A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
About 5/6 according to OBR, but it's still not an out-of-work sickness benefit.
(There's a valid question about whether the claims are justified)
All claims are justified every 3 years or sooner. There is a very large form to fill out. I've completed a few and the questions are quite detailed if somewhat intrusive. A lot are rejected by the DWP (poor staff training) but are paid after a visit to a Tribunal and a long delay.
The payments are lawful and justified under the current legislation. If people want it changed then Parliament has to sit down and change the legislation after consultation, impact assessments, reference to linked legislation etc. No-one wants to touch it and Kemi is just making noise as she will be aware of the issue.
She really is a dud.
Isn't that system famos for being the one where (for instance) people with trisomy-21 are hauled in triennially to see if this has miraculously reverted to diploidy-21 and their condition has been cured? Every three years, with the risk of one of those DWP assessment disasters or a mistake in filling in the bumf causing a return to zero in the snakes and ladders game.
A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
About 5/6 according to OBR, but it's still not an out-of-work sickness benefit.
(There's a valid question about whether the claims are justified)
All claims are justified every 3 years or sooner. There is a very large form to fill out. I've completed a few and the questions are quite detailed if somewhat intrusive. A lot are rejected by the DWP (poor staff training) but are paid after a visit to a Tribunal and a long delay.
The payments are lawful and justified under the current legislation. If people want it changed then Parliament has to sit down and change the legislation after consultation, impact assessments, reference to linked legislation etc. No-one wants to touch it and Kemi is just making noise as she will be aware of the issue.
She really is a dud.
One would have thought after the blowback Reeves and Starmer received for attacking disabled related benefits, she would steer clear without copper bottomed advice. Suggesting PIP is an out of work benefit suggests she hasn't bothered with any due diligence.
Of course, given their inability to pass legislation to reduce eligibility for disabled benefits, the only lever available to the government will be fiscal drag. Which, of course, will affect every claimant.
Manchester Evening News has images of a bomb disposal van deployed to the Synagogue.
I would think that's SOP in such an incident where a vehicle is involved. Call them out, just in case.
I’ve seen footage of the police shooting the attacker and the copper saying he’s got a bomb on his fucking jacket and he’s trying to press it.
My friend’s grandfather goes to this synagogue.
My son took some Yiddish lessons a while back (my father in law was non-practising Jewish, and he's interested in the history and culture). The background checks before you were allowed to attend lessons were quite eye opening as to the realities of life in 21C Britain.
A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
About 5/6 according to OBR, but it's still not an out-of-work sickness benefit.
(There's a valid question about whether the claims are justified)
All claims are justified every 3 years or sooner. There is a very large form to fill out. I've completed a few and the questions are quite detailed if somewhat intrusive. A lot are rejected by the DWP (poor staff training) but are paid after a visit to a Tribunal and a long delay.
The payments are lawful and justified under the current legislation. If people want it changed then Parliament has to sit down and change the legislation after consultation, impact assessments, reference to linked legislation etc. No-one wants to touch it and Kemi is just making noise as she will be aware of the issue.
She really is a dud.
Some awards are for longer than 3 years, more severe disability is on a light touch basis with awards lasting much longer due to the cinditions being highly unlikely to change. Less severe disability or conditions that can change quite rapidly are assessed or reassessed much more frequently
What the police need is someone to invent (and really I'm assuming they already have because it is so obvious) some sort of AI cctv viewer that can near-instantly do a binary search for the moment the item of interest appears or disappears, rather than tie up police officers for eight hours checking an eight hour recording from start to finish.
Manchester Evening News has images of a bomb disposal van deployed to the Synagogue.
I would think that's SOP in such an incident where a vehicle is involved. Call them out, just in case.
I’ve seen footage of the police shooting the attacker and the copper saying he’s got a bomb on his fucking jacket and he’s trying to press it.
My friend’s grandfather goes to this synagogue.
Hopefully the body-cam footage clears the copper quickly.
Other than the formality to be followed, I doubt many would question why a lunatic wielding a knife outside a Synagogue on Yom Kippur, whilst apparently wearing an explosive vest after having stabbed people, shouldn't be justifiably shot by a trained officer.
Trouble is, this can encourage the next guy who sees this as a short-cut to heaven, a point I'd be playing up if I were recruiting mentally challenged volunteers for the next mission.
I don't believe anyone can argue with the actions taken on the knowledge available at the moment. Better to be safe than sorry under normal circumstances. We don't often blow away innocent Brazilian electricians by mistake. I'm satisfied GMP did the right thing.
Sure would have been good to have a new fast North-South passenger rail line to take the load off the other lines: Clearly the demand is there to make it profitable. What happened to that idea I wonder?
You don't need to run more trains to increase capacity. There are far too many services operated by 5-car sets, rather than 9 or 10. Run every service with a full-length train, and there will be plenty of extra passenger capacity. But that would require the procurement of more trains.
They should also get rid of the cherry-picking open access operators (who all operate half-size trains), so that we have a fully-joined up timetable.
But why is buying more carriages so hard, when it's only 13% of costs?
Every percentage counts but cleaning and maintaining the extra carriages would increase the cost shown in other which includes cleaning and maintenance, so that 13% figure is not necessarily accurate for what the costs would be.
EDIT: Longer trains would presumably also significantly increase the mass of the trains and energy required to haul those trains too, so that percentage should go up. Could require extra staffing too.
Is the normal cause for limitations on the lengths of trains not usually the lengths of platforms, and other aspects of our heritage railway infrastructure?
Our PB railway-station-spotter will know.
That's certainly the case for local trains in the North. (You may remember the Gilligan report - Reform's response to NPR and HS2 - which casually suggested greater capacity could be achieved by train lengthening: unfortunately, that is far less easy than it sounds for exactly the reason you say. And platform lengthening is normally much harder than it sounds: the low-hanging fruit has been done, and many of the remaining targets are quite hard-to-do - the land isn't available, or there are bridges in the way, or topographical reasons.) It may be that Sandy's point is reasonable about longer distance trains though - my knowledge of such things is a tad parochial!
A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
About 5/6 according to OBR, but it's still not an out-of-work sickness benefit.
(There's a valid question about whether the claims are justified)
All claims are justified every 3 years or sooner. There is a very large form to fill out. I've completed a few and the questions are quite detailed if somewhat intrusive. A lot are rejected by the DWP (poor staff training) but are paid after a visit to a Tribunal and a long delay.
The payments are lawful and justified under the current legislation. If people want it changed then Parliament has to sit down and change the legislation after consultation, impact assessments, reference to linked legislation etc. No-one wants to touch it and Kemi is just making noise as she will be aware of the issue.
She really is a dud.
One would have thought after the blowback Reeves and Starmer received for attacking disabled related benefits, she would steer clear without copper bottomed advice. Suggesting PIP is an out of work benefit suggests she hasn't bothered with any due diligence.
Or is deliberately conflating them. Much as right wingers like to insist that UC is strictly for dole scroungers, when it's arguably in large part a modern Speenhamland system.
A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
About 5/6 according to OBR, but it's still not an out-of-work sickness benefit.
(There's a valid question about whether the claims are justified)
All claims are justified every 3 years or sooner. There is a very large form to fill out. I've completed a few and the questions are quite detailed if somewhat intrusive. A lot are rejected by the DWP (poor staff training) but are paid after a visit to a Tribunal and a long delay.
The payments are lawful and justified under the current legislation. If people want it changed then Parliament has to sit down and change the legislation after consultation, impact assessments, reference to linked legislation etc. No-one wants to touch it and Kemi is just making noise as she will be aware of the issue.
She really is a dud.
One would have thought after the blowback Reeves and Starmer received for attacking disabled related benefits, she would steer clear without copper bottomed advice. Suggesting PIP is an out of work benefit suggests she hasn't bothered with any due diligence.
A good point. Even when the current government with a large majority try to amend it, there is a lot of pushback. Wonder how much effort would be put into it if there is a hung parliament.
A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
About 5/6 according to OBR, but it's still not an out-of-work sickness benefit.
(There's a valid question about whether the claims are justified)
All claims are justified every 3 years or sooner. There is a very large form to fill out. I've completed a few and the questions are quite detailed if somewhat intrusive. A lot are rejected by the DWP (poor staff training) but are paid after a visit to a Tribunal and a long delay.
The payments are lawful and justified under the current legislation. If people want it changed then Parliament has to sit down and change the legislation after consultation, impact assessments, reference to linked legislation etc. No-one wants to touch it and Kemi is just making noise as she will be aware of the issue.
She really is a dud.
One would have thought after the blowback Reeves and Starmer received for attacking disabled related benefits, she would steer clear without copper bottomed advice. Suggesting PIP is an out of work benefit suggests she hasn't bothered with any due diligence.
She probably read something on X last night. No need for any of that silly old due diligence.
Manchester Evening News has images of a bomb disposal van deployed to the Synagogue.
I would think that's SOP in such an incident where a vehicle is involved. Call them out, just in case.
I’ve seen footage of the police shooting the attacker and the copper saying he’s got a bomb on his fucking jacket and he’s trying to press it.
My friend’s grandfather goes to this synagogue.
Hopefully the body-cam footage clears the copper quickly.
Other than the formality to be followed, I doubt many would question why a lunatic wielding a knife outside a Synagogue on Yom Kippur, whilst apparently wearing an explosive vest after having stabbed people, shouldn't be justifiably shot by a trained officer.
If an assailant has a knife, a lethal weapon, surely they may be killed. Self defence, reasonable force. It would only be otherwise if you continued to attack them once they have been obviously incapacitated
A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
About 5/6 according to OBR, but it's still not an out-of-work sickness benefit.
(There's a valid question about whether the claims are justified)
Precisely. IF that is what she means (and I'm not clear yet that she does), then she is climbing on the Demonise-Disabled-People bandwagon, and such behaviour is sickening.
