When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
What's your limit on gifts? Or does everyone have to fill in a tax return every year? Ornaybe every time they get a credit in their bank account?
£10K
How often? To how many people?
Once a year. To as many people as you like.
Ireland taxes gifts. €3,000 yearly to as many people as you like. Lifetime gift allowance to your children of €400,000. It can be done.
France allows you to gift up to €100k every, I think, 10 or possibly 15 years (I should know, I was looking into it recently as my parents were handing over their half of the ownership of our French house).
My mum did that with the house she shared with me for her final years when I was her carer.
She very inconsiderately popped her clogs after six and a half years ...
If she lived in it post "giving" it" to you... it's not a gift for iht purposes afaik
There's certainly some complex rules about continuing to use an asset after 'gifting' it away.
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
Yep, although I completely disagree with @hyufd on IHT and I am more in line with @BartholomewRoberts there is no doubting @HYUFD views represent a huge constituency of voters and you have to respect that to some extent.
I do think the pension pot change is right as it was an anomaly, but you can't ignore that it will bring into IHT an awful lot of people who previously were nowhere near it.
It'll trigger behavioural change though. People will take their pensions rather than keeping hold of them. There's a lot to be said for encouraging older people to spend the money and assets they have. Ideally on having a good time rather than social care, but realistically both.
The retired are such a huge proportion of the population now that we rely heavily on them for consumer spending. That's the only way they pay meaningful tax - through VAT - while keeping the economy afloat.
The maths is brutal. You have an ever expanding dependent population with ever increasing health and social care needs, coupled with an ever-decreasing working age population that is only going to shrink further now birth rates have sunk so low (even with significant immigration). So unless the retired either keep working much longer or spend spend spend, the tax on working age people has to rise inexorably simply for public services to stand still.
I agree with all of that except 'It'll trigger behavioural change'. It won't. It is the one time that won't because you don't know when you are going to die. You need the pot to live on so you have to keep it. You won't blow it because otherwise you have nothing to live on. If you remove it and keep it, it still attracts IHT when you die. You might distribute some funds before you die, but again what you have to distribute is unchanged.
It will likely see a further increase in annuities that had become less popular under ultra low interest rates.
Must admit I hadn't thought of that. Good point. It does sway the argument towards annuity.
However I wonder if the decision on drawdown/annuity is financial based or life style based. It certainly wasn't financial for me. I have good genes so an annuity would be the best decision financially but I have opted for drawdown for flexibility and as it isn't my only source I am happy with the risk.
I suspect annuities are more attractive to people on lower resources and the IHT impact is on those with higher resources.
If IHT was part of calculations it is very hard for an annuity to make sense under current rules. Generally it is an extra layer of transactions and insurance that come with costs that have to be paid, so is typically worse than self managed drawdown mathematically but the price may suit those wanting certainty and security.
"The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide."
This is the stupidity of all this because, as other PBers have pointed out and experienced, the unlucky ones lose everything.
It is a 100% IHT but by lottery. Maybe 1 in 6 lose the lottery and lose everything they have built up over a lifetime whereas the old guy next door passes in his sleep and leaves the lot behind to face at most a 40% hit and then only above £500K.
A decent set of politicians would be able to take the public through this argument and build a solution.
Good morning
The Dilnot Commission report should have been implemented with cross party support
Care for the elderly is a lottery especially as dementia is not treated the same as a terminal illness
My sister, who had terminal cancer, was cared for in a nursing home for 18 months until she died under CHC assessment but my son in law's parents who both had dementia did not get care under CHC resulting in £200,000 care fees
Mrs Flatlander's mum has dementia but is being cared for at home through a big effort by the family, because (evidenced by a couple of episodes in respite care) she gets better looked after that way.
So any money saved in care fees will be taxed at 40%.
That seems wrong...
Presumably you mean any money in the estate over £500k or £1m is taxed at 40% ?
Yes. But provided you are over the threshold, the marginal rate is 40%.
[Although house prices in the Flatlands mean the limit is lower than stated]
Leon (who seems to have disappeared ?) is fond of talking about a "Korean style armistice". Nonsense, of course, for multiple reasons, but this demonstrates the biggest single one.
US Secretary of Defense confirmed that Washington would defend South Korea by using all available weapons, including nuclear weapons, if necessary. Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the US or its allies and partners would lead to the end of the Kim Jong Un regime. https://x.com/Hromadske/status/1851922058030256371
Unless Ukraine is in NATO, the comparison is simply absurd.
It would require a nuclear guarantee from the UK and France. Not enough nukes to defeat Russia in an all out war, but enough for MAD.
But Europe definitely needs to get its act together, and part of that is by excluding, or threatening to exclude, bad actors like Hungary or Slovakia under Fico from NATO and the security apparatus of the EU as well as taking away their veto over economic sanctions. The US is going to become semi-detached from NATO even if Harris wins, and potentially actively hostile if Trump does - only mutual hostility to China would remain as common cause, and NATO is not the main geographical player in that theatre.
Any thoughts on simple investment strategies for a Trump win that could hedge against global trade wars?
Gold is at a record high this morning…
I struggle with gold for some reason (well because its a lump of metal without any obvious return bar speculation). But yes, that is probably part of the answer.
Well it’s a lot less volatile than Bitcoin!
In the medium term the old fashioned S&P 500 tracker is unlikely to generate terrible returns, if only that they regularly replace old companies with new ones.
Disclaimer: just because that’s where I put my own investments, doesn’t mean it’s suitable for yours!
"By provoking and then taking apparent pleasure in dramatic reactions from their critics, Trump and his team encourage his supporters’ feelings of vitriol toward fellow Americans—feelings Trump has spent years feeding by referring to his political opponents as enemies, “vermin,” “lunatics,” and “thugs.” Harris and her team will make a much stronger closing statement if they refuse to give Trump the satisfaction of being their campaign’s main subject. But it’s also up to the American voting public to resist being baited by the outrage that Trump stokes, and to refuse the path of vengeance that he represents."
ie when Trump goes low (which is most of the time) you're probably best ignoring it. But then the risk is his vile rhetoric and behaviour becomes normalized. Tricky.
I like the reference to the voters here. At the end of the day it's up to them. Do they really want this shit?
I can’t be the only one looking at this and thinking a bit of victim blaming? They attack him and his supporters and he uses that attack right back at them. That’s good politics.
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
What's your limit on gifts? Or does everyone have to fill in a tax return every year? Ornaybe every time they get a credit in their bank account?
£10K
How often? To how many people?
Once a year. To as many people as you like.
Ireland taxes gifts. €3,000 yearly to as many people as you like. Lifetime gift allowance to your children of €400,000. It can be done.
France allows you to gift up to €100k every, I think, 10 or possibly 15 years (I should know, I was looking into it recently as my parents were handing over their half of the ownership of our French house).
My mum did that with the house she shared with me for her final years when I was her carer.
She very inconsiderately popped her clogs after six and a half years ...
If she lived in it post "giving" it" to you... it's not a gift for iht purposes afaik
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
Yesterday went some way towards that. 20% IHT on business and agricultural property above the threshold.
Our regime is out of step with other developed European countries, which generally have broader bases and lower rates.
Agricultural property used to be exempt, so yesterday’s changes are simply a tax rise that sends even more money to the lawyers and accountants.
Isn't the concern that wealthy non-farming people have been buying farmland to evade IHT when they die?
Avoid. Not evade.
Evade=illegal Avoid=finding a legal loophole. It's reasonable for governments to close loopholes.
The distinction between the two isn't as clear as it was, of course. But if it's a government designed exemption, which was true for agricultural land, it's not a loophole.
Rich non-farmers buying agricultural land just in order to pass down assets, while avoiding IHT, wasn't really part of the plan.
Are you saying the likes of the Duke of Westminster have fucked it for regular farmers ?
Anders Holch Povlsen is probably a bigger culprit...
I don't think he's buying land for IHT reasons. It could all legitimately be in a nature conservation trust anyway.
I remember Glen Feshie from the early 90's when the tree cover was very limited and the wildlife interest was close to zero. Very different now.
He's put a big boot into official conservation organisations who have mucked about avoiding radical solutions for too long.
In terms of taxing inheritance as income, would it make sense to do so only on withdrawal from a fund?
So instead of setting up some sort of complicated family trust in advance, you could just create one on inheriting with the money and withdraw from it at whatever rate, paying income tax at that time?
That would be the way to deal with the farm land issue - if it is simply passed onto the next generation of farmers, no tax. If they sell it...
Otherwise corporate ownership of all agricultural land will be the norm in a generation.
If you don't mind that....
Exactly - it would solve most of the farm problem straight away.
What you would do with other sorts of assets is the tricky part. Is the Van Gogh on the wall part of the fund or not?
Yes, the concern is a lot of farms will be caught up in this, not just larger ones or corporate owned ones. If there is a land price crash, you can bet that a lot of what land comes onto the market will be keenly fought over by investment companies/green energy or carbon offsetting schemes. It won't be as easy as selling off a field for housing for a lot of family farms
It's hard to say the short term net result, given average farm size and land value there won't be many viable family farms under £1 million total value.
Someone asked how many tenant farms there are right now, my rough guess is in Scotland it's about 65% owner occupied/35% tenanted
Leon (who seems to have disappeared ?) is fond of talking about a "Korean style armistice". Nonsense, of course, for multiple reasons, but this demonstrates the biggest single one.
US Secretary of Defense confirmed that Washington would defend South Korea by using all available weapons, including nuclear weapons, if necessary. Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the US or its allies and partners would lead to the end of the Kim Jong Un regime. https://x.com/Hromadske/status/1851922058030256371
Unless Ukraine is in NATO, the comparison is simply absurd.
It would require a nuclear guarantee from the UK and France. Not enough nukes to defeat Russia in an all out war, but enough for MAD.
But Europe definitely needs to get its act together, and part of that is by excluding, or threatening to exclude, bad actors like Hungary or Slovakia under Fico from NATO and the security apparatus of the EU as well as taking away their veto over economic sanctions. The US is going to become semi-detached from NATO even if Harris wins, and potentially actively hostile if Trump does - only mutual hostility to China would remain as common cause, and NATO is not the main geographical player in that theatre.
Any thoughts on simple investment strategies for a Trump win that could hedge against global trade wars?
Gold is at a record high this morning…
I struggle with gold for some reason (well because its a lump of metal without any obvious return bar speculation). But yes, that is probably part of the answer.
Well it’s a lot less volatile than Bitcoin!
In the medium term the old fashioned S&P 500 tracker is unlikely to generate terrible returns, if only that they regularly replace old companies with new ones.
Disclaimer: just because that’s where I put my own investments, doesn’t mean it’s suitable for yours!
I am mostly in trackers of the big indices but at a guesstimate probably around 40-50% is US. Would like that number to come down if Trumpy wins. If we get into big extended trade wars I assume it is not impossible things like new taxes on foreign shareholder sales and dividends are added.
Crypto slightly more appealing than gold but similar in a non productive speculative type asset.
Serious fury from pro Ukraine voices now. One can still dream that’s it’s a big psyop and on the morning of 6th Nov, Ukraine will launch a huge surprise operation aimed at crushing the Russian army. But that sadly feels like wish casting.
“Biden sabotaged Ukraine's confidential plans then didn't honor the request to keep those plans confidential, spreading it to media to further sabotage.
Biden is a f**king piece of sh*t and now costing thousands of deaths.”
Yes, to say that they’re royally pissed off with Biden would be something of an understatement right now.
His actions are some way short of matching his words, European nations are going to have to step up no matter the result in the US next week.
Starmer and Reeves have been very careful in their phrasing on support for Ukraine. It isn't time-limited, but there seems to be zero prospect of any increase to the £3bn pa figure. I'm not happy about it.
I actually have a hospital appointment this morning. What a budget!
I went to hospital yesterday.
There was a poster by the entrance warning about measles, which we thought had been vanquished in the 1960s, before they invented anti-vaxxers.
But beyond that were electronic signs displaying a message that their software licence had expired (presumably unbeknownst to whoever could either renew the licence or turn the system off to save electricity) and direction signs that stopped well short of their destination. The clock had not been put back an hour at the weekend, or so I thought till I noticed that even then it would be 10 minutes wrong.
People say the NHS needs huge investment. They are right. It does. But it also needs people directly running hospitals and clinics to pick the low hanging fruit.
The other and equally obvious management possibility is facilities management that has been privatised out under PFI with huge fees for the proverbial changing of a lightbulb. A relative worked in exactly that kind of hospital - nearly badly hurt in an accident (collapse of furniture): it was a sobering moment for her when she realised how many possible bodies she might have had to sue. And she went and joined her union the next day, which I'd never been able to get her to do for years.
Probably up to their eyeballs in mortgage debt. Still, no sympathy.
Got to ask how on earth have they ended up in that mess with 70 btl properties. Well I know how because they used the extra equity in the first one to purchase the second one and so on but that really is self inflicted no sympathy...
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
Every case is different.
Our 90 year old patient usually stays in bed once put there. The bed can be lowered to the floor which prevents any accidents.
Though when put in formal care to give everyone a break only it took 3 days before she had a fall, despite not having had any such incidents at home.
It does take a 92 year old to keep an eye on things between carer visits (mostly family) but we are just about managing.
At least she's got past the point of saying "I want to be dead" half the time.
Probably up to their eyeballs in mortgage debt. Still, no sympathy.
When I was selling my father's house, one offer came from a chap with a nearby shop. Had something like a dozen BTL properties. Wanted us to stop considering offers so he could see about raising money on them.
As SandyRentoul would say, and I did, feck that.
