increased personal allowance to shield poorer pensioners are perversely on the side of the pensioners v the workers who are precently paying double taxation
I suggest you should be more sympathetic to those in labour. Those contractions really hurt.
When it comes to Labour's tax policies though there's definitely womb for improvement.
I’m not attacking removing NI, just the Tories being hypocrites. £40Bn blackhole that they can’t pay for.
You need to understand the explanation as I have just posted
You are constantly complaining about pensioners and yet this change would be progressive and much fairer to everyone
Depends how you do it, not just on the headline.
Move the basic rate of IT up (to what? 25/26p?), fine, though there are non-trivial admin issues in doing that.
Squeeze the IT threshold, even passively by letting inflation eat at it, not fine. That's a transfer of tax burden to the lower paid. Unfortunately, that's been government policy since Sunak was Chancellor.
Pretending it can be done by spending cuts. Probably la la land. But go on, specify 40 billion a year of savings if you dare.
I've been a slight fan of Pope Francis during his time int he job, but after his Ukraine 'white flag' comment, I'd just like to say this:
Pope Francis, I hope you rot in Hell.
It doesn't matter how much he tries to clarify the comment; his words will have been heard and listened to. It is not up to Ukraine to 'negotiate'; it is up to Russia to withdraw.
There's also a rather important moral issue. Despite what tankies and pro-Russians say, Ukraine did not start this war. The aggressor is obvious, and the aggression unsupportable. What Pope Francis says will lead to more war, not less.
(And yes, I have read the 'clarification' (1), It's shit.
Anyone who has been following Russia over the last decade will recognise this as an incredibly naive comment by the Pope - almost idiotic.
It's too blunt to not be deliberate, rather than naiive. He's clearly a tankie at heart, more wrapped up in adolescent politics than the morals of effectively condoning an imperialist conqueror by making defending oneself as worthy of condemnation as attacking someone.
It's infuritating, as there seem to be countless numbers of people who do the same thing, equating the morality of defending oneself with that of attacking another, with faux neutral appeals for cessation as part of that.
The MoS seem to be convinced Angela Rayner has broken the law despite the Police already investigating and finding no evidence of any rules being broken.
Feels a bit beergate 2.0 doesn’t it?
Hunt has loads of rental properties and so the right wing cesspit media should be careful about making this a huge story .
I've been a slight fan of Pope Francis during his time int he job, but after his Ukraine 'white flag' comment, I'd just like to say this:
Pope Francis, I hope you rot in Hell.
It doesn't matter how much he tries to clarify the comment; his words will have been heard and listened to. It is not up to Ukraine to 'negotiate'; it is up to Russia to withdraw.
There's also a rather important moral issue. Despite what tankies and pro-Russians say, Ukraine did not start this war. The aggressor is obvious, and the aggression unsupportable. What Pope Francis says will lead to more war, not less.
(And yes, I have read the 'clarification' (1), It's shit.
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
Yes, it's "All Households" from the ONS. 1.01 spare bedrooms per household, even after netting off against the 1 million households that are overcrowded.
(It's probably even higher - I've assumed that households with "2+" extra bedrooms just have 2.)
It's an irrelevant statistic though.
If a retired great grandparent has say 2 spare bedrooms, 4 adult children, 12 adult grandchildren and 20 child great grandchildren then who should be living in those "spare rooms"?
We need to build more houses so that everyone can have a family home of their own, not try and foist people into the gaps of existing households.
"Mansions for all" - comes with free owl!
Bart is typical of why we are in such a state as a country, the idiot thinks everything should be free and especially for him. thicker than mince and twice as stupid.
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
I'd certainly count houses that people don't live in.
How many empty houses would you have to have for that stat to make sense?
I don't understand this peculiar questioning.
Spare bedrooms is a basic statistic in the English Housing Survey which has been collected for years and years. I've discussed the survey fairly often here, and on occasion under-occupation.
Under-occupied means 2 or more spare bedrooms, and in the recent survey 9.3 million owner occupied dwellings were "under-occupied":
That's 18.6 million from your 26 million just for a start, plus any third spare bedrooms, and all those households that only have one spare bedroom.
26 million sounds about right, but I'd punt that that is an England-only figure.
The biggest distortion, and most gaping wound, in our housing market, remains the owner-occupied sector, its unfortunate existence as a store of wealth and tax free accumulation of wealth, and the tax breaks, politics and rhetoric that goes into justifying those practices.
Distractedly rant against pensioners and landlords as much as you like. The OO sector, and related tax breaks and market distortion, is the core problem.