I know multiple people who receive PIP, and some use it to obtain the tools or services they need to be able to make it possible or practical for them to work.
The process is an unprofessional mess that makes one or two scared saying that they can cycle on an adapted bike funded with their PIP, even though they cannot walk more than a few steps (example condition: Fibromyalgia), because they are frightened the insufficiently-knowledgeable officer will make a false assumption in their assessment and they will not receive the help they need.
For particular cases, I know one professional woman mum of four who works in disabled advocacy with a progressive condition, who believes she does not get the higher rate because of false assumptions.
If Kemi wants to tackle abuse and marginal cases, then that is what she should say - and not attack the whole lot.
A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
About 5/6 according to OBR, but it's still not an out-of-work sickness benefit.
(There's a valid question about whether the claims are justified)
All claims are justified every 3 years or sooner. There is a very large form to fill out. I've completed a few and the questions are quite detailed if somewhat intrusive. A lot are rejected by the DWP (poor staff training) but are paid after a visit to a Tribunal and a long delay.
The payments are lawful and justified under the current legislation. If people want it changed then Parliament has to sit down and change the legislation after consultation, impact assessments, reference to linked legislation etc. No-one wants to touch it and Kemi is just making noise as she will be aware of the issue.
She really is a dud.
One would have thought after the blowback Reeves and Starmer received for attacking disabled related benefits, she would steer clear without copper bottomed advice. Suggesting PIP is an out of work benefit suggests she hasn't bothered with any due diligence.
She probably read something on X last night. No need for any of that silly old due diligence.
I'm not quite ready to dismiss the suspicion based on Kemi's PMQs, that she is not being deliberately undermined by some faction or other at CCHQ writing her nonsensical scripts, a bit like the way Labour did to Jeremy Corbyn.
Manchester Evening News has images of a bomb disposal van deployed to the Synagogue.
I would think that's SOP in such an incident where a vehicle is involved. Call them out, just in case.
I’ve seen footage of the police shooting the attacker and the copper saying he’s got a bomb on his fucking jacket and he’s trying to press it.
My friend’s grandfather goes to this synagogue.
Hopefully the body-cam footage clears the copper quickly.
Other than the formality to be followed, I doubt many would question why a lunatic wielding a knife outside a Synagogue on Yom Kippur, whilst apparently wearing an explosive vest after having stabbed people, shouldn't be justifiably shot by a trained officer.
Trouble is, this can encourage the next guy who sees this as a short-cut to heaven, a point I'd be playing up if I were recruiting mentally challenged volunteers for the next mission.
I don't believe anyone can argue with the actions taken on the knowledge available at the moment. Better to be safe than sorry under normal circumstances. We don't often blow away innocent Brazilian electricians by mistake. I'm satisfied GMP did the right thing.
Yes they didn’t really have a choice . And if there’s any doubt they need to act.
Manchester Evening News has images of a bomb disposal van deployed to the Synagogue.
I would think that's SOP in such an incident where a vehicle is involved. Call them out, just in case.
I’ve seen footage of the police shooting the attacker and the copper saying he’s got a bomb on his fucking jacket and he’s trying to press it.
My friend’s grandfather goes to this synagogue.
Hopefully the body-cam footage clears the copper quickly.
Other than the formality to be followed, I doubt many would question why a lunatic wielding a knife outside a Synagogue on Yom Kippur, whilst apparently wearing an explosive vest after having stabbed people, shouldn't be justifiably shot by a trained officer.
If an assailant has a knife, a lethal weapon, surely they may be killed. Self defence, reasonable force. It would only be otherwise if you continued to attack them once they have been obviously incapacitated
He was on the ground, trying to get back up. That's why I hoped that the body cam footage would make it very clear that the coppers actions were the right thing to do.
Manchester Evening News has images of a bomb disposal van deployed to the Synagogue.
I would think that's SOP in such an incident where a vehicle is involved. Call them out, just in case.
I’ve seen footage of the police shooting the attacker and the copper saying he’s got a bomb on his fucking jacket and he’s trying to press it.
My friend’s grandfather goes to this synagogue.
Hopefully the body-cam footage clears the copper quickly.
Other than the formality to be followed, I doubt many would question why a lunatic wielding a knife outside a Synagogue on Yom Kippur, whilst apparently wearing an explosive vest after having stabbed people, shouldn't be justifiably shot by a trained officer.
If an assailant has a knife, a lethal weapon, surely they may be killed. Self defence, reasonable force. It would only be otherwise if you continued to attack them once they have been obviously incapacitated
UK firearms officers under these circumstances are under instruction to "shoot to kill" and not to incapacitate.
If you want to raise more tax, get economic growth going.
Otherwise you end up in a doom loop, where tax rises suppress economic activity, which means you don't raise as much tax as you'd expected, which means you need to increase tax rates...
As I keep pointing out, the UK economy is growing the fastest in G7 despite Reeves inheriting a very poor fiscal situation that necessitated tax rises, and some general economic headwinds from US tariffs.
At the same time, Reeves has increased capital spending for long term growth and unlocked a number of large infrastructure projects that were stuck. Lots more to be done, but it's a very tricky balancing act at the moment.
That is as maybe, but the entire developed world is suffering from slow growth - partly that's because of long term structural headwinds around demographics, but made worse by the Russian invasion of Ukraine which has pushed up energy prices, and Trump's tariffs.
One thing the government do is significantly loosen planning controls and buildling regulations. This would have the twin benefit of increasing housing supply, and driving economic growth.
Here's my one factoid for the day: residential construction as a percentage of GDP has fallen from over 7% of GDP in the early 1970s, to 5.8% between 1991 and 2007, to under 4% now. Given the increase in population we've seen, that is insanity.
I would just say that the prices of new build property around us is way out of the pocket of local buyers
Of course local authorities in Wales are implementing surcharges on second homes which next year will be a 200% uplift in Conwy
Local Estate Agents tell me a lot of second home owners are selling up and indeed, my daughter, following her divorce, is buying one such property
If the market was mostly driven by second home owners then surely that will just even out in the long term.
It will hit current owners but new ones will just pay a lower price and a bit more council tax.
Its actually a lot more council tax
In my case if it was applicable it would rise from £4,000 to £12,000 pa
£4000 is a lot by Flatland standards, that would be the highest band (H).
For a band H house, surely a, say, £100k drop isn't out of the question if the demand disappears?
If you want to raise more tax, get economic growth going.
Otherwise you end up in a doom loop, where tax rises suppress economic activity, which means you don't raise as much tax as you'd expected, which means you need to increase tax rates...
As I keep pointing out, the UK economy is growing the fastest in G7 despite Reeves inheriting a very poor fiscal situation that necessitated tax rises, and some general economic headwinds from US tariffs.
At the same time, Reeves has increased capital spending for long term growth and unlocked a number of large infrastructure projects that were stuck. Lots more to be done, but it's a very tricky balancing act at the moment.
That is as maybe, but the entire developed world is suffering from slow growth - partly that's because of long term structural headwinds around demographics, but made worse by the Russian invasion of Ukraine which has pushed up energy prices, and Trump's tariffs.
One thing the government do is significantly loosen planning controls and buildling regulations. This would have the twin benefit of increasing housing supply, and driving economic growth.
Here's my one factoid for the day: residential construction as a percentage of GDP has fallen from over 7% of GDP in the early 1970s, to 5.8% between 1991 and 2007, to under 4% now. Given the increase in population we've seen, that is insanity.
I would just say that the prices of new build property around us is way out of the pocket of local buyers
Of course local authorities in Wales are implementing surcharges on second homes which next year will be a 200% uplift in Conwy
Local Estate Agents tell me a lot of second home owners are selling up and indeed, my daughter, following her divorce, is buying one such property
If the market was mostly driven by second home owners then surely that will just even out in the long term.
It will hit current owners but new ones will just pay a lower price and a bit more council tax.
Its actually a lot more council tax
In my case if it was applicable it would rise from £4,000 to £12,000 pa
£4000 is a lot by Flatland standards, that would be the highest band (H).
For a band H house, surely a, say, £100k drop isn't out of the question if the demand disappears?
G in our case
C for me (smug face)
A. Still £95 a month even with the 25% discount though. More than gas and electric combined.
An employer has £100 extra to use on employment costs, so he spends it on his employee, earning £30,000 pa. What happens to the £100.
He has to pay 15% employers NI, so he pays £85.
Of this 8% goes in employees NI, making £78.20.
20% goes in IT, making £61.20
And he pays 9% because he has a student loan.
So he receives £53.50.
Which he spends on a VATable item worth £44.60 at 20% rate.
I imagine my data and maths are imperfect, but it's not far out. It's how the state plucks the goose with the minimum of hissing, and manages to raise over 40% of GDP for the state to spend.
If there were no other taxes but the IT basic rate was 55% we would notice more.
Er and ee Pension as well, say 3% and 5%
vat is different but high deductions are a real issue. The marginal rate of deduction is about 50% even for a lot of people on middle incomes.
The video shows a member of the public refusing to get back and just standing there as police are telling people to get back . Wtf is wrong with some people .
Sure would have been good to have a new fast North-South passenger rail line to take the load off the other lines: Clearly the demand is there to make it profitable. What happened to that idea I wonder?
You don't need to run more trains to increase capacity. There are far too many services operated by 5-car sets, rather than 9 or 10. Run every service with a full-length train, and there will be plenty of extra passenger capacity. But that would require the procurement of more trains.
They should also get rid of the cherry-picking open access operators (who all operate half-size trains), so that we have a fully-joined up timetable.
But why is buying more carriages so hard, when it's only 13% of costs?
Every percentage counts but cleaning and maintaining the extra carriages would increase the cost shown in other which includes cleaning and maintenance, so that 13% figure is not necessarily accurate for what the costs would be.