Edit: in the end, the thing went to a services family returning from overseas stations. Just the luck of it, but I was sentimentally glad it didn't end up as a HMO.
Probably up to their eyeballs in mortgage debt. Still, no sympathy.
Got to ask how on earth have they ended up in that mess with 70 btl properties. Well I know how because they used the extra equity in the first one to purchase the second one and so on but that really is self inflicted no sympathy...
Why do the banks still let them do this stuff after the GFC? (Of course it is because if the banks lose the govt steps in...but hey ho).
Leon (who seems to have disappeared ?) is fond of talking about a "Korean style armistice". Nonsense, of course, for multiple reasons, but this demonstrates the biggest single one.
US Secretary of Defense confirmed that Washington would defend South Korea by using all available weapons, including nuclear weapons, if necessary. Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the US or its allies and partners would lead to the end of the Kim Jong Un regime. https://x.com/Hromadske/status/1851922058030256371
Unless Ukraine is in NATO, the comparison is simply absurd.
It would require a nuclear guarantee from the UK and France. Not enough nukes to defeat Russia in an all out war, but enough for MAD.
But Europe definitely needs to get its act together, and part of that is by excluding, or threatening to exclude, bad actors like Hungary or Slovakia under Fico from NATO and the security apparatus of the EU as well as taking away their veto over economic sanctions. The US is going to become semi-detached from NATO even if Harris wins, and potentially actively hostile if Trump does - only mutual hostility to China would remain as common cause, and NATO is not the main geographical player in that theatre.
Any thoughts on simple investment strategies for a Trump win that could hedge against global trade wars?
Gold is at a record high this morning…
I struggle with gold for some reason (well because its a lump of metal without any obvious return bar speculation). But yes, that is probably part of the answer.
Investing in anything that's at a record high is an inherently risky move.
Gold is the ultimate store of value though. No returns but a lump of the yellow stuff put together 3000 years ago is still intrinsically valuable today (as opposed to something that's survived 3000 years and is valuable for that rather than for the purpose for which it was created).
Trump's hostility to China is trade-based though, not geostrategic. Big difference. He wouldn't give a toss if it invaded Taiwan; he cares much more about state subsidies to industry.
Previously I was content to defend the extension of the bus fare cap at £3 rather than the existing £2, on the basis that it required additional subsidy to keep it going.
But when the Chancellor announced not only a freeze in fuel duty, but an extension of the temporary 5p/litre discount, then feck this.
With rail fares also increasing, the motorist is being feather-bedded, with public transport users bearing the cost.
Sorry, RR, you've got this badly wrong.
My local regional mayor applies a mayoral precept to our council tax that reduces bus fares down from £2 to £1 for under 25s.
Will be interesting to see if our council tax precept will have to increase to cover this or if he decides to increase the fare up to the £3 (or £2). If it is £3, then those under 25s who travel to work by bus, will have their minimum pay increase pretty much wiped out through travel alone.
Previously I was content to defend the extension of the bus fare cap at £3 rather than the existing £2, on the basis that it required additional subsidy to keep it going.
But when the Chancellor announced not only a freeze in fuel duty, but an extension of the temporary 5p/litre discount, then feck this.
With rail fares also increasing, the motorist is being feather-bedded, with public transport users bearing the cost.
Sorry, RR, you've got this badly wrong.
Fuel duty will have to go eventually as EVs rollout but in the short-term, it's an incredibly regressive measure and, combined with public transport costs, widens the marginal cost even further between the modes of travel.
The hope is that there is a much bigger motoring taxation reform coming in the spring that makes things much cheaper for people on low incomes and in rural areas, while making other modes relatively more attractive in the towns and cities.
Probably up to their eyeballs in mortgage debt. Still, no sympathy.
Got to ask how on earth have they ended up in that mess with 70 btl properties. Well I know how because they used the extra equity in the first one to purchase the second one and so on but that really is self inflicted no sympathy...
Previously I was content to defend the extension of the bus fare cap at £3 rather than the existing £2, on the basis that it required additional subsidy to keep it going.
But when the Chancellor announced not only a freeze in fuel duty, but an extension of the temporary 5p/litre discount, then feck this.
With rail fares also increasing, the motorist is being feather-bedded, with public transport users bearing the cost.
Sorry, RR, you've got this badly wrong.
But the front page of today's Sun newspaper was better than it would have otherwise been so job done..
Well I've learnt from the front page of the Daily Mail that BP's corporate shareholders are "Britain's Strivers".
And the Telegraph is full of wailing and gnashing of teeth, so Reeves must have got some things right.
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
Every case is different.
Our 90 year old patient usually stays in bed once put there. The bed can be lowered to the floor which prevents any accidents.
Though when put in formal care to give everyone a break only it took 3 days before she had a fall, despite not having had any such incidents at home.
It does take a 92 year old to keep an eye on things between carer visits (mostly family) but we are just about managing.
At least she's got past the point of saying "I want to be dead" half the time.
All power to your elbow. If you can find something that works that’s amazing.
Probably up to their eyeballs in mortgage debt. Still, no sympathy.
Got to ask how on earth have they ended up in that mess with 70 btl properties. Well I know how because they used the extra equity in the first one to purchase the second one and so on but that really is self inflicted no sympathy...
Why do the banks still let them do this stuff after the GFC? (Of course it is because if the banks lose the govt steps in...but hey ho).
I suspect it's the fact that banks have stopped lending which is why they are in the mess they are in.
If you can't shift the mortgage at the end of the fixed rate period to another lender you are shifted from the 3% rate they were probably paying to 7-8% now.
And given the number of properties they have no bank is going to allow them to remortgage their btl property at a low rate...
Leon (who seems to have disappeared ?) is fond of talking about a "Korean style armistice". Nonsense, of course, for multiple reasons, but this demonstrates the biggest single one.
US Secretary of Defense confirmed that Washington would defend South Korea by using all available weapons, including nuclear weapons, if necessary. Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the US or its allies and partners would lead to the end of the Kim Jong Un regime. https://x.com/Hromadske/status/1851922058030256371
Unless Ukraine is in NATO, the comparison is simply absurd.
It would require a nuclear guarantee from the UK and France. Not enough nukes to defeat Russia in an all out war, but enough for MAD.
But Europe definitely needs to get its act together, and part of that is by excluding, or threatening to exclude, bad actors like Hungary or Slovakia under Fico from NATO and the security apparatus of the EU as well as taking away their veto over economic sanctions. The US is going to become semi-detached from NATO even if Harris wins, and potentially actively hostile if Trump does - only mutual hostility to China would remain as common cause, and NATO is not the main geographical player in that theatre.
Any thoughts on simple investment strategies for a Trump win that could hedge against global trade wars?
Gold is at a record high this morning…
I struggle with gold for some reason (well because its a lump of metal without any obvious return bar speculation). But yes, that is probably part of the answer.
Investing in anything that's at a record high is an inherently risky move.
Gold is the ultimate store of value though. No returns but a lump of the yellow stuff put together 3000 years ago is still intrinsically valuable today (as opposed to something that's survived 3000 years and is valuable for that rather than for the purpose for which it was created).
Trump's hostility to China is trade-based though, not geostrategic. Big difference. He wouldn't give a toss if it invaded Taiwan; he cares much more about state subsidies to industry.
Nope - he cares that the product is being manufactured in china at a price that the USA can't compete with..
Fundamentally, our highly westernised individualistic model means we expect people who need help and those who need care to be fully independent or cared for by paid others without any recourse to extended families or communities who'd do it essentially for free with a bit of aid and help.
This is not normal, throughout human history or in the rest of the world, where extended families care for their elderly parents and those with disabilities.
That doesn't bankrupt nations. And psychologically it's better for them too.
It is though dependent on family members living locally and being available so difficult where both of a couple work or if the elderly parent does not live near them. If the elderly parent has to move in, then a bigger house is needed, and possibly significant modifications.
Which is exactly what we intend to do.
You have a duty to look after your nearest and dearest, and we need to talk much more about duty and responsibility rather than "rights".
Words like duty and responsibility are attractive to me, but I don't think the practicality works.
I believe it is in South Korea, where the expectation on women that they will care for their husband's parents in old age is one of the factors often cited to explain why they are reluctant to marry and have children.
You end up expecting women to do the lion's share of caring for children and for parents, while also holding down a full-time job. Why would they want to do that?
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
The historic model of the elderly being cared for at home depended not only on stay-at-home wives but also on a lesser state of medical intervention possibilities.
I was fortunate in that both my mother and then, after 10 years, my father passed away before the care burden became impossible to meet whilst working. In the latter case part-time working and then early retirement picked up the slack.
At the age of 59 I was intending to work full-time until 65, the oldest permitted age in my job. Shortly after that the need to cut down my hours came, and before my 60th birthday I'd had to retire to cope.
Re. Arnie and other Rep endorsements for Harris, there may be one or two big ones saved for the eve of polling. Dubya would be the really huge one, but I suspect if it was going to happen it'd have happened by now. Though I do see one of his daughters has recently backed Harris.
Leon (who seems to have disappeared ?) is fond of talking about a "Korean style armistice". Nonsense, of course, for multiple reasons, but this demonstrates the biggest single one.
US Secretary of Defense confirmed that Washington would defend South Korea by using all available weapons, including nuclear weapons, if necessary. Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the US or its allies and partners would lead to the end of the Kim Jong Un regime. https://x.com/Hromadske/status/1851922058030256371
Unless Ukraine is in NATO, the comparison is simply absurd.
Leon has received the ban hammer a few nights back.
Don't know if it is Temp or not. It was all somewhat tetchy here at the time.
He went the full racist; Britain for the white British.
Good riddance IMO. He's entertaining, but I don't think that excuses his views.
I don't think he was saying that and, even if he was, I don't think such views should lead to a banning unless it was accompanied by incitement to violence or raw hate.
But, I have a higher spectrum of tolerance for speech (admittedly I can respond very aggressively and rudely to them but I only advocate banning where they are consistently personally abusive or nasty)
He literally said that the UK should promote/increase the number of "white babies".
Great Replacement and "14 words" are all that's left from there....
But, that's your extrapolation of what you thought he might subsequently say and mean and not what he actually said.
Just saying we should increase the number of white babies isn't an intrinsically and fundamentally unreasonable thing to say.
Do I want to spend my time talking to someone who thinks my beautiful, smart children are less welcome in this world because of the colour of their skin? Not really.
Leon (who seems to have disappeared ?) is fond of talking about a "Korean style armistice". Nonsense, of course, for multiple reasons, but this demonstrates the biggest single one.
US Secretary of Defense confirmed that Washington would defend South Korea by using all available weapons, including nuclear weapons, if necessary. Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the US or its allies and partners would lead to the end of the Kim Jong Un regime. https://x.com/Hromadske/status/1851922058030256371
Unless Ukraine is in NATO, the comparison is simply absurd.
Leon has received the ban hammer a few nights back.
Don't know if it is Temp or not. It was all somewhat tetchy here at the time.
He went the full racist; Britain for the white British.
Good riddance IMO. He's entertaining, but I don't think that excuses his views.
I don't think he was saying that and, even if he was, I don't think such views should lead to a banning unless it was accompanied by incitement to violence or raw hate.
But, I have a higher spectrum of tolerance for speech (admittedly I can respond very aggressively and rudely to them but I only advocate banning where they are consistently personally abusive or nasty)
He literally said that the UK should promote/increase the number of "white babies".
Great Replacement and "14 words" are all that's left from there....
But, that's your extrapolation of what you thought he might subsequently say and mean and not what he actually said.
Just saying we should increase the number of white babies isn't an intrinsically and fundamentally unreasonable thing to say.
The implication is "increase the proportion of white babies", which is.
I have to say I am with @Casino_Royale on this (twice in one day, might have to lie down). See my earlier post.
I was one of the people arguing with @leon. He was putting a point of view that I totally disagreed with and we argued, but it was civilised. There was no abuse. He put an argument. He didn't just come out with racist abuse. His argument to my mind is racist but you have to argue against it not ban it. It is not as if he was chanting racist stuff. He was just putting an argument forward.
Now my only reservation was after the fact when @TheScreamingEagles commented upon the effect it had on him when thinking of his daughter. Something I hadn't considered being white.
This is the story from earlier. I see no mention of "having to sell our boat", and tbh it doesn't ring true as related; nor is the caricature as portrayed on social media.
The stated crisis is "until we sell up", so it's a short term squeeze for them not existential. They can sell a couple of properties for cash in a couple of weeks if they need, and with 60 there will be tenants leaving regularly.
This budget does not target landlords selling up - the 3% Stamp Duty surcharge up to 5% is on LL buyers not sellers (though IMO it's crass by Reeves, but that's a different argument), and they can sell into the general market. There has not been much increase in general costs particularly on LLs beyond what eg Osborne did, other than maybe required quality upgrades which are a train which has been coming and expected for more than a decade.
I'd say it's far more likely they are more affected by over-gearing and have been hit hard by mortgage rate increases on variable rate, or fixed rates reaching end-of-term, mortgages, which may have doubled or more on payments in the last year or two.
A LL with 60 properties needs a generous 6 figure liquid sum in the bank as a buffer (say £200k+).
For the Telegraph to run this as a pensioner poverty story is tin-eared and self-satirical - as stupid as we would expect. But they are twits to let it be used.
We discussed this before here between ourselves and others. We need more information on why people are voting Trump. I asked the question and got a lot of helpful replies, but none really totally convinced me. The idea that 50% of Americans are idiots is just daft. So I would really like some more informed feedback and shutting down people who give that is not helpful.
I do think @Sandpit gives a lot of useful stuff and people don't try and shut him down, which is good.