Yes but you still haven't said what the relevance of this statistic is.
If we build enough houses, then everyone can have a house for their own household. There's no problems besides the shortage of houses.
Trying to break up households or foist people into people's spare rooms isn't a solution. Nor is suggesting that pensioners who can be vulnerable and have a support network where they live should be evicted from their homes and shoved into a smaller house once their kids no longer need a room in their home.
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
I'd certainly count houses that people don't live in.
How many empty houses would you have to have for that stat to make sense?
I don't understand this peculiar questioning.
Spare bedrooms is a basic statistic in the English Housing Survey which has been collected for years and years. I've discussed the survey fairly often here, and on occasion under-occupation.
Under-occupied means 2 or more spare bedrooms, and in the recent survey 9.3 million owner occupied dwellings were "under-occupied":
That's 18.6 million from your 26 million just for a start, plus any third spare bedrooms, and all those households that only have one spare bedroom.
26 million sounds about right, but I'd punt that that is an England-only figure.
The biggest distortion, and most gaping wound, in our housing market, remains the owner-occupied sector, its unfortunate existence as a store of wealth and tax free accumulation of wealth, and the tax breaks, politics and rhetoric that goes into justifying those practices.
Distractedly rant against pensioners and landlords as much as you like. The OO sector, and related tax breaks and market distortion, is the core problem.
It's E&W. Powys has 1.3 spare bedrooms per household, for example.
I get 8.3 million 1 extra bedrooms, 8.9 million * 2 extra bedrooms, and 1.1 million with one fewer bedrooms than needed.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
My wife and I are both pensioners, we have two incomes both from contributory pensions and we are not yet old enough to have a state pension (thanks to the qualifying date for this being raised.)
We both pay a marginal rate of 20% on our incomes. Income tax, nothing else. We were paid to go to university, so no student loans ever. We have no housing costs, having long ago paid off our mortgage (having been fortunate to start out on the housing ladder when properties were cheap, we never had a mortgage of more than £50k.) We have no family to raise. So our incomes are more than enough to live on, indeed our savings our going up and we spend freely.
Now compare that to my son and his wife, in their early thirties, whose gross income is about the same as ours. They both pay 20% income tax, 10% NI currently, 9% student loan repayments (probably lasting 30 years) and pension contributions of 5% and 6% respectively. So they face a marginal rate of 44%-45% deductions from their income. Whats left goes on a £200k mortgage for a very modest house and raising one child so far. They struggle to make ends meet and have to watch every penny. Luckily for them they have Bank of Mum and Dad to fall back on, but others are not so lucky.
If this Chancellor and any future Chancellor want to level the playing field between my privileged retired generation and a generation of young adults in work who are struggling to make ends meet, through cutting NI and raising income tax by stealth, then I am all for it. The principle for me is that two people on the same income should pay the same rate of tax on it, regardless of the source of that income.
Very well said.
Indeed and those in labour who attack the long term objective of eliminating NI and equalising the tax rate for all, with increased personal allowance to shield poorer pensioners are perversely on the side of the pensioners v the workers who are precently paying double taxation
I suggest you should be more sympathetic to those in labour. Those contractions really hurt.
That is funny, but the point remains that Labour does not seem to understand it is progressive and sensible to merge the tax rates in a sensible manner and time scale
The MoS seem to be convinced Angela Rayner has broken the law despite the Police already investigating and finding no evidence of any rules being broken.
Feels a bit beergate 2.0 doesn’t it?
Hunt has loads of rental properties and so the right wing cesspit media should be careful about making this a huge story .
I've been a slight fan of Pope Francis during his time int he job, but after his Ukraine 'white flag' comment, I'd just like to say this:
Pope Francis, I hope you rot in Hell.
It doesn't matter how much he tries to clarify the comment; his words will have been heard and listened to. It is not up to Ukraine to 'negotiate'; it is up to Russia to withdraw.
There's also a rather important moral issue. Despite what tankies and pro-Russians say, Ukraine did not start this war. The aggressor is obvious, and the aggression unsupportable. What Pope Francis says will lead to more war, not less.
(And yes, I have read the 'clarification' (1), It's shit.
Anyone who has been following Russia over the last decade will recognise this as an incredibly naive comment by the Pope - almost idiotic.
Russia seems to have hypnotised half of the world. Remarkable how they pull it off.
There are still people out there who think Russia is anti-imperialist.
Well, it is.
In the same way Williamson is an anti-racist.
They're against other people being imperialists.