EDIT: Longer trains would presumably also significantly increase the mass of the trains and energy required to haul those trains too, so that percentage should go up. Could require extra staffing too.
Is the normal cause for limitations on the lengths of trains not usually the lengths of platforms, and other aspects of our heritage railway infrastructure?
Our PB railway-station-spotter will know.
Running 5 coach trains between King's Cross and Leeds or Newcastle is limited by the availability of rolling stock.
Isn’t the problem with PIP simply that the costs seem to escalate exponentially?
Are people in the UK becoming increasingly sickly and disabled?
Something is wrong, surely.
There was some interesting back-and-forth with the courts when the rules were changed in 2016 which illustrates some of the issues around mental health:
I suspect it's more to do with the public learning how to claim, and lowered shame thresholds. Our system is held together by people not claiming what they are due.
If you want to raise more tax, get economic growth going.
Otherwise you end up in a doom loop, where tax rises suppress economic activity, which means you don't raise as much tax as you'd expected, which means you need to increase tax rates...
As I keep pointing out, the UK economy is growing the fastest in G7 despite Reeves inheriting a very poor fiscal situation that necessitated tax rises, and some general economic headwinds from US tariffs.
At the same time, Reeves has increased capital spending for long term growth and unlocked a number of large infrastructure projects that were stuck. Lots more to be done, but it's a very tricky balancing act at the moment.
That is as maybe, but the entire developed world is suffering from slow growth - partly that's because of long term structural headwinds around demographics, but made worse by the Russian invasion of Ukraine which has pushed up energy prices, and Trump's tariffs.
One thing the government do is significantly loosen planning controls and buildling regulations. This would have the twin benefit of increasing housing supply, and driving economic growth.
Here's my one factoid for the day: residential construction as a percentage of GDP has fallen from over 7% of GDP in the early 1970s, to 5.8% between 1991 and 2007, to under 4% now. Given the increase in population we've seen, that is insanity.
I would just say that the prices of new build property around us is way out of the pocket of local buyers
Of course local authorities in Wales are implementing surcharges on second homes which next year will be a 200% uplift in Conwy
Local Estate Agents tell me a lot of second home owners are selling up and indeed, my daughter, following her divorce, is buying one such property
If the market was mostly driven by second home owners then surely that will just even out in the long term.
It will hit current owners but new ones will just pay a lower price and a bit more council tax.
Its actually a lot more council tax
In my case if it was applicable it would rise from £4,000 to £12,000 pa
£4000 is a lot by Flatland standards, that would be the highest band (H).
For a band H house, surely a, say, £100k drop isn't out of the question if the demand disappears?
G in our case
C for me (smug face)
@Leon had better make sure no valuer sees the inside of his flat. We could be talking a major dent in the National Debt.
Isn’t the problem with PIP simply that the costs seem to escalate exponentially?
Are people in the UK becoming increasingly sickly and disabled?
Something is wrong, surely.
It seems to have been extended over the last few years under the Tories to include some pretty questionable conditions.
I have been watching the Freddie Flintoff programme where he provides cricketing opportunities to "naughty" teenagers. Early on, many display signs of ADHD. When they are engaged deep in the programme all these signs disappear.
A so-called WASPI woman, the sort of person the Lib Dem’s want to give tens of thousands to, feared losing her home. Moved to France. Got a part time job. Bought a second house on the Italian riviera.
Dig deep young uns with Uni debt in the tens of thousands.
These are the people the Lib Dem’s and some others want to hand your cash to.
If you want to raise more tax, get economic growth going.
Otherwise you end up in a doom loop, where tax rises suppress economic activity, which means you don't raise as much tax as you'd expected, which means you need to increase tax rates...
As I keep pointing out, the UK economy is growing the fastest in G7 despite Reeves inheriting a very poor fiscal situation that necessitated tax rises, and some general economic headwinds from US tariffs.
At the same time, Reeves has increased capital spending for long term growth and unlocked a number of large infrastructure projects that were stuck. Lots more to be done, but it's a very tricky balancing act at the moment.
That is as maybe, but the entire developed world is suffering from slow growth - partly that's because of long term structural headwinds around demographics, but made worse by the Russian invasion of Ukraine which has pushed up energy prices, and Trump's tariffs.
One thing the government do is significantly loosen planning controls and buildling regulations. This would have the twin benefit of increasing housing supply, and driving economic growth.
Here's my one factoid for the day: residential construction as a percentage of GDP has fallen from over 7% of GDP in the early 1970s, to 5.8% between 1991 and 2007, to under 4% now. Given the increase in population we've seen, that is insanity.
I would just say that the prices of new build property around us is way out of the pocket of local buyers
Of course local authorities in Wales are implementing surcharges on second homes which next year will be a 200% uplift in Conwy
Local Estate Agents tell me a lot of second home owners are selling up and indeed, my daughter, following her divorce, is buying one such property
If the market was mostly driven by second home owners then surely that will just even out in the long term.
It will hit current owners but new ones will just pay a lower price and a bit more council tax.
Its actually a lot more council tax
In my case if it was applicable it would rise from £4,000 to £12,000 pa
£4000 is a lot by Flatland standards, that would be the highest band (H).
For a band H house, surely a, say, £100k drop isn't out of the question if the demand disappears?
G in our case
C for me (smug face)
A. Still £95 a month even with the 25% discount though. More than gas and electric combined.
£325 per month for us but I pay it in 2 equal installments in April and October
If you want to raise more tax, get economic growth going.
Otherwise you end up in a doom loop, where tax rises suppress economic activity, which means you don't raise as much tax as you'd expected, which means you need to increase tax rates...
As I keep pointing out, the UK economy is growing the fastest in G7 despite Reeves inheriting a very poor fiscal situation that necessitated tax rises, and some general economic headwinds from US tariffs.
At the same time, Reeves has increased capital spending for long term growth and unlocked a number of large infrastructure projects that were stuck. Lots more to be done, but it's a very tricky balancing act at the moment.
That is as maybe, but the entire developed world is suffering from slow growth - partly that's because of long term structural headwinds around demographics, but made worse by the Russian invasion of Ukraine which has pushed up energy prices, and Trump's tariffs.
One thing the government do is significantly loosen planning controls and buildling regulations. This would have the twin benefit of increasing housing supply, and driving economic growth.
Here's my one factoid for the day: residential construction as a percentage of GDP has fallen from over 7% of GDP in the early 1970s, to 5.8% between 1991 and 2007, to under 4% now. Given the increase in population we've seen, that is insanity.
I would just say that the prices of new build property around us is way out of the pocket of local buyers
Of course local authorities in Wales are implementing surcharges on second homes which next year will be a 200% uplift in Conwy
Local Estate Agents tell me a lot of second home owners are selling up and indeed, my daughter, following her divorce, is buying one such property
If the market was mostly driven by second home owners then surely that will just even out in the long term.
It will hit current owners but new ones will just pay a lower price and a bit more council tax.
Its actually a lot more council tax
In my case if it was applicable it would rise from £4,000 to £12,000 pa
£4000 is a lot by Flatland standards, that would be the highest band (H).
For a band H house, surely a, say, £100k drop isn't out of the question if the demand disappears?
G in our case
C for me (smug face)
A. Still £95 a month even with the 25% discount though. More than gas and electric combined.
The single person discount should go too. It rewards inefficient use of housing (no offence).
Politically impossible because of all the widows who would kick up a fuss.
A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
About 5/6 according to OBR, but it's still not an out-of-work sickness benefit.
(There's a valid question about whether the claims are justified)
All claims are justified every 3 years or sooner. There is a very large form to fill out. I've completed a few and the questions are quite detailed if somewhat intrusive. A lot are rejected by the DWP (poor staff training) but are paid after a visit to a Tribunal and a long delay.
The payments are lawful and justified under the current legislation. If people want it changed then Parliament has to sit down and change the legislation after consultation, impact assessments, reference to linked legislation etc. No-one wants to touch it and Kemi is just making noise as she will be aware of the issue.
She really is a dud.
One would have thought after the blowback Reeves and Starmer received for attacking disabled related benefits, she would steer clear without copper bottomed advice. Suggesting PIP is an out of work benefit suggests she hasn't bothered with any due diligence.
It was Liz Kendall actually and it was simply slowing the rate of growth not cutting the total spent.
When it was said 35% of people would be worse off that simply means the vast majority don’t need the money.
They’re smart enough to know this is not sustainable.
The video shows a member of the public refusing to get back and just standing there as police are telling people to get back . Wtf is wrong with some people .
I think he was in shock most probably. Elderly man.
What the police need is someone to invent (and really I'm assuming they already have because it is so obvious) some sort of AI cctv viewer that can near-instantly do a binary search for the moment the item of interest appears or disappears, rather than tie up police officers for eight hours checking an eight hour recording from start to finish.
I hope that's not how the police would check such a video. You check the video at the start to identify the stolen bicycle and its location. You check the video at the end to verify that it is indeed no longer there at the end of the video you are searching. Then you check halfway through. Then halfway through the half in which you know the theft happened. And so on. It doesn't take many of these halving checks to reduce the search window from 8 hours to less than a minute.
It sounds like the police response to the attack on the synagogue was commendably rapid and prevented greater loss of life.
Ooh, has something bad happened. I have been racking off and fining my last batches of home made wine today.
I’m guessing the usual suspects on either side will be more interested in the ethnicity of the attacker rather than the victims.
What sort of wine, grape or fruit? And if grape, what variety?
I’m guessing fruit given you’d have had to harvest grapes absurdly early to be already at the racking stage. Blackberry?
I make wine from a few sources
Cartons of fruit juice from the supermarket. That is how I started.
Dried fruit such as raisins, dates, sultanas, apricot. These really are first class. The drying of the fruit intensifies the flavour and they are full of sugar. It is messy. But worth it. The apricots need to be organic as non organic has sulfites in that retard fermentation. Raisins need a wash as they are coated in sunflower oil and dates chopped have flour on them.