*The one minor point in defence of @Jossiasjessop is that particular poster does post a lot of conspiracy stuff and does link to a lot of exceedingly dodgy stuff. You might have noticed that he referred to that in one of his posts, although none appeared in that exchange. The links seemed straight forward. I would probably have done the same as @JosiasJessop , but it would have been without justification in this instant.
Fair enough. I am a bit sensitive to the pile-ons on any poster who gives a "pro-Trump" angle because I think it's really important to see it from the PoV of an American swing voter and to try to understand that.
I understand completely. I also want to see it from the point of view of all those who intend to vote for Trump and are not MAGA. I want to know why? It is important for me to understand, because I just don't.
This guy on YouTube is a Trump fan and capable of explaining politics in a rational manner, which I like. He's usually my go-to for the 2020's American centre-right. https://www.youtube.com/@MonsieurDean/videos
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
Why should the whole of society have responsibility for it?
This might sound harsh but we have a principle here that we deify length of life regardless of quality or cost.
Dementia is a very cruel fate and I wouldn't wish it on anyone but what sort of sense does it make to bankrupt ourselves to keep someone in that condition.
Leon (who seems to have disappeared ?) is fond of talking about a "Korean style armistice". Nonsense, of course, for multiple reasons, but this demonstrates the biggest single one.
US Secretary of Defense confirmed that Washington would defend South Korea by using all available weapons, including nuclear weapons, if necessary. Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the US or its allies and partners would lead to the end of the Kim Jong Un regime. https://x.com/Hromadske/status/1851922058030256371
Unless Ukraine is in NATO, the comparison is simply absurd.
Leon has received the ban hammer a few nights back.
Don't know if it is Temp or not. It was all somewhat tetchy here at the time.
He went the full racist; Britain for the white British.
Good riddance IMO. He's entertaining, but I don't think that excuses his views.
I don't think he was saying that and, even if he was, I don't think such views should lead to a banning unless it was accompanied by incitement to violence or raw hate.
But, I have a higher spectrum of tolerance for speech (admittedly I can respond very aggressively and rudely to them but I only advocate banning where they are consistently personally abusive or nasty)
He literally said that the UK should promote/increase the number of "white babies".
Great Replacement and "14 words" are all that's left from there....
But, that's your extrapolation of what you thought he might subsequently say and mean and not what he actually said.
Just saying we should increase the number of white babies isn't an intrinsically and fundamentally unreasonable thing to say.
Do I want to spend my time talking to someone who thinks my beautiful, smart children are less welcome in this world because of the colour of their skin? Not really.
This is the story from earlier. I see no mention of "having to sell our boat", and tbh it doesn't ring true as related; nor is the caricature as portrayed on social media.
The stated crisis is "until we sell up", so it's a short term squeeze for them not existential. They can sell a couple of properties for cash in a couple of weeks if they need, and with 60 there will be tenants leaving regularly.
This budget does not target landlords selling up - the 3% Stamp Duty surcharge up to 5% is on LL buyers not sellers (though IMO it's crass by Reeves, but that's a different argument), and they can sell into the general market. There has not been much increase in general costs particularly on LLs beyond what eg Osborne did, other than maybe required quality upgrades which are a train which has been coming and expected for more than a decade.
I'd say it's far more likely they are more affected by over-gearing and have been hit hard by mortgage rate increases on variable rate, or fixed rates reaching end-of-term, mortgages, which may have doubled or more on payments in the last year or two.
A LL with 60 properties needs a generous 6 figure liquid sum in the bank as a buffer (say £200k+).
For the Telegraph to run this as a pensioner poverty story is tin-eared and self-satirical - as stupid as we would expect. But they are twits to let it be used.
Leon (who seems to have disappeared ?) is fond of talking about a "Korean style armistice". Nonsense, of course, for multiple reasons, but this demonstrates the biggest single one.
US Secretary of Defense confirmed that Washington would defend South Korea by using all available weapons, including nuclear weapons, if necessary. Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the US or its allies and partners would lead to the end of the Kim Jong Un regime. https://x.com/Hromadske/status/1851922058030256371
Unless Ukraine is in NATO, the comparison is simply absurd.
It would require a nuclear guarantee from the UK and France. Not enough nukes to defeat Russia in an all out war, but enough for MAD.
But Europe definitely needs to get its act together, and part of that is by excluding, or threatening to exclude, bad actors like Hungary or Slovakia under Fico from NATO and the security apparatus of the EU as well as taking away their veto over economic sanctions. The US is going to become semi-detached from NATO even if Harris wins, and potentially actively hostile if Trump does - only mutual hostility to China would remain as common cause, and NATO is not the main geographical player in that theatre.
Any thoughts on simple investment strategies for a Trump win that could hedge against global trade wars?
Gold is at a record high this morning…
I struggle with gold for some reason (well because its a lump of metal without any obvious return bar speculation). But yes, that is probably part of the answer.
Investing in anything that's at a record high is an inherently risky move.
Gold is the ultimate store of value though. No returns but a lump of the yellow stuff put together 3000 years ago is still intrinsically valuable today (as opposed to something that's survived 3000 years and is valuable for that rather than for the purpose for which it was created).
Trump's hostility to China is trade-based though, not geostrategic. Big difference. He wouldn't give a toss if it invaded Taiwan; he cares much more about state subsidies to industry.
Nope - he cares that the product is being manufactured in china at a price that the USA can't compete with..
It’s something that the rest of the world is going to have to deal with in short order as well, especially in key industries such as car manufacturing and relatedly battery manufacture.
Many of Trump’s base are people who have lost their jobs when factories have been shipped abroad, in some cases hollowing out entire towns and cities. Detroit is full of whole abandoned towns that used to house the auto workers, and those displaced workers feel the government is doing nothing for them.
The old Michael Moore rant from eight years ago is just as relevant today as it was then, perhaps even more so.
Leon (who seems to have disappeared ?) is fond of talking about a "Korean style armistice". Nonsense, of course, for multiple reasons, but this demonstrates the biggest single one.
US Secretary of Defense confirmed that Washington would defend South Korea by using all available weapons, including nuclear weapons, if necessary. Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the US or its allies and partners would lead to the end of the Kim Jong Un regime. https://x.com/Hromadske/status/1851922058030256371
Unless Ukraine is in NATO, the comparison is simply absurd.
Leon has received the ban hammer a few nights back.
Don't know if it is Temp or not. It was all somewhat tetchy here at the time.
He went the full racist; Britain for the white British.
Good riddance IMO. He's entertaining, but I don't think that excuses his views.
I don't think he was saying that and, even if he was, I don't think such views should lead to a banning unless it was accompanied by incitement to violence or raw hate.
But, I have a higher spectrum of tolerance for speech (admittedly I can respond very aggressively and rudely to them but I only advocate banning where they are consistently personally abusive or nasty)
He literally said that the UK should promote/increase the number of "white babies".
Great Replacement and "14 words" are all that's left from there....
But, that's your extrapolation of what you thought he might subsequently say and mean and not what he actually said.
Just saying we should increase the number of white babies isn't an intrinsically and fundamentally unreasonable thing to say.
Do I want to spend my time talking to someone who thinks my beautiful, smart children are less welcome in this world because of the colour of their skin? Not really.
I actually have a hospital appointment this morning. What a budget!
I went to hospital yesterday.
There was a poster by the entrance warning about measles, which we thought had been vanquished in the 1960s, before they invented anti-vaxxers.
But beyond that were electronic signs displaying a message that their software licence had expired (presumably unbeknownst to whoever could either renew the licence or turn the system off to save electricity) and direction signs that stopped well short of their destination. The clock had not been put back an hour at the weekend, or so I thought till I noticed that even then it would be 10 minutes wrong.
People say the NHS needs huge investment. They are right. It does. But it also needs people directly running hospitals and clinics to pick the low hanging fruit.
My wife had a miscarriage at about 9 weeks 18 months or so ago. Turning up at my local large hospital to find there was nowhere to park (we would cheerfully have paid, but the site has about 50% of the parking spaces it needs - we ended up ditching the car in a nearby supermarket carpark), followed by having to find the "early pregnancy unit*" we'd been told to attend and then follow the non-existent signage to it with a tired and distressed wife was one of the less enjoyable experiences of my life, which could have been made vastly for virtually no cost by some decent signage.
I think I've posted before about how I nearly missed an expensive MRI slot because I went to the wrong hospital, thanks to the receptionist at a different hospital using without explanation the abbreviation MRI for Manchester Royal Infirmary, without considering this was also the department I was being sent to see. This was after a previous missed MRI because they failed to book an X-ray to check for steel splinters in my eyes first, despite my ringing them and telling them this exactly as instructed on the paperwork they sent out.
Stuff like this isn't hard, or expensive to fix - but because it's a state monolith entirely run by a mixture of incompetence and producer capture it isn't. Pouring loads more money in the top won't help either - this stuff isn't fixed primarily because nobody cares, rather than anything else.
*It turned out that it has been renamed the "Jasmine Suite" presumably to be more sensitive to people our situation, which is lovely and thoughtful, but does require that people are told to go there. And once we found that bit out, the signage was still rubbish to actually get there.
This is the story from earlier. I see no mention of "having to sell our boat", and tbh it doesn't ring true as related; nor is the caricature as portrayed on social media.
The stated crisis is "until we sell up", so it's a short term squeeze for them not existential. They can sell a couple of properties for cash in a couple of weeks if they need, and with 60 there will be tenants leaving regularly.
This budget does not target landlords selling up - the 3% Stamp Duty surcharge up to 5% is on LL buyers not sellers (though IMO it's crass by Reeves, but that's a different argument), and they can sell into the general market. There has not been much increase in general costs particularly on LLs beyond what eg Osborne did, other than maybe required quality upgrades which are a train which has been coming and expected for more than a decade.
I'd say it's far more likely they are more affected by over-gearing and have been hit hard by mortgage rate increases on variable rate, or fixed rates reaching end-of-term, mortgages, which may have doubled or more on payments in the last year or two.
A LL with 60 properties needs a generous 6 figure liquid sum in the bank as a buffer (say £200k+).
For the Telegraph to run this as a pensioner poverty story is tin-eared and self-satirical - as stupid as we would expect. But they are twits to let it be used.
That you consider 200k a generous buffer for 60 properties is what is wrong with the BTL industry. I would be thinking more like £2m+.
Buy to let with the several malicious charges on tax relief now only make sense as long as the market is rising. Rising asset value more so than tenant fees are what make it add up. That goes and the market folds in on itself.
Leon (who seems to have disappeared ?) is fond of talking about a "Korean style armistice". Nonsense, of course, for multiple reasons, but this demonstrates the biggest single one.
US Secretary of Defense confirmed that Washington would defend South Korea by using all available weapons, including nuclear weapons, if necessary. Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the US or its allies and partners would lead to the end of the Kim Jong Un regime. https://x.com/Hromadske/status/1851922058030256371
Unless Ukraine is in NATO, the comparison is simply absurd.
Leon has received the ban hammer a few nights back.
Don't know if it is Temp or not. It was all somewhat tetchy here at the time.
He went the full racist; Britain for the white British.
Good riddance IMO. He's entertaining, but I don't think that excuses his views.
I don't think he was saying that and, even if he was, I don't think such views should lead to a banning unless it was accompanied by incitement to violence or raw hate.
But, I have a higher spectrum of tolerance for speech (admittedly I can respond very aggressively and rudely to them but I only advocate banning where they are consistently personally abusive or nasty)
He literally said that the UK should promote/increase the number of "white babies".
Great Replacement and "14 words" are all that's left from there....
But, that's your extrapolation of what you thought he might subsequently say and mean and not what he actually said.
Just saying we should increase the number of white babies isn't an intrinsically and fundamentally unreasonable thing to say.
Do I want to spend my time talking to someone who thinks my beautiful, smart children are less welcome in this world because of the colour of their skin? Not really.
Fundamentally, our highly westernised individualistic model means we expect people who need help and those who need care to be fully independent or cared for by paid others without any recourse to extended families or communities who'd do it essentially for free with a bit of aid and help.
This is not normal, throughout human history or in the rest of the world, where extended families care for their elderly parents and those with disabilities.
That doesn't bankrupt nations. And psychologically it's better for them too.
An enormous amount of caring in our society is still done by families, extended families and friends, as many here can attest to.
Leon (who seems to have disappeared ?) is fond of talking about a "Korean style armistice". Nonsense, of course, for multiple reasons, but this demonstrates the biggest single one.
US Secretary of Defense confirmed that Washington would defend South Korea by using all available weapons, including nuclear weapons, if necessary. Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the US or its allies and partners would lead to the end of the Kim Jong Un regime. https://x.com/Hromadske/status/1851922058030256371
Unless Ukraine is in NATO, the comparison is simply absurd.
Leon has received the ban hammer a few nights back.
Don't know if it is Temp or not. It was all somewhat tetchy here at the time.
He went the full racist; Britain for the white British.
Good riddance IMO. He's entertaining, but I don't think that excuses his views.
I don't think he was saying that and, even if he was, I don't think such views should lead to a banning unless it was accompanied by incitement to violence or raw hate.
But, I have a higher spectrum of tolerance for speech (admittedly I can respond very aggressively and rudely to them but I only advocate banning where they are consistently personally abusive or nasty)
He literally said that the UK should promote/increase the number of "white babies".
Great Replacement and "14 words" are all that's left from there....
But, that's your extrapolation of what you thought he might subsequently say and mean and not what he actually said.
Just saying we should increase the number of white babies isn't an intrinsically and fundamentally unreasonable thing to say.
Do I want to spend my time talking to someone who thinks my beautiful, smart children are less welcome in this world because of the colour of their skin? Not really.