(And always were. Look how many colonial wars they sponsored against Britain and France while brutally crushing rebellions in East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Or, going further back, the Tsarist meddling in Afghanistan, India and Persia.)
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
Not just pensioners. I'm assuming you refer to the inaction of raising tax bands in line with inflation but let me know if that isn't the case. That affects everyone including the lowest paid.
No.i mean giving tax breaks to workers via ni cut but f all for pensioners. My pension increase has been cut 20pc by tax before I get it.
You've got an 8.5% increase in your state pension.
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
Yes, it's "All Households" from the ONS. 1.01 spare bedrooms per household, even after netting off against the 1 million households that are overcrowded.
(It's probably even higher - I've assumed that households with "2+" extra bedrooms just have 2.)
It's an irrelevant statistic though.
If a retired great grandparent has say 2 spare bedrooms, 4 adult children, 12 adult grandchildren and 20 child great grandchildren then who should be living in those "spare rooms"?
We need to build more houses so that everyone can have a family home of their own, not try and foist people into the gaps of existing households.
"Mansions for all" - comes with free owl!
Bart is typical of why we are in such a state as a country, the idiot thinks everything should be free and especially for him. thicker than mince and twice as stupid.
Er, what? He wants more houses to be built so people can buy them, not be given them for nothing.
Not getting tax cut because you don’t pay that particular tax - why is that an issue?
I don’t get to buy much productivity increasing industrial equipment at home, so I don’t benefit from tax allowances for that. Is that an attack on me?
Pensioners are getting an above inflation increase in the pension, as well.
It is interesting though, this reaction to the budget. I had thought the retired population realised they’d got the best of government largesse since 2010 and would be happy for their working age brethren, but it does seem that a portion of them are outraged.
It’s yet more bad news for the government but it’s also a warning to Labour that the national union of pensioners (NUP) is going to be a militant force to be reckoned with in the next parliament.
Where you been , on here it is "attack pensioners who are all filthy rich" day every day.
I've been a slight fan of Pope Francis during his time int he job, but after his Ukraine 'white flag' comment, I'd just like to say this:
Pope Francis, I hope you rot in Hell.
It doesn't matter how much he tries to clarify the comment; his words will have been heard and listened to. It is not up to Ukraine to 'negotiate'; it is up to Russia to withdraw.
There's also a rather important moral issue. Despite what tankies and pro-Russians say, Ukraine did not start this war. The aggressor is obvious, and the aggression unsupportable. What Pope Francis says will lead to more war, not less.
(And yes, I have read the 'clarification' (1), It's shit.
Anyone who has been following Russia over the last decade will recognise this as an incredibly naive comment by the Pope - almost idiotic.
It's too blunt to not be deliberate, rather than naiive. He's clearly a tankie at heart, more wrapped up in adolescent politics than the morals of effectively condoning an imperialist conqueror by making defending oneself as worthy of condemnation as attacking someone.
It's infuritating, as there seem to be countless numbers of people who do the same thing, equating the morality of defending oneself with that of attacking another, with faux neutral appeals for cessation as part of that.
They also ignore that, with an antagonist such as Russia, 'peace' now on their terms just leads to another war in the near future.
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
I'd certainly count houses that people don't live in.
How many empty houses would you have to have for that stat to make sense?
I don't understand this peculiar questioning.
Spare bedrooms is a basic statistic in the English Housing Survey which has been collected for years and years. I've discussed the survey fairly often here, and on occasion under-occupation.
Under-occupied means 2 or more spare bedrooms, and in the recent survey 9.3 million owner occupied dwellings were "under-occupied":
That's 18.6 million from your 26 million just for a start, plus any third spare bedrooms, and all those households that only have one spare bedroom.
26 million sounds about right, but I'd punt that that is an England-only figure.
The biggest distortion, and most gaping wound, in our housing market, remains the owner-occupied sector, its unfortunate existence as a store of wealth and tax free accumulation of wealth, and the tax breaks, politics and rhetoric that goes into justifying those practices.
Distractedly rant against pensioners and landlords as much as you like. The OO sector, and related tax breaks and market distortion, is the core problem.
Yes but you still haven't said what the relevance of this statistic is.
If we build enough houses, then everyone can have a house for their own household. There's no problems besides the shortage of houses.
Trying to break up households or foist people into people's spare rooms isn't a solution. Nor is suggesting that pensioners who can be vulnerable and have a support network where they live should be evicted from their homes and shoved into a smaller house once their kids no longer need a room in their home.
Just build more houses. Problem solved.
I don't think Matt was suggesting such draconian measures.
I would go for no stamp duty when downsizing and large council tax increases on spare rooms.