Frozen fruit from the supermarket. Mixed berries, the sainsburys value range, give some rather good results.
Fruit I have grown, or bought from the shops. So Rhubarb, banana, apple, ginger.
It have made some kits as well. The red ones I don’t do as I found they lack depth.
I have a small garden and no chance of an allotment for many years so I used to get fruit from a co worker. Now I retired I have started growing rhubarb and strawberries and have a couple of apple trees.
It’s great fun. I enjoy drinking it but I make far too much. I don’t have many spare wine bottles so will bottle in beer bottles next week.
One of the most popular new genres in fiction is "Dark Romance". Which is a euphemistic name for "rape fantasy fiction". Yes
Entire novels which are centred around the idea of a villainous "hero" taking, without consent, or with very very blurred consent, the heroine.. Often the "hero" is an actual criminal, often he kidnaps the woman, sometimes there is quite a lot of violence towards the woman
It's being bought by the shedload, in America, Germany, Scandinavia, and increasingly Britain. Who is buying it? Women
My beloved MiL, no longer with us, spent her days and night reading Mills and Boon. Her favourite type - anything with a 'Rake' - Georgian Rake, Edwardian Rake and so on.
Its always been a thing that some women rather like a slightly bad boy. Only later do they come to realise that spending time with the nice ones you overlooked as not exciting, is a better bet in the long run.
What angers me is that they need to be matched with at least equivalent cuts in public spending so that a real and meaningful dent can be made in our scary deficits. When I hear nonsense like removing the 2 child cap after the WFA for millionaires, the rejection of the cuts on disability benefits and the bottomless pit of the NHS to pay ever higher wages with consequential pension liabilities I....am disappointed.
I don't think equating the 2-child limit with WFP is fair. UC is strictly tapered and means-tested in a way that WFP is not. That means that those children affected by the limit really are among the poorest and most vulnerable in the UK. It cements intergenerational poverty etc etc
I understand why people think the limit is fair - people should only have lots of kids if they have the cash to do so. But what is grotesquely unfair is keeping it even while rich pensioners continue to get WFP, and the long term effects of kids growing up in poverty harm both our society and long term spending (just look at rates of crime, health etc etc).
Manchester Evening News has images of a bomb disposal van deployed to the Synagogue.
I would think that's SOP in such an incident where a vehicle is involved. Call them out, just in case.
I’ve seen footage of the police shooting the attacker and the copper saying he’s got a bomb on his fucking jacket and he’s trying to press it.
My friend’s grandfather goes to this synagogue.
Hopefully the body-cam footage clears the copper quickly.
Other than the formality to be followed, I doubt many would question why a lunatic wielding a knife outside a Synagogue on Yom Kippur, whilst apparently wearing an explosive vest after having stabbed people, shouldn't be justifiably shot by a trained officer.
Yes, but. There was that case with the wanker in the stolen car not long ago.
A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
About 5/6 according to OBR, but it's still not an out-of-work sickness benefit.
(There's a valid question about whether the claims are justified)
All claims are justified every 3 years or sooner. There is a very large form to fill out. I've completed a few and the questions are quite detailed if somewhat intrusive. A lot are rejected by the DWP (poor staff training) but are paid after a visit to a Tribunal and a long delay.
The payments are lawful and justified under the current legislation. If people want it changed then Parliament has to sit down and change the legislation after consultation, impact assessments, reference to linked legislation etc. No-one wants to touch it and Kemi is just making noise as she will be aware of the issue.
She really is a dud.
One would have thought after the blowback Reeves and Starmer received for attacking disabled related benefits, she would steer clear without copper bottomed advice. Suggesting PIP is an out of work benefit suggests she hasn't bothered with any due diligence.
It was Liz Kendall actually and it was simply slowing the rate of growth not cutting the total spent.
When it was said 35% of people would be worse off that simply means the vast majority don’t need the money.
They’re smart enough to know this is not sustainable.
I’d be interested to see similar graphs for other OECD countries.
As I’ve posted before, the UK seems to have set up a system that feels extremely punitive on the striving middle classes (let’s say income earners 60k - 200k) who essentially keep the whole economy going.
It all encourages a society where building wealth is seen as suspect.
Thanks. Seems like claims are 2x what they “ought” to be, and the system hasn’t yet got to grips with a kind of post-Covid settlement which encourages claim-making.
One of the most popular new genres in fiction is "Dark Romance". Which is a euphemistic name for "rape fantasy fiction". Yes
Entire novels which are centred around the idea of a villainous "hero" taking, without consent, or with very very blurred consent, the heroine.. Often the "hero" is an actual criminal, often he kidnaps the woman, sometimes there is quite a lot of violence towards the woman
It's being bought by the shedload, in America, Germany, Scandinavia, and increasingly Britain. Who is buying it? Women
Sounds like they might have at least one male buyer.
You can be certain many people living day to day are living a more fulfilling honest life valuing things money cannot buy
For some people, their net worth is how they keep score, how they know that they are winning at life. (After all, once you are living well off the interest on the interest, what else can you do but view it as a number in a game?) Dying rich equalling dying disgraced has gone out of fashion.
I suspect it's part of why taxes are so toxic at the top end- it's not about the value of the money, it's about a sense of the government taking a chunk of their life away.
See also: the power of inheritance tax to scare people, when rationally it's the one time we pay taxes without losing.
Interesting perspective. My parents have been quite frugal. Never earned big money, Labour voters, Dad a PE teacher, Mum worked in local govt, but paid off the mortgage and would never dodge taxes, yet they see inheritance tax as the devil, and are trying to syphon the money to me and the grandkids before the govt get their hands on 40% of it. They don’t see the kids being taxed heavily on inheritance as them not losing
Manchester Evening News has images of a bomb disposal van deployed to the Synagogue.
I would think that's SOP in such an incident where a vehicle is involved. Call them out, just in case.
I’ve seen footage of the police shooting the attacker and the copper saying he’s got a bomb on his fucking jacket and he’s trying to press it.
My friend’s grandfather goes to this synagogue.
Hopefully the body-cam footage clears the copper quickly.
Other than the formality to be followed, I doubt many would question why a lunatic wielding a knife outside a Synagogue on Yom Kippur, whilst apparently wearing an explosive vest after having stabbed people, shouldn't be justifiably shot by a trained officer.
Yes, but. There was that case with the wanker in the stolen car not long ago.
One of the most popular new genres in fiction is "Dark Romance". Which is a euphemistic name for "rape fantasy fiction". Yes
Entire novels which are centred around the idea of a villainous "hero" taking, without consent, or with very very blurred consent, the heroine.. Often the "hero" is an actual criminal, often he kidnaps the woman, sometimes there is quite a lot of violence towards the woman
It's being bought by the shedload, in America, Germany, Scandinavia, and increasingly Britain. Who is buying it? Women
My beloved MiL, no longer with us, spent her days and night reading Mills and Boon. Her favourite type - anything with a 'Rake' - Georgian Rake, Edwardian Rake and so on.
Its always been a thing that some women rather like a slightly bad boy. Only later do they come to realise that spending time with the nice ones you overlooked as not exciting, is a better bet in the long run.
(At least Sunil hopes they do).
These books go way way beyond that. In some of them the women are nearly killed. Or actually killed. Kidnapped by serial killers. It's very extreme
It sounds like the police response to the attack on the synagogue was commendably rapid and prevented greater loss of life.
Ooh, has something bad happened. I have been racking off and fining my last batches of home made wine today.
I’m guessing the usual suspects on either side will be more interested in the ethnicity of the attacker rather than the victims.
What sort of wine, grape or fruit? And if grape, what variety?
I’m guessing fruit given you’d have had to harvest grapes absurdly early to be already at the racking stage. Blackberry?
I make wine from a few sources
Cartons of fruit juice from the supermarket. That is how I started. Dried fruit such as raisins, dates, sultanas, apricot. Frozen fruit from the supermarket. Fruit I have grown, or bought from the shops. So Rhubarb, banana, apple, ginger.
It have made some kits as well. The red ones I don’t do as I found they lack depth.
I have a small garden and no chance of an allotment for many years so I used to get fruit from a co worker. Now I retired I have started growing rhubarb and strawberries and have a couple of apple trees.
It’s great fun. I enjoy drinking it but I make far too much. I don’t have many spare wine bottles so will bottle in beer bottles next week.
Then it’s the fun of the annual clean down 😂
I can tell you have the home brew addiction. Quite hard to shake once it sets in.
That problem, of making far too much, is a real headache. I used to make wine from the back garden grapes every year and the batches were too small to avoid spoilage most of the time, but last year I took a small amount from the vineyard to make at home and now have a load of bottles of that I wouldn’t be allowed to sell but will struggle ever to drink through.
Thanks. Seems like claims are 2x what they “ought” to be, and the system hasn’t yet got to grips with a kind of post-Covid settlement which encourages claim-making.
What the police need is someone to invent (and really I'm assuming they already have because it is so obvious) some sort of AI cctv viewer that can near-instantly do a binary search for the moment the item of interest appears or disappears, rather than tie up police officers for eight hours checking an eight hour recording from start to finish.
It would take you less than 5 minutes to identify when a bike was stolen in an 8 hour period. You check it at the 4 hour mark. If it's there, check at two hours. If not there, at 3 hours. If there, 3.5 hours. And so on.
A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
About 5/6 according to OBR, but it's still not an out-of-work sickness benefit.
(There's a valid question about whether the claims are justified)
All claims are justified every 3 years or sooner. There is a very large form to fill out. I've completed a few and the questions are quite detailed if somewhat intrusive. A lot are rejected by the DWP (poor staff training) but are paid after a visit to a Tribunal and a long delay.