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
Why should the whole of society have responsibility for it?
This might sound harsh but we have a principle here that we deify length of life regardless of quality or cost.
Dementia is a very cruel fate and I wouldn't wish it on anyone but what sort of sense does it make to bankrupt ourselves to keep someone in that condition.
Because like much of life it’s primarily down to luck. So we all carry the burden of ill fortune and share the benefits of good fortune.
This is the story from earlier. I see no mention of "having to sell our boat", and tbh it doesn't ring true as related; nor is the caricature as portrayed on social media.
The stated crisis is "until we sell up", so it's a short term squeeze for them not existential. They can sell a couple of properties for cash in a couple of weeks if they need, and with 60 there will be tenants leaving regularly.
This budget does not target landlords selling up - the 3% Stamp Duty surcharge up to 5% is on LL buyers not sellers (though IMO it's crass by Reeves, but that's a different argument), and they can sell into the general market. There has not been much increase in general costs particularly on LLs beyond what eg Osborne did, other than maybe required quality upgrades which are a train which has been coming and expected for more than a decade.
I'd say it's far more likely they are more affected by over-gearing and have been hit hard by mortgage rate increases on variable rate, or fixed rates reaching end-of-term, mortgages, which may have doubled or more on payments in the last year or two.
A LL with 60 properties needs a generous 6 figure liquid sum in the bank as a buffer (say £200k+).
For the Telegraph to run this as a pensioner poverty story is tin-eared and self-satirical - as stupid as we would expect. But they are twits to let it be used.
A lot of that depends on how they've built up their empire. There are scenarios where the portfolio is built on equity withdrawal you need to dispose of properties in reverse order simply to pay both the mortgage charge and capital gains tax (I've seen it and gone wtf).
There are also a couple of lenders who are playing hardball when portfolio properties are being sold and trying to get the overall debt reduced which can make things even more complex..
Re Trump I know plenty of Americans who are voting for him.
They justify this by looking at his opponents: Defund the police and the various other manifestations of race or gender nonsense, plus the economic illiteracy of the left (tax on unrealised capital gains - how does that work??).
So they've basically sold it to themselves as "OK he's an idiot, but at least he's our idiot" and try to avoid thinking about the fascist tendencies.
The only odd thing @Leon said was that he was proud of his "whiteness", which has never occurred to me and doesn't register because I essentially view skin colour in its truest sense as quite irrelevant - I am much more interested in whether the skin is smooth, unblemished and silky and not too hairy, for example- but we are super sensitive to anyone commenting on race or skin if it's about paler skins in a way we'd barely flick an eyelid for if it were Japanese, Latin American or sub-saharan.
The assumption seems to be that anyone who raises it or anything like it must be a proto-Nazi who needs to be squashed at birth for the safety and security of us all but I think, whilst there are people like that, this is more often liberal hysterics. And it's a function of the history of the last 70 years and ingrained rules of social proof.
To save us from polarisation we need to gently engage with at least some of these concerns on the periphery, as Professor Eric Kaufmann has.
We discussed this before here between ourselves and others. We need more information on why people are voting Trump. I asked the question and got a lot of helpful replies, but none really totally convinced me. The idea that 50% of Americans are idiots is just daft. So I would really like some more informed feedback and shutting down people who give that is not helpful.
I do think @Sandpit gives a lot of useful stuff and people don't try and shut him down, which is good.
*The one minor point in defence of @Jossiasjessop is that particular poster does post a lot of conspiracy stuff and does link to a lot of exceedingly dodgy stuff. You might have noticed that he referred to that in one of his posts, although none appeared in that exchange. The links seemed straight forward. I would probably have done the same as @JosiasJessop , but it would have been without justification in this instant.
Fair enough. I am a bit sensitive to the pile-ons on any poster who gives a "pro-Trump" angle because I think it's really important to see it from the PoV of an American swing voter and to try to understand that.
I understand completely. I also want to see it from the point of view of all those who intend to vote for Trump and are not MAGA. I want to know why? It is important for me to understand, because I just don't.
Caught up with some family friends in the Summer who are likely voting Trump. One is a Brit who has moved to US and become citizen. They don't like Trump as a person, but think he will lower their taxes. They think he managed the economy well. They wanted DeSantis but could settle for Trump. Both claimed they couldn't back Biden, but would consider Harris. They were well practiced at talking to dumbfounded British people about the politics.
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
Probably up to their eyeballs in mortgage debt. Still, no sympathy.
Got to ask how on earth have they ended up in that mess with 70 btl properties. Well I know how because they used the extra equity in the first one to purchase the second one and so on but that really is self inflicted no sympathy...
The theory being that x years from now the rents would have paid off the 99.999% mortgages and they would own a couple of streets......
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
Why should the whole of society have responsibility for it?
This might sound harsh but we have a principle here that we deify length of life regardless of quality or cost.
Dementia is a very cruel fate and I wouldn't wish it on anyone but what sort of sense does it make to bankrupt ourselves to keep someone in that condition.
Because like much of life it’s primarily down to luck. So we all carry the burden of ill fortune and share the benefits of good fortune.
My thesis is that individuals should insure and manage more of that risk themselves, and think sometimes throwing it onto "society" is a way for some - not you - getting away from responsibilities for elderly parents or relatives that they'd rather not have to deal with.
I actually have a hospital appointment this morning. What a budget!
I went to hospital yesterday.
There was a poster by the entrance warning about measles, which we thought had been vanquished in the 1960s, before they invented anti-vaxxers.
But beyond that were electronic signs displaying a message that their software licence had expired (presumably unbeknownst to whoever could either renew the licence or turn the system off to save electricity) and direction signs that stopped well short of their destination. The clock had not been put back an hour at the weekend, or so I thought till I noticed that even then it would be 10 minutes wrong.
People say the NHS needs huge investment. They are right. It does. But it also needs people directly running hospitals and clinics to pick the low hanging fruit.
My wife had a miscarriage at about 9 weeks 18 months or so ago. Turning up at my local large hospital to find there was nowhere to park (we would cheerfully have paid, but the site has about 50% of the parking spaces it needs - we ended up ditching the car in a nearby supermarket carpark), followed by having to find the "early pregnancy unit*" we'd been told to attend and then follow the non-existent signage to it with a tired and distressed wife was one of the less enjoyable experiences of my life, which could have been made vastly for virtually no cost by some decent signage.
I think I've posted before about how I nearly missed an expensive MRI slot because I went to the wrong hospital, thanks to the receptionist at a different hospital using without explanation the abbreviation MRI for Manchester Royal Infirmary, without considering this was also the department I was being sent to see. This was after a previous missed MRI because they failed to book an X-ray to check for steel splinters in my eyes first, despite my ringing them and telling them this exactly as instructed on the paperwork they sent out.
Stuff like this isn't hard, or expensive to fix - but because it's a state monolith entirely run by a mixture of incompetence and producer capture it isn't. Pouring loads more money in the top won't help either - this stuff isn't fixed primarily because nobody cares, rather than anything else.
*It turned out that it has been renamed the "Jasmine Suite" presumably to be more sensitive to people our situation, which is lovely and thoughtful, but does require that people are told to go there. And once we found that bit out, the signage was still rubbish to actually get there.
Personally, and this is unpopular with many NHS staff I know, I think a lot of problems have come from significant cuts to NHS management. Politically it was easy to say more frontline staff less paperwork, but in practice managers can actually add value and help you get more our of available resources.
Leon (who seems to have disappeared ?) is fond of talking about a "Korean style armistice". Nonsense, of course, for multiple reasons, but this demonstrates the biggest single one.
US Secretary of Defense confirmed that Washington would defend South Korea by using all available weapons, including nuclear weapons, if necessary. Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the US or its allies and partners would lead to the end of the Kim Jong Un regime. https://x.com/Hromadske/status/1851922058030256371
Unless Ukraine is in NATO, the comparison is simply absurd.
Leon has received the ban hammer a few nights back.
Don't know if it is Temp or not. It was all somewhat tetchy here at the time.
He went the full racist; Britain for the white British.
Good riddance IMO. He's entertaining, but I don't think that excuses his views.
I don't think he was saying that and, even if he was, I don't think such views should lead to a banning unless it was accompanied by incitement to violence or raw hate.
But, I have a higher spectrum of tolerance for speech (admittedly I can respond very aggressively and rudely to them but I only advocate banning where they are consistently personally abusive or nasty)
He literally said that the UK should promote/increase the number of "white babies".
Great Replacement and "14 words" are all that's left from there....
But, that's your extrapolation of what you thought he might subsequently say and mean and not what he actually said.
Just saying we should increase the number of white babies isn't an intrinsically and fundamentally unreasonable thing to say.
Do I want to spend my time talking to someone who thinks my beautiful, smart children are less welcome in this world because of the colour of their skin? Not really.
I don't think he said that either.
He said exactly that.
Saying he'd like to increase the number of white babies doesn't mean that you think others are less welcome.
I might want to increase the size of my family. It doesn't mean I view other children as less welcome in the world.
I actually have a hospital appointment this morning. What a budget!
I went to hospital yesterday.
There was a poster by the entrance warning about measles, which we thought had been vanquished in the 1960s, before they invented anti-vaxxers.
But beyond that were electronic signs displaying a message that their software licence had expired (presumably unbeknownst to whoever could either renew the licence or turn the system off to save electricity) and direction signs that stopped well short of their destination. The clock had not been put back an hour at the weekend, or so I thought till I noticed that even then it would be 10 minutes wrong.
People say the NHS needs huge investment. They are right. It does. But it also needs people directly running hospitals and clinics to pick the low hanging fruit.
My wife had a miscarriage at about 9 weeks 18 months or so ago. Turning up at my local large hospital to find there was nowhere to park (we would cheerfully have paid, but the site has about 50% of the parking spaces it needs - we ended up ditching the car in a nearby supermarket carpark), followed by having to find the "early pregnancy unit*" we'd been told to attend and then follow the non-existent signage to it with a tired and distressed wife was one of the less enjoyable experiences of my life, which could have been made vastly for virtually no cost by some decent signage.
I think I've posted before about how I nearly missed an expensive MRI slot because I went to the wrong hospital, thanks to the receptionist at a different hospital using without explanation the abbreviation MRI for Manchester Royal Infirmary, without considering this was also the department I was being sent to see. This was after a previous missed MRI because they failed to book an X-ray to check for steel splinters in my eyes first, despite my ringing them and telling them this exactly as instructed on the paperwork they sent out.
Stuff like this isn't hard, or expensive to fix - but because it's a state monolith entirely run by a mixture of incompetence and producer capture it isn't. Pouring loads more money in the top won't help either - this stuff isn't fixed primarily because nobody cares, rather than anything else.
*It turned out that it has been renamed the "Jasmine Suite" presumably to be more sensitive to people our situation, which is lovely and thoughtful, but does require that people are told to go there. And once we found that bit out, the signage was still rubbish to actually get there.
Sorry about your experiences. In mine, the NHS is not fit for purpose, no one cares, really, so people are just left to suffer and die and be fucked around.
Of course nurses staring in your face "care" but actually as you note with your examples, they don't care enough really to amend or help amend or voice concerns about the system which is useless.
Everyone in the NHS should be ashamed of themselves.
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
Why should the whole of society have responsibility for it?
This might sound harsh but we have a principle here that we deify length of life regardless of quality or cost.
Dementia is a very cruel fate and I wouldn't wish it on anyone but what sort of sense does it make to bankrupt ourselves to keep someone in that condition.
Because like much of life it’s primarily down to luck. So we all carry the burden of ill fortune and share the benefits of good fortune.
My thesis is that individuals should insure and manage more of that risk themselves, and think sometimes throwing it onto "society" is a way for some - not you - getting away from responsibilities for elderly parents or relatives that they'd rather not have to deal with.
Nah. That’s a cold bleak future. We’re all in it together. I have a responsibility to you.
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
Previously I was content to defend the extension of the bus fare cap at £3 rather than the existing £2, on the basis that it required additional subsidy to keep it going.
But when the Chancellor announced not only a freeze in fuel duty, but an extension of the temporary 5p/litre discount, then feck this.
With rail fares also increasing, the motorist is being feather-bedded, with public transport users bearing the cost.
Sorry, RR, you've got this badly wrong.
But the front page of today's Sun newspaper was better than it would have otherwise been so job done..
Well I've learnt from the front page of the Daily Mail that BP's corporate shareholders are "Britain's Strivers".
And the Telegraph is full of wailing and gnashing of teeth, so Reeves must have got some things right.
Yes, my sense is that she's landed this pretty well. See also the BBC profiles of the usual archetypes (smug married middle incomes, single man, twentysomething girl etc)
Leon (who seems to have disappeared ?) is fond of talking about a "Korean style armistice". Nonsense, of course, for multiple reasons, but this demonstrates the biggest single one.
US Secretary of Defense confirmed that Washington would defend South Korea by using all available weapons, including nuclear weapons, if necessary. Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the US or its allies and partners would lead to the end of the Kim Jong Un regime. https://x.com/Hromadske/status/1851922058030256371
Unless Ukraine is in NATO, the comparison is simply absurd.
It would require a nuclear guarantee from the UK and France. Not enough nukes to defeat Russia in an all out war, but enough for MAD.
But Europe definitely needs to get its act together, and part of that is by excluding, or threatening to exclude, bad actors like Hungary or Slovakia under Fico from NATO and the security apparatus of the EU as well as taking away their veto over economic sanctions. The US is going to become semi-detached from NATO even if Harris wins, and potentially actively hostile if Trump does - only mutual hostility to China would remain as common cause, and NATO is not the main geographical player in that theatre.