Pope's are not on the whole known for being that concerned with fighting evil. They are far more concerned with preserving the power and wealth of the Church and advancing their personal interpretations of doctrine, it has ever been thus.
If that entails cooperating with evil or turning a blind eye to it, or even just lecturing people who have the temerity to not accept violent domination by others that they should share blame for trying to preserve their own lives, then so be it.
If some actual good elsewhere can be done along the way then that is enough to convince them the whole must be good too.
In fairness, the mindset is that the Church's business is to minister to the souls of the living, not their physicality nor the political processes of the moment. It's not meant to be good in that sense.
"When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you have to have the courage to negotiate. Negotiations are never a surrender."
Imagine he said that to the people of Gaza.
Also, negotiations absolutely are sometimes a surrender.
You might find it is the only option sometimes, and people like the pope clearly are working to help Russia force Ukraine into that situation - along with most of the Republican party - but 'We are losing, please stop killing us and we will agree to give you X' is most certainly a surrender, just a negotiated one.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
My wife and I are both pensioners, we have two incomes both from contributory pensions and we are not yet old enough to have a state pension (thanks to the qualifying date for this being raised.)
We both pay a marginal rate of 20% on our incomes. Income tax, nothing else. We were paid to go to university, so no student loans ever. We have no housing costs, having long ago paid off our mortgage (having been fortunate to start out on the housing ladder when properties were cheap, we never had a mortgage of more than £50k.) We have no family to raise. So our incomes are more than enough to live on, indeed our savings our going up and we spend freely.
Now compare that to my son and his wife, in their early thirties, whose gross income is about the same as ours. They both pay 20% income tax, 10% NI currently, 9% student loan repayments (probably lasting 30 years) and pension contributions of 5% and 6% respectively. So they face a marginal rate of 44%-45% deductions from their income. Whats left goes on a £200k mortgage for a very modest house and raising one child so far. They struggle to make ends meet and have to watch every penny. Luckily for them they have Bank of Mum and Dad to fall back on, but others are not so lucky.
If this Chancellor and any future Chancellor want to level the playing field between my privileged retired generation and a generation of young adults in work who are struggling to make ends meet, through cutting NI and raising income tax by stealth, then I am all for it. The principle for me is that two people on the same income should pay the same rate of tax on it, regardless of the source of that income.
Very well said.
Indeed and those in labour who attack the long term objective of eliminating NI and equalising the tax rate for all, with increased personal allowance to shield poorer pensioners are perversely on the side of the pensioners v the workers who are precently paying double taxation
They going to refund all the pensioners who paid NI for 50 years then, what twisted logic does someone who has paid NI for one or two years compare with someone who paid it for 50+ years. Nobody is double taxed , only idiots think that.
I’m not attacking removing NI, just the Tories being hypocrites. £40Bn blackhole that they can’t pay for.
You need to understand the explanation as I have just posted
You are constantly complaining about pensioners and yet this change would be progressive and much fairer to everyone
Depends how you do it, not just on the headline.
Move the basic rate of IT up (to what? 25/26p?), fine, though there are non-trivial admin issues in doing that.
Squeeze the IT threshold, even passively by letting inflation eat at it, not fine. That's a transfer of tax burden to the lower paid. Unfortunately, that's been government policy since Sunak was Chancellor.
Pretending it can be done by spending cuts. Probably la la land. But go on, specify 40 billion a year of savings if you dare.
The only way is to steadily reduce NI and increase IT over a long period and as I said increase tax allowances to protect poorer pensioners
There is not a quick fix but Hunt has started on the path and once in office I hope Reeves sees the sense in continuing the process
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
I'd certainly count houses that people don't live in.
How many empty houses would you have to have for that stat to make sense?
I don't understand this peculiar questioning.
Spare bedrooms is a basic statistic in the English Housing Survey which has been collected for years and years. I've discussed the survey fairly often here, and on occasion under-occupation.
Under-occupied means 2 or more spare bedrooms, and in the recent survey 9.3 million owner occupied dwellings were "under-occupied":
That's 18.6 million from your 26 million just for a start, plus any third spare bedrooms, and all those households that only have one spare bedroom.
26 million sounds about right, but I'd punt that that is an England-only figure.
The biggest distortion, and most gaping wound, in our housing market, remains the owner-occupied sector, its unfortunate existence as a store of wealth and tax free accumulation of wealth, and the tax breaks, politics and rhetoric that goes into justifying those practices.
Distractedly rant against pensioners and landlords as much as you like. The OO sector, and related tax breaks and market distortion, is the core problem.