The payments are lawful and justified under the current legislation. If people want it changed then Parliament has to sit down and change the legislation after consultation, impact assessments, reference to linked legislation etc. No-one wants to touch it and Kemi is just making noise as she will be aware of the issue.
She really is a dud.
One would have thought after the blowback Reeves and Starmer received for attacking disabled related benefits, she would steer clear without copper bottomed advice. Suggesting PIP is an out of work benefit suggests she hasn't bothered with any due diligence.
It was Liz Kendall actually and it was simply slowing the rate of growth not cutting the total spent.
When it was said 35% of people would be worse off that simply means the vast majority don’t need the money.
They’re smart enough to know this is not sustainable.
I’d be interested to see similar graphs for other OECD countries.
As I’ve posted before, the UK seems to have set up a system that feels extremely punitive on the striving middle classes (let’s say income earners 60k - 200k) who essentially keep the whole economy going.
It all encourages a society where building wealth is seen as suspect.
Yes, all anti aspirational. Profit is a dirty word. You only have to look at the commentators who scream about the likes of Tesco making a £3 Billion profit implying they are ripping people off.
Bart posts a bit about the cliff edges we have in our tax system and is quite knowledgable about it. It seems extremely punitive.
The politicians do indeed cut current spending, and call it "austerity". The problem is the big ticket cuts are often things that promote growth or reduce costs. After they get cut, often, like HS2, at a higher cost than actually building the thing, everyone wonders why public administration is so crap and nothing works. The biggest thing that could be done now is to cut the triple lock on pensions. That alone would bring public finances into primary surplus. However "they/we contributed all their/our lives", even though, actually they/we mostly didn't. So in the end unless the voters are prepared to bite the bullet, you can hardly blame the politicians if they choose not to do so either.
The claim that: cut the triple lock on pensions. That alone would bring public finances into primary surplus seems far-fetched. Cutting the state pension in half might do it but that would be, in Sir Humphrey's parlance, courageous.
In the immediate term, ending the triple lock will save no money at all because pension payments would continue at the current rate. In the medium term, ending it will save money only in those years when the triple lock would mandate a higher pension rise than whatever replaces it, presumably a single or double lock, or tying the pension to inflation as it used to be, or to wages as it used to be.
In the immediate term, ending the triple lock will quite possibly save money within the next 12 months and should save vast sums of money within the next five years, since a single lock as it should be would not see yo-yo ratchetting as we have seen in the past decade.
It would save far, far, far more than any other policy could, because no other policy touches the sides of the expenditure this one does.
It sounds like you have mistaken the whole pension bill for the annual increase, and are then aggregating future years pensions but not the rest of government spending.
No mistake.
Increasing the pension bill by (for example) 0.2% less next year would save a very significant sum of money. More than almost any other feasible change.
Doing so, compound, over the next few years would save many billions of pounds, in the short term of our upcoming years let alone medium or long term.
So as I said, no immediate saving, and future savings only from the time the triple lock increase would be higher than whatever replaces the triple lock (assuming the state pension will not be frozen in perpetuity).
No, you're wrong.
Within the next 12 months is an immediate saving on a Budgetary level.
You're setting an insane bar if you mean "from tonight" as immediate, very few items in the Budget work that way.
You can be certain many people living day to day are living a more fulfilling honest life valuing things money cannot buy
For some people, their net worth is how they keep score, how they know that they are winning at life. (After all, once you are living well off the interest on the interest, what else can you do but view it as a number in a game?) Dying rich equalling dying disgraced has gone out of fashion.
I suspect it's part of why taxes are so toxic at the top end- it's not about the value of the money, it's about a sense of the government taking a chunk of their life away.
See also: the power of inheritance tax to scare people, when rationally it's the one time we pay taxes without losing.
Interesting perspective. My parents have been quite frugal. Never earned big money, Labour voters, Dad a PE teacher, Mum worked in local govt, but paid off the mortgage and would never dodge taxes, yet they see inheritance tax as the devil, and are trying to symphonic the money to me and the grandkids before the gift get their hands on 40% of it. They don’t see the kids being taxed heavily on inheritance as them not losing
Yet IHT is effectively a wealth tax and people seem to overwhelmingly support it.
Thanks. Seems like claims are 2x what they “ought” to be, and the system hasn’t yet got to grips with a kind of post-Covid settlement which encourages claim-making.
One of the most popular new genres in fiction is "Dark Romance". Which is a euphemistic name for "rape fantasy fiction". Yes
Entire novels which are centred around the idea of a villainous "hero" taking, without consent, or with very very blurred consent, the heroine.. Often the "hero" is an actual criminal, often he kidnaps the woman, sometimes there is quite a lot of violence towards the woman
It's being bought by the shedload, in America, Germany, Scandinavia, and increasingly Britain. Who is buying it? Women
Didn't you hear about Gillian Anderson's book, Want?
What rock have you been under?
You Yes, I know that book. It's in the tradition of Nancy Friday and Shere Hite - a non fiction analysis of female sex desires and fantasies
I am talking about fiction. Topping the bestseller lists, which is all about rape, by stalkers, murderers, Mafia bosses. And women are buying it
Here's the weird thing, fiction about serial killers is really popular among the 99.99% of us who are potential victims, rather than serial killers.
This is a weird thing which goes back to the beginning of recorded history, and most likely before that.
You're not really getting this, are you?
These are books about rape of young women, where the young woman is often violently abused - choked, tied up, assaulted at gunpoint, knifed, spat on, you get the idea - and then the woman falls in love with the guy that did this. And he's a serial killer, gangster, psycho. Actual psychos
One of the most popular new genres in fiction is "Dark Romance". Which is a euphemistic name for "rape fantasy fiction". Yes
Entire novels which are centred around the idea of a villainous "hero" taking, without consent, or with very very blurred consent, the heroine.. Often the "hero" is an actual criminal, often he kidnaps the woman, sometimes there is quite a lot of violence towards the woman
It's being bought by the shedload, in America, Germany, Scandinavia, and increasingly Britain. Who is buying it? Women
My beloved MiL, no longer with us, spent her days and night reading Mills and Boon. Her favourite type - anything with a 'Rake' - Georgian Rake, Edwardian Rake and so on.
Its always been a thing that some women rather like a slightly bad boy. Only later do they come to realise that spending time with the nice ones you overlooked as not exciting, is a better bet in the long run.
(At least Sunil hopes they do).
These books go way way beyond that. In some of them the women are nearly killed. Or actually killed. Kidnapped by serial killers. It's very extreme
Look at fanfiction. It’s filled with rape fantasies, incest fantasies, and paedo fantasies.
A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
About 5/6 according to OBR, but it's still not an out-of-work sickness benefit.
(There's a valid question about whether the claims are justified)
All claims are justified every 3 years or sooner. There is a very large form to fill out. I've completed a few and the questions are quite detailed if somewhat intrusive. A lot are rejected by the DWP (poor staff training) but are paid after a visit to a Tribunal and a long delay.
The payments are lawful and justified under the current legislation. If people want it changed then Parliament has to sit down and change the legislation after consultation, impact assessments, reference to linked legislation etc. No-one wants to touch it and Kemi is just making noise as she will be aware of the issue.
She really is a dud.
One would have thought after the blowback Reeves and Starmer received for attacking disabled related benefits, she would steer clear without copper bottomed advice. Suggesting PIP is an out of work benefit suggests she hasn't bothered with any due diligence.
It was Liz Kendall actually and it was simply slowing the rate of growth not cutting the total spent.
When it was said 35% of people would be worse off that simply means the vast majority don’t need the money.
They’re smart enough to know this is not sustainable.
I’d be interested to see similar graphs for other OECD countries.
As I’ve posted before, the UK seems to have set up a system that feels extremely punitive on the striving middle classes (let’s say income earners 60k - 200k) who essentially keep the whole economy going.
It all encourages a society where building wealth is seen as suspect.
We have talked a lot about the cliff edge at £100k, but particularly hard hit by all the changes and tax rises are if you are a single parent household on that low end of £50-60k. All the tax rises, you will have been squarely in the crosshairs as you are "rich", while benefits / benefits in kind have been squeezed away and inflation / energy costs eating what is left.
A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
Thanks. Seems like claims are 2x what they “ought” to be, and the system hasn’t yet got to grips with a kind of post-Covid settlement which encourages claim-making.
In a nutshell, it’s younger more-often female claimants with mental illness, and it has put the UK way out of whack with overseas peers.
Lots of 'anxiety' cases out there.
I know life can be tough, but really? We are not under immediate threat of Nazi stormtroopers landing at Dover, or Junkers dropping incendaries on your house.
What angers me is that they need to be matched with at least equivalent cuts in public spending so that a real and meaningful dent can be made in our scary deficits. When I hear nonsense like removing the 2 child cap after the WFA for millionaires, the rejection of the cuts on disability benefits and the bottomless pit of the NHS to pay ever higher wages with consequential pension liabilities I....am disappointed.
I don't think equating the 2-child limit with WFP is fair. UC is strictly tapered and means-tested in a way that WFP is not. That means that those children affected by the limit really are among the poorest and most vulnerable in the UK. It cements intergenerational poverty etc etc
I understand why people think the limit is fair - people should only have lots of kids if they have the cash to do so. But what is grotesquely unfair is keeping it even while rich pensioners continue to get WFP, and the long term effects of kids growing up in poverty harm both our society and long term spending (just look at rates of crime, health etc etc).
Don't get me started on intergenerational fairness. The greedy bastards of the baby boom are the most selfish generation in history. Voted for governments that ran up horrendous debts, voted for ever more generous entitlements and pensions, voted for massive tax benefits for themselves, voted for student debt, voted for ramping up the housing market to their advantage making it impossible for the young to get on the housing ladder, voted for... (that's enough ed).