Any thoughts on simple investment strategies for a Trump win that could hedge against global trade wars?
Gold is at a record high this morning…
I struggle with gold for some reason (well because its a lump of metal without any obvious return bar speculation). But yes, that is probably part of the answer.
Investing in anything that's at a record high is an inherently risky move.
Gold is the ultimate store of value though. No returns but a lump of the yellow stuff put together 3000 years ago is still intrinsically valuable today (as opposed to something that's survived 3000 years and is valuable for that rather than for the purpose for which it was created).
Trump's hostility to China is trade-based though, not geostrategic. Big difference. He wouldn't give a toss if it invaded Taiwan; he cares much more about state subsidies to industry.
Nope - he cares that the product is being manufactured in china at a price that the USA can't compete with..
It’s something that the rest of the world is going to have to deal with in short order as well, especially in key industries such as car manufacturing and relatedly battery manufacture.
Many of Trump’s base are people who have lost their jobs when factories have been shipped abroad, in some cases hollowing out entire towns and cities. Detroit is full of whole abandoned towns that used to house the auto workers, and those displaced workers feel the government is doing nothing for them.
The old Michael Moore rant from eight years ago is just as relevant today as it was then, perhaps even more so.
The entertaining story I've heard is how do you move semi-conductor manufacturing to the US when you've just put a 20% tax on the only supplier of the lithography equipment needed to make the things.
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
Every case is different.
Our 90 year old patient usually stays in bed once put there. The bed can be lowered to the floor which prevents any accidents.
Though when put in formal care to give everyone a break only it took 3 days before she had a fall, despite not having had any such incidents at home.
It does take a 92 year old to keep an eye on things between carer visits (mostly family) but we are just about managing.
At least she's got past the point of saying "I want to be dead" half the time.
All power to your elbow. If you can find something that works that’s amazing.
It only really works because the family all live in the same area and Mrs Flatlander being self-employed can juggle things around.
The modern reality is that this is quite unusual and I wouldn't criticise anyone for doing it differently.
This is the story from earlier. I see no mention of "having to sell our boat", and tbh it doesn't ring true as related; nor is the caricature as portrayed on social media.
The stated crisis is "until we sell up", so it's a short term squeeze for them not existential. They can sell a couple of properties for cash in a couple of weeks if they need, and with 60 there will be tenants leaving regularly.
This budget does not target landlords selling up - the 3% Stamp Duty surcharge up to 5% is on LL buyers not sellers (though IMO it's crass by Reeves, but that's a different argument), and they can sell into the general market. There has not been much increase in general costs particularly on LLs beyond what eg Osborne did, other than maybe required quality upgrades which are a train which has been coming and expected for more than a decade.
I'd say it's far more likely they are more affected by over-gearing and have been hit hard by mortgage rate increases on variable rate, or fixed rates reaching end-of-term, mortgages, which may have doubled or more on payments in the last year or two.
A LL with 60 properties needs a generous 6 figure liquid sum in the bank as a buffer (say £200k+).
For the Telegraph to run this as a pensioner poverty story is tin-eared and self-satirical - as stupid as we would expect. But they are twits to let it be used.
That you consider 200k a generous buffer for 60 properties is what is wrong with the BTL industry. I would be thinking more like £2m+.
It depends. Why do you say £2m+? Let's look at the risk to be managed, and the numbers.
60 properties at a perhaps typical £12k * pa rent in Colchester is £720k per annum top line turnover (albett likely more like £700k due to vacancies). I am not aware of *any* business that requires 3 years of turnover in current reserves - are you?
Even a charity, such as say a local Anglican parish, which inherently needs to be more cautious, will normally run with available reserves of around 3 months of income. For £700k, that would be £210k.
The need is to cover crises, such as a T going non-paying, or a house being damaged and having to provide alternative accommodation for a period in extremis if it burns down, or sudden repairs such as a roof or gas boiler going phut. Even providing alternative accommodation for a year at LL expense will only be rent plus a premium, perhaps £15k over a year. A largish portfolio will lay-off a good deal of the risk, as even if something happens to 3 or 4 properties that is only 5% of normal income down. It's very different from running 1 or 3 properties.
That is further mitigated by rent-payment insurance, obviously buildings insurance and various other normal practices.
* 12k pa is 2 bed flat level in Colchester, but the numbers scale if you want to say £1500-1600 and a larger financial buffer.
Serious fury from pro Ukraine voices now. One can still dream that’s it’s a big psyop and on the morning of 6th Nov, Ukraine will launch a huge surprise operation aimed at crushing the Russian army. But that sadly feels like wish casting.
“Biden sabotaged Ukraine's confidential plans then didn't honor the request to keep those plans confidential, spreading it to media to further sabotage.
Biden is a f**king piece of sh*t and now costing thousands of deaths.”
Yes, to say that they’re royally pissed off with Biden would be something of an understatement right now.
His actions are some way short of matching his words, European nations are going to have to step up no matter the result in the US next week.
But step up rather more if it's Trump.
I believe this is now the rationale(sic) of Trumpers for Ukraine; if/when Trump shits all over Zhelensky and Ukraine, Europe will HAVE to step up in their defence. A high risk strategy, particularly when the same people have been constantly disparaging European efforts up to now.
Yep. And some pitch rolling along the lines of "well Biden had already betrayed them so whatever bad stuff happens from now on is on him."
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
Not even cash !!!!!
Suggest they donate to a mutually acceptable charity!
Serious fury from pro Ukraine voices now. One can still dream that’s it’s a big psyop and on the morning of 6th Nov, Ukraine will launch a huge surprise operation aimed at crushing the Russian army. But that sadly feels like wish casting.
“Biden sabotaged Ukraine's confidential plans then didn't honor the request to keep those plans confidential, spreading it to media to further sabotage.
Biden is a f**king piece of sh*t and now costing thousands of deaths.”
Yes, to say that they’re royally pissed off with Biden would be something of an understatement right now.
His actions are some way short of matching his words, European nations are going to have to step up no matter the result in the US next week.
But step up rather more if it's Trump.
I believe this is now the rationale(sic) of Trumpers for Ukraine; if/when Trump shits all over Zhelensky and Ukraine, Europe will HAVE to step up in their defence. A high risk strategy, particularly when the same people have been constantly disparaging European efforts up to now.
Yep. And some pitch rolling along the lines of "well Biden had already betrayed them so whatever bad stuff happens from now on is on him."
Plus Z's selling a line to Trump..... Be The Saviour. Make A Deal.
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
Why should the whole of society have responsibility for it?
This might sound harsh but we have a principle here that we deify length of life regardless of quality or cost.
Dementia is a very cruel fate and I wouldn't wish it on anyone but what sort of sense does it make to bankrupt ourselves to keep someone in that condition.
Because like much of life it’s primarily down to luck. So we all carry the burden of ill fortune and share the benefits of good fortune.
My thesis is that individuals should insure and manage more of that risk themselves, and think sometimes throwing it onto "society" is a way for some - not you - getting away from responsibilities for elderly parents or relatives that they'd rather not have to deal with.
Nah. That’s a cold bleak future. We’re all in it together. I have a responsibility to you.
You could buy me a pint, I suppose.
Look, I'm not saying dog eat dog. But I think we have an absurd level of overcommitment to very expensive chronic and morbid conditions atm that are overly socialised and not ensured enough.
Property, pensions and houses should be used to part fund them. As Theresa May argued.
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
Not even cash !!!!!
The newly opening gastropub near me has announced on its website that it will not be accepting the stuff. Very smart move, in my view. Will save its staff loads of time faffing around with the pointless stuff.
I actually have a hospital appointment this morning. What a budget!
I went to hospital yesterday.
There was a poster by the entrance warning about measles, which we thought had been vanquished in the 1960s, before they invented anti-vaxxers.
But beyond that were electronic signs displaying a message that their software licence had expired (presumably unbeknownst to whoever could either renew the licence or turn the system off to save electricity) and direction signs that stopped well short of their destination. The clock had not been put back an hour at the weekend, or so I thought till I noticed that even then it would be 10 minutes wrong.
People say the NHS needs huge investment. They are right. It does. But it also needs people directly running hospitals and clinics to pick the low hanging fruit.
My wife had a miscarriage at about 9 weeks 18 months or so ago. Turning up at my local large hospital to find there was nowhere to park (we would cheerfully have paid, but the site has about 50% of the parking spaces it needs - we ended up ditching the car in a nearby supermarket carpark), followed by having to find the "early pregnancy unit*" we'd been told to attend and then follow the non-existent signage to it with a tired and distressed wife was one of the less enjoyable experiences of my life, which could have been made vastly for virtually no cost by some decent signage.
I think I've posted before about how I nearly missed an expensive MRI slot because I went to the wrong hospital, thanks to the receptionist at a different hospital using without explanation the abbreviation MRI for Manchester Royal Infirmary, without considering this was also the department I was being sent to see. This was after a previous missed MRI because they failed to book an X-ray to check for steel splinters in my eyes first, despite my ringing them and telling them this exactly as instructed on the paperwork they sent out.
Stuff like this isn't hard, or expensive to fix - but because it's a state monolith entirely run by a mixture of incompetence and producer capture it isn't. Pouring loads more money in the top won't help either - this stuff isn't fixed primarily because nobody cares, rather than anything else.
*It turned out that it has been renamed the "Jasmine Suite" presumably to be more sensitive to people our situation, which is lovely and thoughtful, but does require that people are told to go there. And once we found that bit out, the signage was still rubbish to actually get there.
Sorry about your experiences. In mine, the NHS is not fit for purpose, no one cares, really, so people are just left to suffer and die and be fucked around.
Of course nurses staring in your face "care" but actually as you note with your examples, they don't care enough really to amend or help amend or voice concerns about the system which is useless.
Everyone in the NHS should be ashamed of themselves.
Basic stuff like signage and lighting requires one senior manager to spend an hour a day actually walking round, perhaps taking a week to complete the whole facility, and noting everything that’s out of place to the appropriate department.
The people who are there every day often don’t notice these things, and people in sick or distressed situations aren’t going to fill out a form or raise a complaint.
I actually have a hospital appointment this morning. What a budget!
I went to hospital yesterday.
There was a poster by the entrance warning about measles, which we thought had been vanquished in the 1960s, before they invented anti-vaxxers.
But beyond that were electronic signs displaying a message that their software licence had expired (presumably unbeknownst to whoever could either renew the licence or turn the system off to save electricity) and direction signs that stopped well short of their destination. The clock had not been put back an hour at the weekend, or so I thought till I noticed that even then it would be 10 minutes wrong.
People say the NHS needs huge investment. They are right. It does. But it also needs people directly running hospitals and clinics to pick the low hanging fruit.
My wife had a miscarriage at about 9 weeks 18 months or so ago. Turning up at my local large hospital to find there was nowhere to park (we would cheerfully have paid, but the site has about 50% of the parking spaces it needs - we ended up ditching the car in a nearby supermarket carpark), followed by having to find the "early pregnancy unit*" we'd been told to attend and then follow the non-existent signage to it with a tired and distressed wife was one of the less enjoyable experiences of my life, which could have been made vastly for virtually no cost by some decent signage.
I think I've posted before about how I nearly missed an expensive MRI slot because I went to the wrong hospital, thanks to the receptionist at a different hospital using without explanation the abbreviation MRI for Manchester Royal Infirmary, without considering this was also the department I was being sent to see. This was after a previous missed MRI because they failed to book an X-ray to check for steel splinters in my eyes first, despite my ringing them and telling them this exactly as instructed on the paperwork they sent out.
Stuff like this isn't hard, or expensive to fix - but because it's a state monolith entirely run by a mixture of incompetence and producer capture it isn't. Pouring loads more money in the top won't help either - this stuff isn't fixed primarily because nobody cares, rather than anything else.
*It turned out that it has been renamed the "Jasmine Suite" presumably to be more sensitive to people our situation, which is lovely and thoughtful, but does require that people are told to go there. And once we found that bit out, the signage was still rubbish to actually get there.
These are exactly the sorts of problems that arise when you keep cutting costs so there's no-one to check on signage and staff don't have the time to check everything has been understood. They have nothing to do with the system being "a state monolith".
Your claim that "nobody cares" is nonsense (and insulting). NHS staff generally do care, but they're worked off their feet. More money does help.
This is the story from earlier. I see no mention of "having to sell our boat", and tbh it doesn't ring true as related; nor is the caricature as portrayed on social media.
The stated crisis is "until we sell up", so it's a short term squeeze for them not existential. They can sell a couple of properties for cash in a couple of weeks if they need, and with 60 there will be tenants leaving regularly.
This budget does not target landlords selling up - the 3% Stamp Duty surcharge up to 5% is on LL buyers not sellers (though IMO it's crass by Reeves, but that's a different argument), and they can sell into the general market. There has not been much increase in general costs particularly on LLs beyond what eg Osborne did, other than maybe required quality upgrades which are a train which has been coming and expected for more than a decade.
I'd say it's far more likely they are more affected by over-gearing and have been hit hard by mortgage rate increases on variable rate, or fixed rates reaching end-of-term, mortgages, which may have doubled or more on payments in the last year or two.
A LL with 60 properties needs a generous 6 figure liquid sum in the bank as a buffer (say £200k+).
For the Telegraph to run this as a pensioner poverty story is tin-eared and self-satirical - as stupid as we would expect. But they are twits to let it be used.
That you consider 200k a generous buffer for 60 properties is what is wrong with the BTL industry. I would be thinking more like £2m+.
It depends. Why do you say £2m+? Let's look at the risk to be managed, and the numbers.