Yes but you still haven't said what the relevance of this statistic is.
If we build enough houses, then everyone can have a house for their own household. There's no problems besides the shortage of houses.
Trying to break up households or foist people into people's spare rooms isn't a solution. Nor is suggesting that pensioners who can be vulnerable and have a support network where they live should be evicted from their homes and shoved into a smaller house once their kids no longer need a room in their home.
Just build more houses. Problem solved.
I don't think Matt was suggesting such draconian measures.
I would go for no stamp duty on downsizing and large council tax increases on spare rooms.
What is a 'spare room,' though? I mean, if a person has two children who live Box and Cox with their other parent on a 3/4 day a week split, do they have two rooms empty 55% of the time and have to pay?
I suppose it would be fair enough for me, living alone in a three bedroom house. But would my study (which I do need because of the nature of my work) also count? Or would it be exempt?
Or - and here we come back to the 'bedroom tax' as it was not very accurately known - what about those who need that space for say, dialysis equipment? Or a carer?
I can see why it isn't used as a criteria. It gets complicated very quickly and complicated taxes raise little money.
Not getting tax cut because you don’t pay that particular tax - why is that an issue?
I don’t get to buy much productivity increasing industrial equipment at home, so I don’t benefit from tax allowances for that. Is that an attack on me?
Pensioners are getting an above inflation increase in the pension, as well.
Not to mention that the increases in government spending have predominantly benefitted pensioners as well.
Can you tell me what government spending has benefitted me perhaps.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
Not just pensioners. I'm assuming you refer to the inaction of raising tax bands in line with inflation but let me know if that isn't the case. That affects everyone including the lowest paid.
No.i mean giving tax breaks to workers via ni cut but f all for pensioners. My pension increase has been cut 20pc by tax before I get it.
You've got an 8.5% increase in your state pension.
That's a lot more than most workers will get.
And 10.1% last year
For comparison, my salary increased by 6.2% last year, and will increase by 4.5% this. My employer is a reasonably good one, so this will be somewhere around or above the market average for my sector.
Pope's are not on the whole known for being that concerned with fighting evil. They are far more concerned with preserving the power and wealth of the Church and advancing their personal interpretations of doctrine, it has ever been thus.
If that entails cooperating with evil or turning a blind eye to it, or even just lecturing people who have the temerity to not accept violent domination by others that they should share blame for trying to preserve their own lives, then so be it.
If some actual good elsewhere can be done along the way then that is enough to convince them the whole must be good too.
In fairness, the mindset is that the Church's business is to minister to the souls of the living, not their physicality nor the political processes of the moment. It's not meant to be good in that sense.
Historically it's not been great at the ministering of the souls business either. Made plenty of money off that.
Probably due a deeper renewal anyway - any institution, any at all, will ultimately end up focusing more on itself than its purported mission.
"When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you have to have the courage to negotiate. Negotiations are never a surrender."
Imagine he said that to the people of Gaza.
It makes me wonder where he's getting his information from. That sounds like he's lapping up the septic anal spewings of the tankies and the Russian foreign ministry.
Fun fact of the day: there are 26 million spare bedrooms in England & Wales...
Um plausibility check! That's more than the number of households! A "household" is a group of people living together in a single address, usually a family. If you are right, it means that every family has a spare bedroom on average. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't seem plausible. Are you including things like hotels, prisons, student accommodation?
I'd certainly count houses that people don't live in.
How many empty houses would you have to have for that stat to make sense?
I don't understand this peculiar questioning.
Spare bedrooms is a basic statistic in the English Housing Survey which has been collected for years and years. I've discussed the survey fairly often here, and on occasion under-occupation.
Under-occupied means 2 or more spare bedrooms, and in the recent survey 9.3 million owner occupied dwellings were "under-occupied":
That's 18.6 million from your 26 million just for a start, plus any third spare bedrooms, and all those households that only have one spare bedroom.
26 million sounds about right, but I'd punt that that is an England-only figure.
The biggest distortion, and most gaping wound, in our housing market, remains the owner-occupied sector, its unfortunate existence as a store of wealth and tax free accumulation of wealth, and the tax breaks, politics and rhetoric that goes into justifying those practices.
Distractedly rant against pensioners and landlords as much as you like. The OO sector, and related tax breaks and market distortion, is the core problem.
It's E&W. Powys has 1.3 spare bedrooms per household, for example.
I get 8.3 million 1 extra bedrooms, 8.9 million * 2 extra bedrooms, and 1.1 million with one fewer bedrooms than needed.