I know I know. But if you Baxter this with no tactical voting, the Tories only get 7 (seven!) seats. Hunt would be about the only one left perversely.
Good conference boost for Labour there. They will be pleased with that
Up 2 points to 19, and only 16 behind Reform, who are also up 2 to 35%. More than a third of Britons, who are "racists" are now supporting "racist" Reform
A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
About 5/6 according to OBR, but it's still not an out-of-work sickness benefit.
(There's a valid question about whether the claims are justified)
All claims are justified every 3 years or sooner. There is a very large form to fill out. I've completed a few and the questions are quite detailed if somewhat intrusive. A lot are rejected by the DWP (poor staff training) but are paid after a visit to a Tribunal and a long delay.
The payments are lawful and justified under the current legislation. If people want it changed then Parliament has to sit down and change the legislation after consultation, impact assessments, reference to linked legislation etc. No-one wants to touch it and Kemi is just making noise as she will be aware of the issue.
She really is a dud.
One would have thought after the blowback Reeves and Starmer received for attacking disabled related benefits, she would steer clear without copper bottomed advice. Suggesting PIP is an out of work benefit suggests she hasn't bothered with any due diligence.
It was Liz Kendall actually and it was simply slowing the rate of growth not cutting the total spent.
When it was said 35% of people would be worse off that simply means the vast majority don’t need the money.
They’re smart enough to know this is not sustainable.
I’d be interested to see similar graphs for other OECD countries.
As I’ve posted before, the UK seems to have set up a system that feels extremely punitive on the striving middle classes (let’s say income earners 60k - 200k) who essentially keep the whole economy going.
It all encourages a society where building wealth is seen as suspect.
Yes, all anti aspirational. Profit is a dirty word. You only have to look at the commentators who scream about the likes of Tesco making a £3 Billion profit implying they are ripping people off.
Bart posts a bit about the cliff edges we have in our tax system and is quite knowledgable about it. It seems extremely punitive.
Also recall that the Tory/Lib Dems took a lot of lowest income earners out of taxation altogether. Which sounded like a nice idea at the time, but it has meant that the burden of tax must fall ever more heavily on the middle class.
One of the most popular new genres in fiction is "Dark Romance". Which is a euphemistic name for "rape fantasy fiction". Yes
Entire novels which are centred around the idea of a villainous "hero" taking, without consent, or with very very blurred consent, the heroine.. Often the "hero" is an actual criminal, often he kidnaps the woman, sometimes there is quite a lot of violence towards the woman
It's being bought by the shedload, in America, Germany, Scandinavia, and increasingly Britain. Who is buying it? Women
Didn't you hear about Gillian Anderson's book, Want?
What rock have you been under?
You Yes, I know that book. It's in the tradition of Nancy Friday and Shere Hite - a non fiction analysis of female sex desires and fantasies
I am talking about fiction. Topping the bestseller lists, which is all about rape, by stalkers, murderers, Mafia bosses. And women are buying it
Here's the weird thing, fiction about serial killers is really popular among the 99.99% of us who are potential victims, rather than serial killers.
This is a weird thing which goes back to the beginning of recorded history, and most likely before that.
You're not really getting this, are you?
These are books about rape of young women, where the young woman is often violently abused - choked, tied up, assaulted at gunpoint, knifed, spat on, you get the idea - and then the woman falls in love with the guy that did this. And he's a serial killer, gangster, psycho. Actual psychos
And the people buying this? Young women
Fiction about crimes isn't against the law, within reason.
Otherwise the Godfather and many other stories would be prohibited.
Many people like reading, or watching, fictional stories that would break the law if they happened in real life. Key word is fiction.
If you want to raise more tax, get economic growth going.
Otherwise you end up in a doom loop, where tax rises suppress economic activity, which means you don't raise as much tax as you'd expected, which means you need to increase tax rates...
As I keep pointing out, the UK economy is growing the fastest in G7 despite Reeves inheriting a very poor fiscal situation that necessitated tax rises, and some general economic headwinds from US tariffs.
At the same time, Reeves has increased capital spending for long term growth and unlocked a number of large infrastructure projects that were stuck. Lots more to be done, but it's a very tricky balancing act at the moment.
That is as maybe, but the entire developed world is suffering from slow growth - partly that's because of long term structural headwinds around demographics, but made worse by the Russian invasion of Ukraine which has pushed up energy prices, and Trump's tariffs.
One thing the government do is significantly loosen planning controls and buildling regulations. This would have the twin benefit of increasing housing supply, and driving economic growth.
Here's my one factoid for the day: residential construction as a percentage of GDP has fallen from over 7% of GDP in the early 1970s, to 5.8% between 1991 and 2007, to under 4% now. Given the increase in population we've seen, that is insanity.
I would just say that the prices of new build property around us is way out of the pocket of local buyers
Of course local authorities in Wales are implementing surcharges on second homes which next year will be a 200% uplift in Conwy
Local Estate Agents tell me a lot of second home owners are selling up and indeed, my daughter, following her divorce, is buying one such property
If the market was mostly driven by second home owners then surely that will just even out in the long term.
It will hit current owners but new ones will just pay a lower price and a bit more council tax.
Its actually a lot more council tax
In my case if it was applicable it would rise from £4,000 to £12,000 pa
£4000 is a lot by Flatland standards, that would be the highest band (H).
For a band H house, surely a, say, £100k drop isn't out of the question if the demand disappears?
G in our case
C for me (smug face)
A. Still £95 a month even with the 25% discount though. More than gas and electric combined.
£325 per month for us but I pay it in 2 equal installments in April and October
My local property tax for 2026 will be €41 per month, but Ireland has an absurdly narrow tax base and you can look forward to reading stories about its next fiscal disaster when the Corporate Tax Bonanza dries up.
(Also, refuse collection is privatised which is a pain in the arse)
One of the most popular new genres in fiction is "Dark Romance". Which is a euphemistic name for "rape fantasy fiction". Yes
Entire novels which are centred around the idea of a villainous "hero" taking, without consent, or with very very blurred consent, the heroine.. Often the "hero" is an actual criminal, often he kidnaps the woman, sometimes there is quite a lot of violence towards the woman
It's being bought by the shedload, in America, Germany, Scandinavia, and increasingly Britain. Who is buying it? Women
My beloved MiL, no longer with us, spent her days and night reading Mills and Boon. Her favourite type - anything with a 'Rake' - Georgian Rake, Edwardian Rake and so on.
Its always been a thing that some women rather like a slightly bad boy. Only later do they come to realise that spending time with the nice ones you overlooked as not exciting, is a better bet in the long run.
(At least Sunil hopes they do).
These books go way way beyond that. In some of them the women are nearly killed. Or actually killed. Kidnapped by serial killers. It's very extreme
Look at fanfiction. It’s filled with rape fantasies, incest fantasies, and paedo fantasies.
Probably why I don’t, actually, look at fan fiction.
The politicians do indeed cut current spending, and call it "austerity". The problem is the big ticket cuts are often things that promote growth or reduce costs. After they get cut, often, like HS2, at a higher cost than actually building the thing, everyone wonders why public administration is so crap and nothing works. The biggest thing that could be done now is to cut the triple lock on pensions. That alone would bring public finances into primary surplus. However "they/we contributed all their/our lives", even though, actually they/we mostly didn't. So in the end unless the voters are prepared to bite the bullet, you can hardly blame the politicians if they choose not to do so either.
The claim that: cut the triple lock on pensions. That alone would bring public finances into primary surplus seems far-fetched. Cutting the state pension in half might do it but that would be, in Sir Humphrey's parlance, courageous.
In the immediate term, ending the triple lock will save no money at all because pension payments would continue at the current rate. In the medium term, ending it will save money only in those years when the triple lock would mandate a higher pension rise than whatever replaces it, presumably a single or double lock, or tying the pension to inflation as it used to be, or to wages as it used to be.
In the immediate term, ending the triple lock will quite possibly save money within the next 12 months and should save vast sums of money within the next five years, since a single lock as it should be would not see yo-yo ratchetting as we have seen in the past decade.
It would save far, far, far more than any other policy could, because no other policy touches the sides of the expenditure this one does.
It sounds like you have mistaken the whole pension bill for the annual increase, and are then aggregating future years pensions but not the rest of government spending.
No mistake.
Increasing the pension bill by (for example) 0.2% less next year would save a very significant sum of money. More than almost any other feasible change.
Doing so, compound, over the next few years would save many billions of pounds, in the short term of our upcoming years let alone medium or long term.
So as I said, no immediate saving, and future savings only from the time the triple lock increase would be higher than whatever replaces the triple lock (assuming the state pension will not be frozen in perpetuity).
No, you're wrong.
Within the next 12 months is an immediate saving on a Budgetary level.
You're setting an insane bar if you mean "from tonight" as immediate, very few items in the Budget work that way.
3 years is the key timing, for our fiscal rules (down from 5 years before the last budget).
The politicians do indeed cut current spending, and call it "austerity". The problem is the big ticket cuts are often things that promote growth or reduce costs. After they get cut, often, like HS2, at a higher cost than actually building the thing, everyone wonders why public administration is so crap and nothing works. The biggest thing that could be done now is to cut the triple lock on pensions. That alone would bring public finances into primary surplus. However "they/we contributed all their/our lives", even though, actually they/we mostly didn't. So in the end unless the voters are prepared to bite the bullet, you can hardly blame the politicians if they choose not to do so either.
The claim that: cut the triple lock on pensions. That alone would bring public finances into primary surplus seems far-fetched. Cutting the state pension in half might do it but that would be, in Sir Humphrey's parlance, courageous.
In the immediate term, ending the triple lock will save no money at all because pension payments would continue at the current rate. In the medium term, ending it will save money only in those years when the triple lock would mandate a higher pension rise than whatever replaces it, presumably a single or double lock, or tying the pension to inflation as it used to be, or to wages as it used to be.