60 properties at a perhaps typical £12k pa rent in Colchester is £720k per annum top line turnover (albett likely more like £700k due to vacancies). I am not aware of *any* business that requires 3 years of turnover in current reserves - are you?
Even a charity, such as say a local Anglican parish, which inherently needs to be more cautious, will normally run with available reserves of around 3 months of income. For £700k, that would be £210k.
The need is to cover crises, such as a T going non-paying, or a house being damaged and having to provide alternative accommodation for a period in extremis if it burns down, or sudden repairs such as a roof or gas boiler going phut. Even providing alternative accommodation for a year at LL expense will only be rent plus a premium, perhaps £15k over a year. A largish portfolio will lay-off a good deal of the risk, as even if something happens to 3 or 4 properties that is only 5% of normal income down. It's very different from running 1 or 3 properties.
That is further mitigated by rent-payment insurance, obviously buildings insurance and various other normal practices.
The real issue is almost certainly insane gearing on the properties. I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't underwater on most of them - unable to sell at a price that pays off the paper.
Let's say we could extend lifespans from the age of 88 (average) to 99 (average) but at the cost of £300bn extra on the public purse and with 50%+ of them with major and painful health issues for either themselves and /or their relatives as well.
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
Why should the whole of society have responsibility for it?
This might sound harsh but we have a principle here that we deify length of life regardless of quality or cost.
Dementia is a very cruel fate and I wouldn't wish it on anyone but what sort of sense does it make to bankrupt ourselves to keep someone in that condition.
Because like much of life it’s primarily down to luck. So we all carry the burden of ill fortune and share the benefits of good fortune.
My thesis is that individuals should insure and manage more of that risk themselves, and think sometimes throwing it onto "society" is a way for some - not you - getting away from responsibilities for elderly parents or relatives that they'd rather not have to deal with.
Nah. That’s a cold bleak future. We’re all in it together. I have a responsibility to you.
You could buy me a pint, I suppose.
Look, I'm not saying dog eat dog. But I think we have an absurd level of overcommitment to very expensive chronic and morbid conditions atm that are overly socialised and not ensured enough.
Property, pensions and houses should be used to part fund them. As Theresa May argued.
We all need to contribute and share the burden, much as we do with the lottery of cancer.
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
Not even cash !!!!!
Every year - Every. Single. Year. - I ask for money in a card. Not a lot, just the biggest note they can afford. Every year they buy me something else. My family are annoying
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
I think I have in my wardrobe somewhere around a dozen branded polo shirts, none of which I’ve bought for myself!
I actually have a hospital appointment this morning. What a budget!
I went to hospital yesterday.
There was a poster by the entrance warning about measles, which we thought had been vanquished in the 1960s, before they invented anti-vaxxers.
But beyond that were electronic signs displaying a message that their software licence had expired (presumably unbeknownst to whoever could either renew the licence or turn the system off to save electricity) and direction signs that stopped well short of their destination. The clock had not been put back an hour at the weekend, or so I thought till I noticed that even then it would be 10 minutes wrong.
People say the NHS needs huge investment. They are right. It does. But it also needs people directly running hospitals and clinics to pick the low hanging fruit.
My wife had a miscarriage at about 9 weeks 18 months or so ago. Turning up at my local large hospital to find there was nowhere to park (we would cheerfully have paid, but the site has about 50% of the parking spaces it needs - we ended up ditching the car in a nearby supermarket carpark), followed by having to find the "early pregnancy unit*" we'd been told to attend and then follow the non-existent signage to it with a tired and distressed wife was one of the less enjoyable experiences of my life, which could have been made vastly for virtually no cost by some decent signage.
I think I've posted before about how I nearly missed an expensive MRI slot because I went to the wrong hospital, thanks to the receptionist at a different hospital using without explanation the abbreviation MRI for Manchester Royal Infirmary, without considering this was also the department I was being sent to see. This was after a previous missed MRI because they failed to book an X-ray to check for steel splinters in my eyes first, despite my ringing them and telling them this exactly as instructed on the paperwork they sent out.
Stuff like this isn't hard, or expensive to fix - but because it's a state monolith entirely run by a mixture of incompetence and producer capture it isn't. Pouring loads more money in the top won't help either - this stuff isn't fixed primarily because nobody cares, rather than anything else.
*It turned out that it has been renamed the "Jasmine Suite" presumably to be more sensitive to people our situation, which is lovely and thoughtful, but does require that people are told to go there. And once we found that bit out, the signage was still rubbish to actually get there.
Sorry about your experiences. In mine, the NHS is not fit for purpose, no one cares, really, so people are just left to suffer and die and be fucked around.
Of course nurses staring in your face "care" but actually as you note with your examples, they don't care enough really to amend or help amend or voice concerns about the system which is useless.
Everyone in the NHS should be ashamed of themselves.
Basic stuff like signage and lighting requires one senior manager to spend an hour a day actually walking round, perhaps taking a week to complete the whole facility, and noting everything that’s out of place to the appropriate department.
The people who are there every day often don’t notice these things, and people in sick or distressed situations aren’t going to fill out a form or raise a complaint.
Why would it need a senior manager? What the fuck does a senior manager know about signage?
The builder I employed to rebuild my house could do it. And given he is a hands on guy (electrical & gas certified - even though he employs people for that), he would probably fix lots of it himself.
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
Not even cash !!!!!
Every year - Every. Single. Year. - I ask for money in a card. Not a lot, just the biggest note they can afford. Every year they buy me something else. My family are annoying
Bizarre. Why would you want something that you can't spend easily – and not at all online? It takes about 40 seconds to transfer proper money into your bank account.
Leon (who seems to have disappeared ?) is fond of talking about a "Korean style armistice". Nonsense, of course, for multiple reasons, but this demonstrates the biggest single one.
US Secretary of Defense confirmed that Washington would defend South Korea by using all available weapons, including nuclear weapons, if necessary. Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the US or its allies and partners would lead to the end of the Kim Jong Un regime. https://x.com/Hromadske/status/1851922058030256371
Unless Ukraine is in NATO, the comparison is simply absurd.
It would require a nuclear guarantee from the UK and France. Not enough nukes to defeat Russia in an all out war, but enough for MAD.
But Europe definitely needs to get its act together, and part of that is by excluding, or threatening to exclude, bad actors like Hungary or Slovakia under Fico from NATO and the security apparatus of the EU as well as taking away their veto over economic sanctions. The US is going to become semi-detached from NATO even if Harris wins, and potentially actively hostile if Trump does - only mutual hostility to China would remain as common cause, and NATO is not the main geographical player in that theatre.
Any thoughts on simple investment strategies for a Trump win that could hedge against global trade wars?
Gold is at a record high this morning…
I struggle with gold for some reason (well because its a lump of metal without any obvious return bar speculation). But yes, that is probably part of the answer.
Investing in anything that's at a record high is an inherently risky move.
Gold is the ultimate store of value though. No returns but a lump of the yellow stuff put together 3000 years ago is still intrinsically valuable today (as opposed to something that's survived 3000 years and is valuable for that rather than for the purpose for which it was created).
Trump's hostility to China is trade-based though, not geostrategic. Big difference. He wouldn't give a toss if it invaded Taiwan; he cares much more about state subsidies to industry.
Nope - he cares that the product is being manufactured in china at a price that the USA can't compete with..
It’s something that the rest of the world is going to have to deal with in short order as well, especially in key industries such as car manufacturing and relatedly battery manufacture.
Many of Trump’s base are people who have lost their jobs when factories have been shipped abroad, in some cases hollowing out entire towns and cities. Detroit is full of whole abandoned towns that used to house the auto workers, and those displaced workers feel the government is doing nothing for them.
The old Michael Moore rant from eight years ago is just as relevant today as it was then, perhaps even more so.
The entertaining story I've heard is how do you move semi-conductor manufacturing to the US when you've just put a 20% tax on the only supplier of the lithography equipment needed to make the things.
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
Why should the whole of society have responsibility for it?
This might sound harsh but we have a principle here that we deify length of life regardless of quality or cost.
Dementia is a very cruel fate and I wouldn't wish it on anyone but what sort of sense does it make to bankrupt ourselves to keep someone in that condition.
Because like much of life it’s primarily down to luck. So we all carry the burden of ill fortune and share the benefits of good fortune.
My thesis is that individuals should insure and manage more of that risk themselves, and think sometimes throwing it onto "society" is a way for some - not you - getting away from responsibilities for elderly parents or relatives that they'd rather not have to deal with.
Nah. That’s a cold bleak future. We’re all in it together. I have a responsibility to you.
You could buy me a pint, I suppose.
Look, I'm not saying dog eat dog. But I think we have an absurd level of overcommitment to very expensive chronic and morbid conditions atm that are overly socialised and not ensured enough.
Property, pensions and houses should be used to part fund them. As Theresa May argued.
We all need to contribute and share the burden, much as we do with the lottery of cancer.
We need to solve cancer.
That disease is cruel and fucking sick. Took a friend of mine 3 months ago who was my age (42 years old) and mother to a six year old boy.
Haven't cried that much on the way home from a funeral ever.
This is the story from earlier. I see no mention of "having to sell our boat", and tbh it doesn't ring true as related; nor is the caricature as portrayed on social media.
The stated crisis is "until we sell up", so it's a short term squeeze for them not existential. They can sell a couple of properties for cash in a couple of weeks if they need, and with 60 there will be tenants leaving regularly.
This budget does not target landlords selling up - the 3% Stamp Duty surcharge up to 5% is on LL buyers not sellers (though IMO it's crass by Reeves, but that's a different argument), and they can sell into the general market. There has not been much increase in general costs particularly on LLs beyond what eg Osborne did, other than maybe required quality upgrades which are a train which has been coming and expected for more than a decade.
I'd say it's far more likely they are more affected by over-gearing and have been hit hard by mortgage rate increases on variable rate, or fixed rates reaching end-of-term, mortgages, which may have doubled or more on payments in the last year or two.
A LL with 60 properties needs a generous 6 figure liquid sum in the bank as a buffer (say £200k+).
For the Telegraph to run this as a pensioner poverty story is tin-eared and self-satirical - as stupid as we would expect. But they are twits to let it be used.
That you consider 200k a generous buffer for 60 properties is what is wrong with the BTL industry. I would be thinking more like £2m+.
It depends. Why do you say £2m+? Let's look at the risk to be managed, and the numbers.
60 properties at a perhaps typical £12k pa rent in Colchester is £720k per annum top line turnover (albett likely more like £700k due to vacancies). I am not aware of *any* business that requires 3 years of turnover in current reserves - are you?
Even a charity, such as say a local Anglican parish, which inherently needs to be more cautious, will normally run with available reserves of around 3 months of income. For £700k, that would be £210k.
The need is to cover crises, such as a T going non-paying, or a house being damaged and having to provide alternative accommodation for a period in extremis if it burns down, or sudden repairs such as a roof or gas boiler going phut. Even providing alternative accommodation for a year at LL expense will only be rent plus a premium, perhaps £15k over a year. A largish portfolio will lay-off a good deal of the risk, as even if something happens to 3 or 4 properties that is only 5% of normal income down. It's very different from running 1 or 3 properties.
That is further mitigated by rent-payment insurance, obviously buildings insurance and various other normal practices.
The real issue is almost certainly insane gearing on the properties. I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't underwater on most of them - unable to sell at a price that pays off the paper.
Serious fury from pro Ukraine voices now. One can still dream that’s it’s a big psyop and on the morning of 6th Nov, Ukraine will launch a huge surprise operation aimed at crushing the Russian army. But that sadly feels like wish casting.
“Biden sabotaged Ukraine's confidential plans then didn't honor the request to keep those plans confidential, spreading it to media to further sabotage.
Biden is a f**king piece of sh*t and now costing thousands of deaths.”
Yes, to say that they’re royally pissed off with Biden would be something of an understatement right now.
His actions are some way short of matching his words, European nations are going to have to step up no matter the result in the US next week.
But step up rather more if it's Trump.
I believe this is now the rationale(sic) of Trumpers for Ukraine; if/when Trump shits all over Zhelensky and Ukraine, Europe will HAVE to step up in their defence. A high risk strategy, particularly when the same people have been constantly disparaging European efforts up to now.
Yep. And some pitch rolling along the lines of "well Biden had already betrayed them so whatever bad stuff happens from now on is on him."
Plus Z's selling a line to Trump..... Be The Saviour. Make A Deal.
There's an article in this week's Economist that's effectively suggesting that the Ukraine should make a deal.
Let's say we could extend lifespans from the age of 88 (average) to 99 (average) but at the cost of £300bn extra on the public purse and with 50%+ of them with major and painful health issues for either themselves and /or their relatives as well.
Should we?
Not sure that question has an answer that remotely is possible short of euthanasia, and I am certain you are not suggesting that
This is a serious problem for governments going forward and I simply have no idea how the circle is squared
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
Not even cash !!!!!
Every year - Every. Single. Year. - I ask for money in a card. Not a lot, just the biggest note they can afford. Every year they buy me something else. My family are annoying
As I said upthread, my family find that whisky, or whiskey, or brandy always 'goes down' well with me!
This is the story from earlier. I see no mention of "having to sell our boat", and tbh it doesn't ring true as related; nor is the caricature as portrayed on social media.
The stated crisis is "until we sell up", so it's a short term squeeze for them not existential. They can sell a couple of properties for cash in a couple of weeks if they need, and with 60 there will be tenants leaving regularly.
This budget does not target landlords selling up - the 3% Stamp Duty surcharge up to 5% is on LL buyers not sellers (though IMO it's crass by Reeves, but that's a different argument), and they can sell into the general market. There has not been much increase in general costs particularly on LLs beyond what eg Osborne did, other than maybe required quality upgrades which are a train which has been coming and expected for more than a decade.