So?
Many people get a home with the number of rooms they need. Later on they no longer need them, but they're settled there and have a support network there. Even later on those people 'move on' and the house is freed up for someone who once more needs that many bedrooms.
It's the circle of life. So long as we construct enough houses for our population growth it isn't remotely a problem.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
Not just pensioners. I'm assuming you refer to the inaction of raising tax bands in line with inflation but let me know if that isn't the case. That affects everyone including the lowest paid.
No.i mean giving tax breaks to workers via ni cut but f all for pensioners. My pension increase has been cut 20pc by tax before I get it.
You've got an 8.5% increase in your state pension.
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
Not just pensioners. I'm assuming you refer to the inaction of raising tax bands in line with inflation but let me know if that isn't the case. That affects everyone including the lowest paid.
No.i mean giving tax breaks to workers via ni cut but f all for pensioners. My pension increase has been cut 20pc by tax before I get it.
You've got an 8.5% increase in your state pension.
That's a lot more than most workers will get.
And 10.1% last year
8% or 10.1% of very little is still very little.
As I said last night when I was 20, 60 years ago, I knew then the pension would be insufficient and spent my working life investing in a private pension which today is now wide-spread across the working population
Off thread but I have to say it...The Tories have got one more shot to get my vote back. They've screwed pensioners in this budget. If they don't do something in the Next statement I will do something I never thought I could do and Vote Labour.
My wife and I are both pensioners, we have two incomes both from contributory pensions and we are not yet old enough to have a state pension (thanks to the qualifying date for this being raised.)
We both pay a marginal rate of 20% on our incomes. Income tax, nothing else. We were paid to go to university, so no student loans ever. We have no housing costs, having long ago paid off our mortgage (having been fortunate to start out on the housing ladder when properties were cheap, we never had a mortgage of more than £50k.) We have no family to raise. So our incomes are more than enough to live on, indeed our savings our going up and we spend freely.
Now compare that to my son and his wife, in their early thirties, whose gross income is about the same as ours. They both pay 20% income tax, 10% NI currently, 9% student loan repayments (probably lasting 30 years) and pension contributions of 5% and 6% respectively. So they face a marginal rate of 44%-45% deductions from their income. Whats left goes on a £200k mortgage for a very modest house and raising one child so far. They struggle to make ends meet and have to watch every penny. Luckily for them they have Bank of Mum and Dad to fall back on, but others are not so lucky.
If this Chancellor and any future Chancellor want to level the playing field between my privileged retired generation and a generation of young adults in work who are struggling to make ends meet, through cutting NI and raising income tax by stealth, then I am all for it. The principle for me is that two people on the same income should pay the same rate of tax on it, regardless of the source of that income.
The truly scary thing is that if your son and daughter in law had one single income between them of the same amount as they currently earn jointly the situation would be even worse.
The truly scary thing is how stupid he is and the bollox he is spouting. Apart from NI which he will have paid for 50 years to get his miserly pension and his son and wife only need pay for 35 years , all other taxes are the same. They must be on good salaries if having to pay their student loans. Sounds like the usual whining of the well off , chances are if same as in his day they would not have got into university and be toiling in a factory ot Tesco and staying in a housing association rented house. My heart bleeds for them when I think of all those who could not go to uni, are in crap jobs working all hours while living in a dump with no pension and no hope of ever owning a modest 200K house. There is sure an incredible amount of rich whining bollox on here by green cheesed arseholes.
You start paying a student loan off if you income is above £28,600...
So both over 30K and therefore over 60K joint income. Hardly on the breadline or in bottom 50% of the population at generous minimum. Double the median UK income.
You can't add 2 incomes together and claim its double the median income.
And you're wrong about the graduate tax threshold being on good salaries. The threshold varies depending upon what plan you're on with the lowest threshold being £22,015 which is less than full time minimum wage from next month!
Current students will hit the threshold at just £25k salary. Not a good salary and barely over full time minimum wage.
The graduate tax, along with National Insurance should be abolished and you, I, the young and everyone else should be on the same tax rates.
All your benefits should be abolished so you pay the same as me sunshine, no whining about them from spongers like you.
You don't have much in common with your political hero, former Socialist firebrand and maverick Alex Salmond do you Malcolm?
I am not one for double standards Pete. Whinging spongers like bart Simpson what other people to pay everything whilst he hoovers up benefits etc which he will claim are not taxes etc. greedy greencheese arsehole extrodinaire. Probably charges his children for toothpaste etc as they don't pay NI.
I'm curious what benefits you think I'm claiming when I've already told you I don't claim any?