In the immediate term, ending the triple lock will quite possibly save money within the next 12 months and should save vast sums of money within the next five years, since a single lock as it should be would not see yo-yo ratchetting as we have seen in the past decade.
It would save far, far, far more than any other policy could, because no other policy touches the sides of the expenditure this one does.
It sounds like you have mistaken the whole pension bill for the annual increase, and are then aggregating future years pensions but not the rest of government spending.
No mistake.
Increasing the pension bill by (for example) 0.2% less next year would save a very significant sum of money. More than almost any other feasible change.
Doing so, compound, over the next few years would save many billions of pounds, in the short term of our upcoming years let alone medium or long term.
So as I said, no immediate saving, and future savings only from the time the triple lock increase would be higher than whatever replaces the triple lock (assuming the state pension will not be frozen in perpetuity).
No, you're wrong.
Within the next 12 months is an immediate saving on a Budgetary level.
You're setting an insane bar if you mean "from tonight" as immediate, very few items in the Budget work that way.
No you're wrong. There is no guarantee of a saving because we don't know which of the three locks is going to be higher over the next 12 months. If we link to wages and they grow faster than 2.5% or inflation for the next 5 years then there is no saving in this parliament at all.
The triple lock has to go because of the long term fiscal implications but it makes next to no difference to the cash Reeves has available at the budget. You need to make an actual cut in something to free up some money.
One of the most popular new genres in fiction is "Dark Romance". Which is a euphemistic name for "rape fantasy fiction". Yes
Entire novels which are centred around the idea of a villainous "hero" taking, without consent, or with very very blurred consent, the heroine.. Often the "hero" is an actual criminal, often he kidnaps the woman, sometimes there is quite a lot of violence towards the woman
It's being bought by the shedload, in America, Germany, Scandinavia, and increasingly Britain. Who is buying it? Women
Didn't you hear about Gillian Anderson's book, Want?
What rock have you been under?
You Yes, I know that book. It's in the tradition of Nancy Friday and Shere Hite - a non fiction analysis of female sex desires and fantasies
I am talking about fiction. Topping the bestseller lists, which is all about rape, by stalkers, murderers, Mafia bosses. And women are buying it
Here's the weird thing, fiction about serial killers is really popular among the 99.99% of us who are potential victims, rather than serial killers.
This is a weird thing which goes back to the beginning of recorded history, and most likely before that.
You're not really getting this, are you?
These are books about rape of young women, where the young woman is often violently abused - choked, tied up, assaulted at gunpoint, knifed, spat on, you get the idea - and then the woman falls in love with the guy that did this. And he's a serial killer, gangster, psycho. Actual psychos
And the people buying this? Young women
Fiction about crimes isn't against the law, within reason.
Otherwise the Godfather and many other stories would be prohibited.
Many people like reading, or watching, fictional stories that would break the law if they happened in real life. Key word is fiction.
Head::Desk
I'm not saying this should be prohibited, or criminalised, or whatever
I am saying it is a fascinating cultural phenomenon, which is is. Or at least it is to all the people I talk to in publishing and the arts, which I have been doing today, they are mesmerised by it. So much money is being made, so fast
It is also richly paradoxical. Authors are still getting cancelled by the Woke-Nazis for wrongly attempting to write about, say, a black character, without being black and employing 2000 sensitivity readers. At the same time other authors are making millions while cheerfully writing about enjoyable anal rape at gunpoint
An employer has £100 extra to use on employment costs, so he spends it on his employee, earning £30,000 pa. What happens to the £100.
He has to pay 15% employers NI, so he pays £85.
Of this 8% goes in employees NI, making £78.20.
20% goes in IT, making £61.20
And he pays 9% because he has a student loan.
So he receives £53.50.
Which he spends on a VATable item worth £44.60 at 20% rate.
I imagine my data and maths are imperfect, but it's not far out. It's how the state plucks the goose with the minimum of hissing, and manages to raise over 40% of GDP for the state to spend.
If there were no other taxes but the IT basic rate was 55% we would notice more.
Your maths are slightly out (because the 15% is on the £85) but yes, your point is valid.
Once you hit a point in your life. Probably with a house and car and employment, if you sat down... really sat down... and worked it all out, you'd find more than 50% of your monthly expenditure goes on tax, and that's not even factoring in the Ers NI element. Income tax, national insurance, student 'loan', VAT on loads of stuff you buy, fuel duty (plus VAT) on filling your car, council tax, and IPT on all your insurances. The 'telly tax' as well.
Easily more than 50% of your monthly expenditure.
Governments, of all stripes, don't like to admit this, so it's death by a thousand cuts instead. One tax at 55% is eyewatering.... so there are 55 taxes at 1% instead. Plus that generates huge numbers of civil servents in each of the 55 departments managing the 55 taxes, rather than managing just 1 department.
Now - just to make my position clear. I don't mind paying that sort of level of tax. What I object to is the lies governments and political parties tell, to convince you the tax rate is 20%.... not 55%. Stop lying. But I suppose they can't be honest with their people, few people are like me who'd prefer honesty over hypocricy.
Manchester Evening News has images of a bomb disposal van deployed to the Synagogue.
I would think that's SOP in such an incident where a vehicle is involved. Call them out, just in case.
I’ve seen footage of the police shooting the attacker and the copper saying he’s got a bomb on his fucking jacket and he’s trying to press it.
My friend’s grandfather goes to this synagogue.
Hopefully the body-cam footage clears the copper quickly.
Other than the formality to be followed, I doubt many would question why a lunatic wielding a knife outside a Synagogue on Yom Kippur, whilst apparently wearing an explosive vest after having stabbed people, shouldn't be justifiably shot by a trained officer.
If an assailant has a knife, a lethal weapon, surely they may be killed. Self defence, reasonable force. It would only be otherwise if you continued to attack them once they have been obviously incapacitated
UK firearms officers under these circumstances are under instruction to "shoot to kill" and not to incapacitate.
Well indeed, my example only really makes sense if you engage with an assailant at close range, if he has a knife you need to render him incapable of using it. Although of course a policeman might shoot and incapacitate, if it is "only" a knife then there would be no need to shoot again unless he is still a risk.
With a suspected bomb vest then the only option is to shoot to kill as soon as you are within an appropriate range.
One of the most popular new genres in fiction is "Dark Romance". Which is a euphemistic name for "rape fantasy fiction". Yes
Entire novels which are centred around the idea of a villainous "hero" taking, without consent, or with very very blurred consent, the heroine.. Often the "hero" is an actual criminal, often he kidnaps the woman, sometimes there is quite a lot of violence towards the woman
It's being bought by the shedload, in America, Germany, Scandinavia, and increasingly Britain. Who is buying it? Women
Didn't you hear about Gillian Anderson's book, Want?
What rock have you been under?
You Yes, I know that book. It's in the tradition of Nancy Friday and Shere Hite - a non fiction analysis of female sex desires and fantasies
I am talking about fiction. Topping the bestseller lists, which is all about rape, by stalkers, murderers, Mafia bosses. And women are buying it
Here's the weird thing, fiction about serial killers is really popular among the 99.99% of us who are potential victims, rather than serial killers.
This is a weird thing which goes back to the beginning of recorded history, and most likely before that.
You're not really getting this, are you?
These are books about rape of young women, where the young woman is often violently abused - choked, tied up, assaulted at gunpoint, knifed, spat on, you get the idea - and then the woman falls in love with the guy that did this. And he's a serial killer, gangster, psycho. Actual psychos
And the people buying this? Young women
I'm not quite sure what your point is though? Lots of people read thrillers without ever wanting that to happen to them. Lots of people like horror films.
A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
About 5/6 according to OBR, but it's still not an out-of-work sickness benefit.
(There's a valid question about whether the claims are justified)
All claims are justified every 3 years or sooner. There is a very large form to fill out. I've completed a few and the questions are quite detailed if somewhat intrusive. A lot are rejected by the DWP (poor staff training) but are paid after a visit to a Tribunal and a long delay.
The payments are lawful and justified under the current legislation. If people want it changed then Parliament has to sit down and change the legislation after consultation, impact assessments, reference to linked legislation etc. No-one wants to touch it and Kemi is just making noise as she will be aware of the issue.
She really is a dud.
One would have thought after the blowback Reeves and Starmer received for attacking disabled related benefits, she would steer clear without copper bottomed advice. Suggesting PIP is an out of work benefit suggests she hasn't bothered with any due diligence.
It was Liz Kendall actually and it was simply slowing the rate of growth not cutting the total spent.
When it was said 35% of people would be worse off that simply means the vast majority don’t need the money.
They’re smart enough to know this is not sustainable.
I’d be interested to see similar graphs for other OECD countries.
As I’ve posted before, the UK seems to have set up a system that feels extremely punitive on the striving middle classes (let’s say income earners 60k - 200k) who essentially keep the whole economy going.
It all encourages a society where building wealth is seen as suspect.
Yes, all anti aspirational. Profit is a dirty word. You only have to look at the commentators who scream about the likes of Tesco making a £3 Billion profit implying they are ripping people off.
Bart posts a bit about the cliff edges we have in our tax system and is quite knowledgable about it. It seems extremely punitive.
Also recall that the Tory/Lib Dems took a lot of lowest income earners out of taxation altogether. Which sounded like a nice idea at the time, but it has meant that the burden of tax must fall ever more heavily on the middle class.
No representation without taxation!
If everyone had the same or similar marginal rate then I think politics would be different.
You can be certain many people living day to day are living a more fulfilling honest life valuing things money cannot buy
For some people, their net worth is how they keep score, how they know that they are winning at life. (After all, once you are living well off the interest on the interest, what else can you do but view it as a number in a game?) Dying rich equalling dying disgraced has gone out of fashion.
I suspect it's part of why taxes are so toxic at the top end- it's not about the value of the money, it's about a sense of the government taking a chunk of their life away.