I'd say it's far more likely they are more affected by over-gearing and have been hit hard by mortgage rate increases on variable rate, or fixed rates reaching end-of-term, mortgages, which may have doubled or more on payments in the last year or two.
A LL with 60 properties needs a generous 6 figure liquid sum in the bank as a buffer (say £200k+).
For the Telegraph to run this as a pensioner poverty story is tin-eared and self-satirical - as stupid as we would expect. But they are twits to let it be used.
That you consider 200k a generous buffer for 60 properties is what is wrong with the BTL industry. I would be thinking more like £2m+.
It depends. Why do you say £2m+? Let's look at the risk to be managed, and the numbers.
60 properties at a perhaps typical £12k pa rent in Colchester is £720k per annum top line turnover (albett likely more like £700k due to vacancies). I am not aware of *any* business that requires 3 years of turnover in current reserves - are you?
Even a charity, such as say a local Anglican parish, which inherently needs to be more cautious, will normally run with available reserves of around 3 months of income. For £700k, that would be £210k.
The need is to cover crises, such as a T going non-paying, or a house being damaged and having to provide alternative accommodation for a period in extremis if it burns down, or sudden repairs such as a roof or gas boiler going phut. Even providing alternative accommodation for a year at LL expense will only be rent plus a premium, perhaps £15k over a year. A largish portfolio will lay-off a good deal of the risk, as even if something happens to 3 or 4 properties that is only 5% of normal income down. It's very different from running 1 or 3 properties.
That is further mitigated by rent-payment insurance, obviously buildings insurance and various other normal practices.
60 properties @ say 250k each would be £15m, maybe £10m borrowed. What happens in a recession with a 20% fall in house prices, interest rates go up to 8% and a significant proportion of tenants struggling to pay on time?
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
Not even cash !!!!!
Every year - Every. Single. Year. - I ask for money in a card. Not a lot, just the biggest note they can afford. Every year they buy me something else. My family are annoying
The most amusing one I have had in recent years was a full set of Lynx toiletries.
But we have now settled down to a small hamper one way, and two bottles of wine the other.
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
Why should the whole of society have responsibility for it?
This might sound harsh but we have a principle here that we deify length of life regardless of quality or cost.
Dementia is a very cruel fate and I wouldn't wish it on anyone but what sort of sense does it make to bankrupt ourselves to keep someone in that condition.
Because like much of life it’s primarily down to luck. So we all carry the burden of ill fortune and share the benefits of good fortune.
My thesis is that individuals should insure and manage more of that risk themselves, and think sometimes throwing it onto "society" is a way for some - not you - getting away from responsibilities for elderly parents or relatives that they'd rather not have to deal with.
Nah. That’s a cold bleak future. We’re all in it together. I have a responsibility to you.
You could buy me a pint, I suppose.
Look, I'm not saying dog eat dog. But I think we have an absurd level of overcommitment to very expensive chronic and morbid conditions atm that are overly socialised and not ensured enough.
Property, pensions and houses should be used to part fund them. As Theresa May argued.
We all need to contribute and share the burden, much as we do with the lottery of cancer.
We need to solve cancer.
That disease is cruel and fucking sick. Took a friend of mine 3 months ago who was my age (42 years old) and mother to a six year old boy.
Haven't cried that much on the way home from a funeral ever.
Trouble is, Nixon's crusade against cancer forgot it's not a single disease but a description of a swarm of disease entities. No single cure for it.
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
Not even cash !!!!!
Every year - Every. Single. Year. - I ask for money in a card. Not a lot, just the biggest note they can afford. Every year they buy me something else. My family are annoying
Ok, but then if they give you money, and you give them money, why bother with the whole charade.
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
Why should the whole of society have responsibility for it?
This might sound harsh but we have a principle here that we deify length of life regardless of quality or cost.
Dementia is a very cruel fate and I wouldn't wish it on anyone but what sort of sense does it make to bankrupt ourselves to keep someone in that condition.
Because like much of life it’s primarily down to luck. So we all carry the burden of ill fortune and share the benefits of good fortune.
My thesis is that individuals should insure and manage more of that risk themselves, and think sometimes throwing it onto "society" is a way for some - not you - getting away from responsibilities for elderly parents or relatives that they'd rather not have to deal with.
Nah. That’s a cold bleak future. We’re all in it together. I have a responsibility to you.
You could buy me a pint, I suppose.
Look, I'm not saying dog eat dog. But I think we have an absurd level of overcommitment to very expensive chronic and morbid conditions atm that are overly socialised and not ensured enough.
Property, pensions and houses should be used to part fund them. As Theresa May argued.
We all need to contribute and share the burden, much as we do with the lottery of cancer.
We need to solve cancer.
That disease is cruel and fucking sick. Took a friend of mine 3 months ago who was my age (42 years old) and mother to a six year old boy.
Haven't cried that much on the way home from a funeral ever.
Cruel disease. I’m sorry. We need to solve cancer.
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
Not even cash !!!!!
The newly opening gastropub near me has announced on its website that it will not be accepting the stuff. Very smart move, in my view. Will save its staff loads of time faffing around with the pointless stuff.
It may and it would not be a problem for me as I rarely use cash
However, I expect cash to be a significant part of spending for a considerable time to come
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
Gift-giving has very deep roots in human culture and is one of the things that binds people together.
It wouldn't go amiss for you to keep a list of a few books or other things that you could provide to people so that they could exercise this impulse.
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
Why should the whole of society have responsibility for it?
This might sound harsh but we have a principle here that we deify length of life regardless of quality or cost.
Dementia is a very cruel fate and I wouldn't wish it on anyone but what sort of sense does it make to bankrupt ourselves to keep someone in that condition.
Because like much of life it’s primarily down to luck. So we all carry the burden of ill fortune and share the benefits of good fortune.
My thesis is that individuals should insure and manage more of that risk themselves, and think sometimes throwing it onto "society" is a way for some - not you - getting away from responsibilities for elderly parents or relatives that they'd rather not have to deal with.
Nah. That’s a cold bleak future. We’re all in it together. I have a responsibility to you.
You could buy me a pint, I suppose.
Look, I'm not saying dog eat dog. But I think we have an absurd level of overcommitment to very expensive chronic and morbid conditions atm that are overly socialised and not ensured enough.
Property, pensions and houses should be used to part fund them. As Theresa May argued.
We all need to contribute and share the burden, much as we do with the lottery of cancer.
We need to solve cancer.
That disease is cruel and fucking sick. Took a friend of mine 3 months ago who was my age (42 years old) and mother to a six year old boy.
Haven't cried that much on the way home from a funeral ever.
Trouble is, Nixon's crusade against cancer forgot it's not a single disease but a description of a swarm of disease entities. No single cure for it.
And enormous progress has been made. Many have gone from "inevitable death" to "complete cure is the probable outcome".
Serious fury from pro Ukraine voices now. One can still dream that’s it’s a big psyop and on the morning of 6th Nov, Ukraine will launch a huge surprise operation aimed at crushing the Russian army. But that sadly feels like wish casting.
“Biden sabotaged Ukraine's confidential plans then didn't honor the request to keep those plans confidential, spreading it to media to further sabotage.
Biden is a f**king piece of sh*t and now costing thousands of deaths.”
Yes, to say that they’re royally pissed off with Biden would be something of an understatement right now.
His actions are some way short of matching his words, European nations are going to have to step up no matter the result in the US next week.
But step up rather more if it's Trump.
I believe this is now the rationale(sic) of Trumpers for Ukraine; if/when Trump shits all over Zhelensky and Ukraine, Europe will HAVE to step up in their defence. A high risk strategy, particularly when the same people have been constantly disparaging European efforts up to now.
Yep. And some pitch rolling along the lines of "well Biden had already betrayed them so whatever bad stuff happens from now on is on him."
Plus Z's selling a line to Trump..... Be The Saviour. Make A Deal.
The only odd thing @Leon said was that he was proud of his "whiteness", which has never occurred to me and doesn't register because I essentially view skin colour in its truest sense as quite irrelevant - I am much more interested in whether the skin is smooth, unblemished and silky and not too hairy, for example- but we are super sensitive to anyone commenting on race or skin if it's about paler skins in a way we'd barely flick an eyelid for if it were Japanese, Latin American or sub-saharan.
The assumption seems to be that anyone who raises it or anything like it must be a proto-Nazi who needs to be squashed at birth for the safety and security of us all but I think, whilst there are people like that, this is more often liberal hysterics. And it's a function of the history of the last 70 years and ingrained rules of social proof.
To save us from polarisation we need to gently engage with at least some of these concerns on the periphery, as Professor Eric Kaufmann has.
Martin Luther King said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Leon would rather judge by the colour of their skin. That's racism. I suggest we should not pander to racists. I suggest we should stop making excuses for racists.
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
I think I have in my wardrobe somewhere around a dozen branded polo shirts, none of which I’ve bought for myself!
The nicest gift anyone can give is to pick up the bill for lunch or dinner, or just be a great guest, and – if moved – bring a good bottle and/or a bouquet of flowers for the house. By the time you reach our time of life, you have no need for 'stuff'. Yet lots of people simply cannot grasp this, for reasons I have never fathomed.
Let's say we could extend lifespans from the age of 88 (average) to 99 (average) but at the cost of £300bn extra on the public purse and with 50%+ of them with major and painful health issues for either themselves and /or their relatives as well.
Should we?
Not sure that question has an answer that remotely is possible short of euthanasia, and I am certain you are not suggesting that
This is a serious problem for governments going forward and I simply have no idea how the circle is squared
Not euthanasia but we are already prolonging lifespans over and above where they would otherwise be with expensive medical innovations and healthcare. When it doesn't work out people pass away naturally, and a bit earlier.
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
Why should the whole of society have responsibility for it?
This might sound harsh but we have a principle here that we deify length of life regardless of quality or cost.
Dementia is a very cruel fate and I wouldn't wish it on anyone but what sort of sense does it make to bankrupt ourselves to keep someone in that condition.
Because like much of life it’s primarily down to luck. So we all carry the burden of ill fortune and share the benefits of good fortune.
My thesis is that individuals should insure and manage more of that risk themselves, and think sometimes throwing it onto "society" is a way for some - not you - getting away from responsibilities for elderly parents or relatives that they'd rather not have to deal with.
Nah. That’s a cold bleak future. We’re all in it together. I have a responsibility to you.
You could buy me a pint, I suppose.
Look, I'm not saying dog eat dog. But I think we have an absurd level of overcommitment to very expensive chronic and morbid conditions atm that are overly socialised and not ensured enough.
Property, pensions and houses should be used to part fund them. As Theresa May argued.
We all need to contribute and share the burden, much as we do with the lottery of cancer.
We need to solve cancer.
That disease is cruel and fucking sick. Took a friend of mine 3 months ago who was my age (42 years old) and mother to a six year old boy.
Haven't cried that much on the way home from a funeral ever.
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
Why should the whole of society have responsibility for it?
This might sound harsh but we have a principle here that we deify length of life regardless of quality or cost.
Dementia is a very cruel fate and I wouldn't wish it on anyone but what sort of sense does it make to bankrupt ourselves to keep someone in that condition.
Because like much of life it’s primarily down to luck. So we all carry the burden of ill fortune and share the benefits of good fortune.
My thesis is that individuals should insure and manage more of that risk themselves, and think sometimes throwing it onto "society" is a way for some - not you - getting away from responsibilities for elderly parents or relatives that they'd rather not have to deal with.
Nah. That’s a cold bleak future. We’re all in it together. I have a responsibility to you.
You could buy me a pint, I suppose.
Look, I'm not saying dog eat dog. But I think we have an absurd level of overcommitment to very expensive chronic and morbid conditions atm that are overly socialised and not ensured enough.
Property, pensions and houses should be used to part fund them. As Theresa May argued.
We all need to contribute and share the burden, much as we do with the lottery of cancer.
We need to solve cancer.
That disease is cruel and fucking sick. Took a friend of mine 3 months ago who was my age (42 years old) and mother to a six year old boy.
Haven't cried that much on the way home from a funeral ever.
Cruel disease. I’m sorry. We need to solve cancer.
Motor Neurone Disease is one I want to see gone. Or, at least, treatable. Took our daughter ten years ago, at 49.
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
Not even cash !!!!!
Every year - Every. Single. Year. - I ask for money in a card. Not a lot, just the biggest note they can afford. Every year they buy me something else. My family are annoying
As I said upthread, my family find that whisky, or whiskey, or brandy always 'goes down' well with me!
Yes, me too. I enjoy whiskey, but I never buy it for myself. Instead, I suggest it as a Christmas/birthday gift. I means my friends and relatives don't have to think too hard; it comes in a range of prices to suit most budgets; even cheap whiskey doesn't taste terrible (unlike some wines); and I get a special treat that I'm always grateful for.
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
Not even cash !!!!!
The newly opening gastropub near me has announced on its website that it will not be accepting the stuff. Very smart move, in my view. Will save its staff loads of time faffing around with the pointless stuff.
It may and it would not be a problem for me as I rarely use cash
However, I expect cash to be a significant part of spending for a considerable time to come
When will the political class wake up to the social care crisis and finally accept health and social care are the same fucking thing? All part of a continuum of care. Directly linked. Hospitals cannot discharge because the care homes don't have staff and beds, OTs so short in supply it takes months to get an assessment to send someone home etc etc.
I am so bloody sick of this. Every single budget, year after year, decade after decade. Labour or Conservative.
You are right. I think social care is an issue a bit like "growth" that we have been talking about, or reforming the tax system.