Unlike you.
bet you get child benefit, free school meals , free childcrae as a minimum, and no whining about cutting them
Comments
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67706277
One thing that is positive is that left wing vandals are increasingly being put in the same category as right wing vandals, which I would say is evidence that people are tiring of 'woke'.
Number of second homes - a tricky one to define. One estimate of the number of second homes without usual residents is sub 200K.
You seem to have developed a rather bizarre hatred of children lately, when actually the amount of benefits given to children is miniscule within the overall welfare budget and those are all means-tested unlike the pension so I'm struggling to see what point you think you are making with that analogy. It rather works against you, not in your favour.
Taxing some people less than others, who have the same earnings, is a bad and immoral choice. It is indefensible.
A newly graduated teacher on 30k as an example who needs to pay rent or save for a deposit is currently on a higher real marginal tax rate than a retired final salary head teacher on a 95k salary who has paid off their home.
Do you really, honestly, think that is appropriate?
Unlike you.
"Charlie Gilmour, son of Pink Floyd guitarist, jailed for protest violence | UK news | The Guardian" https://amp.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jul/15/charlie-gilmour-jailed-david-son-pink-floyd
You cannot just connect a new (medium or large) supply up to the grid; it requires a heck of planning and other systems in place - which naturally enough, the new supplier doesn't want to pay for, especially in advance. And the demandside problems are obvious enough.
Too many people think that electricity is automagically generated and just appears at the sockets in their home. In reality, there's a massive amount of complex engineering involved. Ditto water/sewage, telecoms, etc, etc.
*in Scotland and NI, IIRC
There will be some pensioners living in the same home they lived in decades ago, but whose children and grandchildren don't live with then, but then so what? Should a grandchild or great-grandchild be shipped away from their family home to live with them so that there's full occupation of the homes?
We just need to build more houses, not try to sweat every room to its maximum potential leaving no slack in the system. Its the shortage of empty homes that is the problem, not the abundance of them.
We need more houses.
Nothing should stop the developers from doing their own job. The water firms (which is owned by the state in your country) should pull their fingers out and do their own job. No excuses.
You would still be better off on £95k even if you paid the same tax rate as someone on £30k, let alone a higher one.
You really are as thick as a brick. 🤦♂️
Were you under the idiotic belief that men are somehow incapable of procreating in their fifties or sixties?
I know pensioners with children younger than my own.
Unlike you I don't claim a penny in benefits. Unlike you I pay all taxes, including NI too.
"You can't capitulate to evil, you have to fight it and defeat it, so that evil raises the white flag and capitulates."
https://twitter.com/edgarsrinkevics/status/1766716424725107050
I do pay all taxes, including NI.
Can you say the same? To either of those questions? Entitled sponger.
I don’t get to buy much productivity increasing industrial equipment at home, so I don’t benefit from tax allowances for that. Is that an attack on me?
Pensioners are getting an above inflation increase in the pension, as well.
If that entails cooperating with evil or turning a blind eye to it, or even just lecturing people who have the temerity to not accept violent domination by others that they should share blame for trying to preserve their own lives, then so be it.
If some actual good elsewhere can be done along the way then that is enough to convince them the whole must be good too.
That's a lot more than most workers will get.
There is a big reaction against the current system to be had before we need to worry about overreacting.
In the HoC, John Hayes is leading the charge but he's far from the only one making trouble.
I wouldn't entirely be surprised to see some sort of sabotage/bombing campaign aimed at the grid, along the lines of the recent anti-Ulez stuff.
(It's probably even higher - I've assumed that households with "2+" extra bedrooms just have 2.)
But the way the Government have set it up it's like Bob Marley's chains and anchor.
One love.
Feels a bit beergate 2.0 doesn’t it?
If a retired great grandparent has say 2 spare bedrooms, 4 adult children, 12 adult grandchildren and 20 child great grandchildren then who should be living in those "spare rooms"?
We need to build more houses so that everyone can have a family home of their own, not try and foist people into the gaps of existing households.
Spare bedrooms is a basic statistic in the English Housing Survey which has been collected for years and years. I've discussed the survey fairly often here, and on occasion under-occupation.
Under-occupied means 2 or more spare bedrooms, and in the recent survey 9.3 million owner occupied dwellings were "under-occupied":
1.83 The overall rate of under-occupation in England in 2021-22 was 39% with around 9.3 million households living in under-occupied homes (i.e. with two or more spare bedrooms), Annex Table 1.25.https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-housing-survey-2021-to-2022-headline-report/english-housing-survey-2021-to-2022-headline-report#glossary
That's 18.6 million from your 26 million just for a start, plus any third spare bedrooms, and all those households that only have one spare bedroom.