We all know these are major problems. Few people have a good idea of exactly how to fix those issues. Even fewer are willing to stake the political capital to actually tackle them . So nothing happens from parliament to parliament.
And frankly the UK public would almost certainly reject a party that had good ideas about these issues. Too big a change, too scary, too risky, so keep patching and tweaking the broken systems.
The political ‘wisdom’ is that there are hardly any votes in social care; surprising really, given the dramatic cost and effect on family finances when an elderly relative goes into care, as I am now dealing with. Ed Davey has gone a little way to proving this wisdom wrong; the LDs got a bit of traction for focusing on the issue during the GE and it was good to see Ed get a hat tip from the Budget speech. But Labour in particular always campaigns on the NHS (even in local elections) where it thinks the votes are, and has never made social care a priority. Streeting is clearly now fishing around for some way of offloading his promise of a resolution into some sort of cross-party long grass.
The problem iis the enormous cost, as May found out, any suggestion that the elderly should pitch in and share the risk of social care costs is political suicide. The only time a govt could do this is early in their term but Labour learnt a lesson when Cameron pulled out of cross party talks on a solution, choosing instead to use it for political point scoring.
Except that for many families, thats status quo. I've just this second sent another £6,000 over to the care home for my mother's next month, and we're selling her now vacant flat in order to cover future costs. Almost any change to the current arrangements would likely reduce our burden, and the Dilnot cap would have been most welcome, as we'll be up to it in about a year's time.
Similar situation in my family. Our inheritance from both sides has been wiped out by care costs; a result of brilliant efforts of the NHS to keep my grandparents alive.
It's a lottery and why, under the current system, inheritance tax feels fair to me. I'd rather it was upfront insurance premium that everyone paid though.
If they made inheritance tax 10% but with no exceptions, it would almost certainly raise more money than the current scheme full of a very expensive avoidance industry, that catches mostly the middle classes who happen to have a house in the South and some savings or pension - while the seriously wealthy pay little to nothing.
If it were up to me all inheritances would be taxed the same as income, with no exceptions.
Going to work to earn £50,000 shouldn't be taxed a single penny more than inheriting £50,000 that you haven't gone to work to earn.
IHT seems to evoke more emotion than any other tax, which is why there are so many reliefs. Politically extremely difficult.
My solution fixes that, it should be abolished and inheritance should be taxed as income instead.
No more IHT.
Would you also tax gifts?
I'd ban them for adults. Who really wants socks and toileteries from their family and friends. And who wants to spend their time coming up with fresh ideas.
LOL. You are a man after my own heart.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
I think I have in my wardrobe somewhere around a dozen branded polo shirts, none of which I’ve bought for myself!
The nicest gift anyone can give is to pick up the bill for lunch or dinner, or just be a great guest, and – if moved – bring a good bottle and/or a bouquet of flowers for the house. My the time you reach our time of life, you have no need for 'stuff'. Yet lots of people simply cannot grasp this, for reasons I have never fathomed.
Or just a pot of home made jam or local honey.
As for LostPassword's comment about it being ritual - which is a good one - the problem is that gift giving does imply a geas or obligation on the recipient never to dispose of the gift. Especially frustrating at your and my time of life when we're not only trying not to accumulate too much more but positively declutter and sort out.
Comments
Putting your father to bed at 10:30pm, for him to be up dressed and ready for the next day 1hr later. A smart guy trying to help , he found and took his morning medication. Essentially double dosing warfarin. Dangerous.
He refused to return to bed, and decided to sit the whole night out in his wide awake in his chair. Heartbreaking.
This was not the night he decided to help out, fell down the stairs, broke his shoulder and landed himself in hospital for three months. The interesting thing is that he somehow managed to get back to bed. We only only discovered the massive bruise when he couldn’t get out of bed.
I assure you that this kind of dementia care is beyond the capability of most families. A problem for society as a whole to solve.
[Although house prices in the Flatlands mean the limit is lower than stated]
In the medium term the old fashioned S&P 500 tracker is unlikely to generate terrible returns, if only that they regularly replace old companies with new ones.
Disclaimer: just because that’s where I put my own investments, doesn’t mean it’s suitable for yours!
That’s good politics.
It's hard to say the short term net result, given average farm size and land value there won't be many viable family farms under £1 million total value.
Someone asked how many tenant farms there are right now, my rough guess is in Scotland it's about 65% owner occupied/35% tenanted
Crypto slightly more appealing than gold but similar in a non productive speculative type asset.
Oh, the humanity!
https://x.com/j_bloodworth/status/1851767735937609758?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
Our 90 year old patient usually stays in bed once put there. The bed can be lowered to the floor which prevents any accidents.
Though when put in formal care to give everyone a break only it took 3 days before she had a fall, despite not having had any such incidents at home.
It does take a 92 year old to keep an eye on things between carer visits (mostly family) but we are just about managing.
At least she's got past the point of saying "I want to be dead" half the time.
As SandyRentoul would say, and I did, feck that.
Edit: in the end, the thing went to a services family returning from overseas stations. Just the luck of it, but I was sentimentally glad it didn't end up as a HMO.
Gold is the ultimate store of value though. No returns but a lump of the yellow stuff put together 3000 years ago is still intrinsically valuable today (as opposed to something that's survived 3000 years and is valuable for that rather than for the purpose for which it was created).
Trump's hostility to China is trade-based though, not geostrategic. Big difference. He wouldn't give a toss if it invaded Taiwan; he cares much more about state subsidies to industry.
Will be interesting to see if our council tax precept will have to increase to cover this or if he decides to increase the fare up to the £3 (or £2). If it is £3, then those under 25s who travel to work by bus, will have their minimum pay increase pretty much wiped out through travel alone.
The hope is that there is a much bigger motoring taxation reform coming in the spring that makes things much cheaper for people on low incomes and in rural areas, while making other modes relatively more attractive in the towns and cities.
And the Telegraph is full of wailing and gnashing of teeth, so Reeves must have got some things right.
If you can't shift the mortgage at the end of the fixed rate period to another lender you are shifted from the 3% rate they were probably paying to 7-8% now.
And given the number of properties they have no bank is going to allow them to remortgage their btl property at a low rate...
I believe it is in South Korea, where the expectation on women that they will care for their husband's parents in old age is one of the factors often cited to explain why they are reluctant to marry and have children.
You end up expecting women to do the lion's share of caring for children and for parents, while also holding down a full-time job. Why would they want to do that?
You'd see the birth rate plummet even further.
I was fortunate in that both my mother and then, after 10 years, my father passed away before the care burden became impossible to meet whilst working. In the latter case part-time working and then early retirement picked up the slack.
At the age of 59 I was intending to work full-time until 65, the oldest permitted age in my job. Shortly after that the need to cut down my hours came, and before my 60th birthday I'd had to retire to cope.
I was one of the people arguing with @leon. He was putting a point of view that I totally disagreed with and we argued, but it was civilised. There was no abuse. He put an argument. He didn't just come out with racist abuse. His argument to my mind is racist but you have to argue against it not ban it. It is not as if he was chanting racist stuff. He was just putting an argument forward.
Now my only reservation was after the fact when @TheScreamingEagles commented upon the effect it had on him when thinking of his daughter. Something I hadn't considered being white.
The stated crisis is "until we sell up", so it's a short term squeeze for them not existential. They can sell a couple of properties for cash in a couple of weeks if they need, and with 60 there will be tenants leaving regularly.
This budget does not target landlords selling up - the 3% Stamp Duty surcharge up to 5% is on LL buyers not sellers (though IMO it's crass by Reeves, but that's a different argument), and they can sell into the general market. There has not been much increase in general costs particularly on LLs beyond what eg Osborne did, other than maybe required quality upgrades which are a train which has been coming and expected for more than a decade.
I'd say it's far more likely they are more affected by over-gearing and have been hit hard by mortgage rate increases on variable rate, or fixed rates reaching end-of-term, mortgages, which may have doubled or more on payments in the last year or two.
A LL with 60 properties needs a generous 6 figure liquid sum in the bank as a buffer (say £200k+).
For the Telegraph to run this as a pensioner poverty story is tin-eared and self-satirical - as stupid as we would expect. But they are twits to let it be used.
Full story: https://archive.ph/AMp02#selection-3243.0-3265.67
This might sound harsh but we have a principle here that we deify length of life regardless of quality or cost.
Dementia is a very cruel fate and I wouldn't wish it on anyone but what sort of sense does it make to bankrupt ourselves to keep someone in that condition.
Many of Trump’s base are people who have lost their jobs when factories have been shipped abroad, in some cases hollowing out entire towns and cities. Detroit is full of whole abandoned towns that used to house the auto workers, and those displaced workers feel the government is doing nothing for them.
The old Michael Moore rant from eight years ago is just as relevant today as it was then, perhaps even more so.
I think I've posted before about how I nearly missed an expensive MRI slot because I went to the wrong hospital, thanks to the receptionist at a different hospital using without explanation the abbreviation MRI for Manchester Royal Infirmary, without considering this was also the department I was being sent to see. This was after a previous missed MRI because they failed to book an X-ray to check for steel splinters in my eyes first, despite my ringing them and telling them this exactly as instructed on the paperwork they sent out.
Stuff like this isn't hard, or expensive to fix - but because it's a state monolith entirely run by a mixture of incompetence and producer capture it isn't. Pouring loads more money in the top won't help either - this stuff isn't fixed primarily because nobody cares, rather than anything else.
*It turned out that it has been renamed the "Jasmine Suite" presumably to be more sensitive to people our situation, which is lovely and thoughtful, but does require that people are told to go there. And once we found that bit out, the signage was still rubbish to actually get there.
There are also a couple of lenders who are playing hardball when portfolio properties are being sold and trying to get the overall debt reduced which can make things even more complex..
They justify this by looking at his opponents: Defund the police and the various other manifestations of race or gender nonsense, plus the economic illiteracy of the left (tax on unrealised capital gains - how does that work??).
So they've basically sold it to themselves as "OK he's an idiot, but at least he's our idiot" and try to avoid thinking about the fascist tendencies.
The assumption seems to be that anyone who raises it or anything like it must be a proto-Nazi who needs to be squashed at birth for the safety and security of us all but I think, whilst there are people like that, this is more often liberal hysterics. And it's a function of the history of the last 70 years and ingrained rules of social proof.
To save us from polarisation we need to gently engage with at least some of these concerns on the periphery, as Professor Eric Kaufmann has.
My (female) relatives regularly complain that I am "hard to buy for", this is despite my telling them every Christmas that – really – I don't want anything!
I might want to increase the size of my family. It doesn't mean I view other children as less welcome in the world.
Of course nurses staring in your face "care" but actually as you note with your examples, they don't care enough really to amend or help amend or voice concerns about the system which is useless.
Everyone in the NHS should be ashamed of themselves.
The modern reality is that this is quite unusual and I wouldn't criticise anyone for doing it differently.
60 properties at a perhaps typical £12k * pa rent in Colchester is £720k per annum top line turnover (albett likely more like £700k due to vacancies). I am not aware of *any* business that requires 3 years of turnover in current reserves - are you?
Even a charity, such as say a local Anglican parish, which inherently needs to be more cautious, will normally run with available reserves of around 3 months of income. For £700k, that would be £210k.
The need is to cover crises, such as a T going non-paying, or a house being damaged and having to provide alternative accommodation for a period in extremis if it burns down, or sudden repairs such as a roof or gas boiler going phut. Even providing alternative accommodation for a year at LL expense will only be rent plus a premium, perhaps £15k over a year. A largish portfolio will lay-off a good deal of the risk, as even if something happens to 3 or 4 properties that is only 5% of normal income down. It's very different from running 1 or 3 properties.
That is further mitigated by rent-payment insurance, obviously buildings insurance and various other normal practices.
* 12k pa is 2 bed flat level in Colchester, but the numbers scale if you want to say £1500-1600 and a larger financial buffer.
Look, I'm not saying dog eat dog. But I think we have an absurd level of overcommitment to very expensive chronic and morbid conditions atm that are overly socialised and not ensured enough.
Property, pensions and houses should be used to part fund them. As Theresa May argued.
The people who are there every day often don’t notice these things, and people in sick or distressed situations aren’t going to fill out a form or raise a complaint.
Your claim that "nobody cares" is nonsense (and insulting). NHS staff generally do care, but they're worked off their feet. More money does help.
Labour engaging in the 'same silly games playing ' as the Tories on spending
Not what Reeves wants to hear
https://news.sky.com/story/budget-latest-rachel-reeves-updates-live-12593360?postid=8538161#liveblog-body
Should we?
The builder I employed to rebuild my house could do it. And given he is a hands on guy (electrical & gas certified - even though he employs people for that), he would probably fix lots of it himself.
That disease is cruel and fucking sick. Took a friend of mine 3 months ago who was my age (42 years old) and mother to a six year old boy.
Haven't cried that much on the way home from a funeral ever.
If you are going to be Icarus, take a parachute.
This is a serious problem for governments going forward and I simply have no idea how the circle is squared
But we have now settled down to a small hamper one way, and two bottles of wine the other.
Presents are for kids.
However, I expect cash to be a significant part of spending for a considerable time to come
It wouldn't go amiss for you to keep a list of a few books or other things that you could provide to people so that they could exercise this impulse.
Thank god he's not going to win 🙂
So these choices already exist.
As for LostPassword's comment about it being ritual - which is a good one - the problem is that gift giving does imply a geas or obligation on the recipient never to dispose of the gift. Especially frustrating at your and my time of life when we're not only trying not to accumulate too much more but positively declutter and sort out.
T 48
I think