26 million sounds about right, but I'd punt that that is an England-only figure.
The biggest distortion, and most gaping wound, in our housing market, remains the owner-occupied sector, its unfortunate existence as a store of wealth and tax free accumulation of wealth, and the tax breaks, politics and rhetoric that goes into justifying those practices.
Distractedly rant against pensioners and landlords as much as you like. The OO sector, and related tax breaks and market distortion, is the core problem.
It’s yet more bad news for the government but it’s also a warning to Labour that the national union of pensioners (NUP) is going to be a militant force to be reckoned with in the next parliament.
The lords of the castle bought the loyalty of the locals with a steady stream of work. Paid for by the locals taxes….
You are constantly complaining about pensioners and yet this change would be progressive and much fairer to everyone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8xhdL8BPvU
But they make the mistake of not looking at Johnson’s polling when he left office (abysmal) or Brexit right/wrong polling now (very wrong). If they try Brexit 2 Electric Bugaloo (a.k.a. an ECHR referendum) or bringing Boris back in some way, they’ll crash and burn. Even going on about LTNs isn’t going to save them given how popular they turn out to be.
The Conservatives need to identify things they’ve done that are still popular (support during the pandemic and support on energy bills are obvious things for Sunak to talk about) or new proposals that will be popular, although even here faith in the party is so low that no-one believes they can deliver anything.
https://twitter.com/fellaraktar/status/1766668956541104633
LOL!
It’s not up to the police to investigate. They wouldn’t have a clue about property taxation rules. It’s HMRC’s responsibility. If there’s tax due they will launch ann enquiry and issue an assessment.
The confected outrage in the Tory press, including the ever outraged (((Dan Hodges))), is very reminiscent of Beergate though.
This is why smart nations do not elect people in their 80s to run the country.
This is why America given itself a choice of Biden or Trump suggests it is not a smart nation any more...
Move the basic rate of IT up (to what? 25/26p?), fine, though there are non-trivial admin issues in doing that.
Squeeze the IT threshold, even passively by letting inflation eat at it, not fine. That's a transfer of tax burden to the lower paid. Unfortunately, that's been government policy since Sunak was Chancellor.
Pretending it can be done by spending cuts. Probably la la land. But go on, specify 40 billion a year of savings if you dare.
It's infuritating, as there seem to be countless numbers of people who do the same thing, equating the morality of defending oneself with that of attacking another, with faux neutral appeals for cessation as part of that.
There are still people out there who think Russia is anti-imperialist.
If we build enough houses, then everyone can have a house for their own household. There's no problems besides the shortage of houses.
Trying to break up households or foist people into people's spare rooms isn't a solution. Nor is suggesting that pensioners who can be vulnerable and have a support network where they live should be evicted from their homes and shoved into a smaller house once their kids no longer need a room in their home.
Just build more houses. Problem solved.
In the same way Williamson is an anti-racist.
They're against other people being imperialists.
(And always were. Look how many colonial wars they sponsored against Britain and France while brutally crushing rebellions in East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Or, going further back, the Tsarist meddling in Afghanistan, India and Persia.)
"When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you have to have the courage to negotiate. Negotiations are never a surrender."
Imagine he said that to the people of Gaza.
I would go for no stamp duty when downsizing and large council tax increases on spare rooms.
You might find it is the only option sometimes, and people like the pope clearly are working to help Russia force Ukraine into that situation - along with most of the Republican party - but 'We are losing, please stop killing us and we will agree to give you X' is most certainly a surrender, just a negotiated one.
There is not a quick fix but Hunt has started on the path and once in office I hope Reeves sees the sense in continuing the process
I suppose it would be fair enough for me, living alone in a three bedroom house. But would my study (which I do need because of the nature of my work) also count? Or would it be exempt?
Or - and here we come back to the 'bedroom tax' as it was not very accurately known - what about those who need that space for say, dialysis equipment? Or a carer?
I can see why it isn't used as a criteria. It gets complicated very quickly and complicated taxes raise little money.
Probably due a deeper renewal anyway - any institution, any at all, will ultimately end up focusing more on itself than its purported mission.
Many people get a home with the number of rooms they need. Later on they no longer need them, but they're settled there and have a support network there. Even later on those people 'move on' and the house is freed up for someone who once more needs that many bedrooms.
It's the circle of life. So long as we construct enough houses for our population growth it isn't remotely a problem.