See also: the power of inheritance tax to scare people, when rationally it's the one time we pay taxes without losing.
Interesting perspective. My parents have been quite frugal. Never earned big money, Labour voters, Dad a PE teacher, Mum worked in local govt, but paid off the mortgage and would never dodge taxes, yet they see inheritance tax as the devil, and are trying to symphonic the money to me and the grandkids before the gift get their hands on 40% of it. They don’t see the kids being taxed heavily on inheritance as them not losing
Yet IHT is effectively a wealth tax and people seem to overwhelmingly support it.
Worse now without the IHT exemptions on businesses and agriculture it's a tax on investment for family run businesses. Indeed, there has been an entirely predictable crash in business investment among small businesses.
One of the most popular new genres in fiction is "Dark Romance". Which is a euphemistic name for "rape fantasy fiction". Yes
Entire novels which are centred around the idea of a villainous "hero" taking, without consent, or with very very blurred consent, the heroine.. Often the "hero" is an actual criminal, often he kidnaps the woman, sometimes there is quite a lot of violence towards the woman
It's being bought by the shedload, in America, Germany, Scandinavia, and increasingly Britain. Who is buying it? Women
Didn't you hear about Gillian Anderson's book, Want?
What rock have you been under?
You Yes, I know that book. It's in the tradition of Nancy Friday and Shere Hite - a non fiction analysis of female sex desires and fantasies
I am talking about fiction. Topping the bestseller lists, which is all about rape, by stalkers, murderers, Mafia bosses. And women are buying it
Here's the weird thing, fiction about serial killers is really popular among the 99.99% of us who are potential victims, rather than serial killers.
This is a weird thing which goes back to the beginning of recorded history, and most likely before that.
You're not really getting this, are you?
These are books about rape of young women, where the young woman is often violently abused - choked, tied up, assaulted at gunpoint, knifed, spat on, you get the idea - and then the woman falls in love with the guy that did this. And he's a serial killer, gangster, psycho. Actual psychos
And the people buying this? Young women
I'm not quite sure what your point is though? Lots of people read thrillers without ever wanting that to happen to them. Lots of people like horror films.
What angers me is that they need to be matched with at least equivalent cuts in public spending so that a real and meaningful dent can be made in our scary deficits. When I hear nonsense like removing the 2 child cap after the WFA for millionaires, the rejection of the cuts on disability benefits and the bottomless pit of the NHS to pay ever higher wages with consequential pension liabilities I....am disappointed.
I don't think equating the 2-child limit with WFP is fair. UC is strictly tapered and means-tested in a way that WFP is not. That means that those children affected by the limit really are among the poorest and most vulnerable in the UK. It cements intergenerational poverty etc etc
I understand why people think the limit is fair - people should only have lots of kids if they have the cash to do so. But what is grotesquely unfair is keeping it even while rich pensioners continue to get WFP, and the long term effects of kids growing up in poverty harm both our society and long term spending (just look at rates of crime, health etc etc).
Don't get me started on intergenerational fairness. The greedy bastards of the baby boom are the most selfish generation in history. Voted for governments that ran up horrendous debts, voted for ever more generous entitlements and pensions, voted for massive tax benefits for themselves, voted for student debt, voted for ramping up the housing market to their advantage making it impossible for the young to get on the housing ladder, voted for... (that's enough ed).
Anyone over 50, which includes you and perhaps most on here, benefitted from this boomer settlement.
Anyone under 50 has increasingly been part of generation short shrift.
From one perspective, it’s no wonder that young people are increasingly claiming disabled status in the hope of some kind of handout. Legitimate ways to get ahead are in ever-shorter supply.
What the police need is someone to invent (and really I'm assuming they already have because it is so obvious) some sort of AI cctv viewer that can near-instantly do a binary search for the moment the item of interest appears or disappears, rather than tie up police officers for eight hours checking an eight hour recording from start to finish.
I hope that's not how the police would check such a video. You check the video at the start to identify the stolen bicycle and its location. You check the video at the end to verify that it is indeed no longer there at the end of the video you are searching. Then you check halfway through. Then halfway through the half in which you know the theft happened. And so on. It doesn't take many of these halving checks to reduce the search window from 8 hours to less than a minute.
That is what I meant by binary search. However, I doubt the police have announced this change to save the odd couple of minutes here and there. Possibly there are other time sinks, like submitting the right forms in triplicate to get access to the recording in the first place.
The politicians do indeed cut current spending, and call it "austerity". The problem is the big ticket cuts are often things that promote growth or reduce costs. After they get cut, often, like HS2, at a higher cost than actually building the thing, everyone wonders why public administration is so crap and nothing works. The biggest thing that could be done now is to cut the triple lock on pensions. That alone would bring public finances into primary surplus. However "they/we contributed all their/our lives", even though, actually they/we mostly didn't. So in the end unless the voters are prepared to bite the bullet, you can hardly blame the politicians if they choose not to do so either.
The claim that: cut the triple lock on pensions. That alone would bring public finances into primary surplus seems far-fetched. Cutting the state pension in half might do it but that would be, in Sir Humphrey's parlance, courageous.
In the immediate term, ending the triple lock will save no money at all because pension payments would continue at the current rate. In the medium term, ending it will save money only in those years when the triple lock would mandate a higher pension rise than whatever replaces it, presumably a single or double lock, or tying the pension to inflation as it used to be, or to wages as it used to be.
In the immediate term, ending the triple lock will quite possibly save money within the next 12 months and should save vast sums of money within the next five years, since a single lock as it should be would not see yo-yo ratchetting as we have seen in the past decade.
It would save far, far, far more than any other policy could, because no other policy touches the sides of the expenditure this one does.
It sounds like you have mistaken the whole pension bill for the annual increase, and are then aggregating future years pensions but not the rest of government spending.
No mistake.
Increasing the pension bill by (for example) 0.2% less next year would save a very significant sum of money. More than almost any other feasible change.
Doing so, compound, over the next few years would save many billions of pounds, in the short term of our upcoming years let alone medium or long term.
So as I said, no immediate saving, and future savings only from the time the triple lock increase would be higher than whatever replaces the triple lock (assuming the state pension will not be frozen in perpetuity).
No, you're wrong.
Within the next 12 months is an immediate saving on a Budgetary level.
You're setting an insane bar if you mean "from tonight" as immediate, very few items in the Budget work that way.
No you're wrong. There is no guarantee of a saving because we don't know which of the three locks is going to be higher over the next 12 months. If we link to wages and they grow faster than 2.5% or inflation for the next 5 years then there is no saving in this parliament at all.
The triple lock has to go because of the long term fiscal implications but it makes next to no difference to the cash Reeves has available at the budget. You need to make an actual cut in something to free up some money.
I’m convinced that announcing an end to triple lock would lower long-cost borrowing costs (ie reduce long term gilt rates)
You can be certain many people living day to day are living a more fulfilling honest life valuing things money cannot buy
For some people, their net worth is how they keep score, how they know that they are winning at life. (After all, once you are living well off the interest on the interest, what else can you do but view it as a number in a game?) Dying rich equalling dying disgraced has gone out of fashion.
I suspect it's part of why taxes are so toxic at the top end- it's not about the value of the money, it's about a sense of the government taking a chunk of their life away.
See also: the power of inheritance tax to scare people, when rationally it's the one time we pay taxes without losing.
Interesting perspective. My parents have been quite frugal. Never earned big money, Labour voters, Dad a PE teacher, Mum worked in local govt, but paid off the mortgage and would never dodge taxes, yet they see inheritance tax as the devil, and are trying to symphonic the money to me and the grandkids before the gift get their hands on 40% of it. They don’t see the kids being taxed heavily on inheritance as them not losing
Yet IHT is effectively a wealth tax and people seem to overwhelmingly support it.
Worse now without the IHT exemptions on businesses and agriculture it's a tax on investment for family run businesses. Indeed, there has been an entirely predictable crash in business investment among small businesses.
I think it's highly unlikely to have had a material effect on small business investment. The seven year rule still applies and, in my family at least, the business gets passed on/sold at retirement.
One of the most popular new genres in fiction is "Dark Romance". Which is a euphemistic name for "rape fantasy fiction". Yes
Entire novels which are centred around the idea of a villainous "hero" taking, without consent, or with very very blurred consent, the heroine.. Often the "hero" is an actual criminal, often he kidnaps the woman, sometimes there is quite a lot of violence towards the woman
It's being bought by the shedload, in America, Germany, Scandinavia, and increasingly Britain. Who is buying it? Women
Didn't you hear about Gillian Anderson's book, Want?
What rock have you been under?
You Yes, I know that book. It's in the tradition of Nancy Friday and Shere Hite - a non fiction analysis of female sex desires and fantasies
I am talking about fiction. Topping the bestseller lists, which is all about rape, by stalkers, murderers, Mafia bosses. And women are buying it
Here's the weird thing, fiction about serial killers is really popular among the 99.99% of us who are potential victims, rather than serial killers.
This is a weird thing which goes back to the beginning of recorded history, and most likely before that.
You're not really getting this, are you?
These are books about rape of young women, where the young woman is often violently abused - choked, tied up, assaulted at gunpoint, knifed, spat on, you get the idea - and then the woman falls in love with the guy that did this. And he's a serial killer, gangster, psycho. Actual psychos
And the people buying this? Young women
I'm not quite sure what your point is though? Lots of people read thrillers without ever wanting that to happen to them. Lots of people like horror films.
I give up
There’s a limited audience for your advocacy of “enjoyable anal rape at gunpoint”, tbh.
"The British Transport Police (BTP) says it will not investigate bike thefts outside stations where the bicycle has been left for more than two hours."
Checks notes about what happened to shoplifing after the government / police made it clear that was their policy.....I have no idea why people think crime is out of control despite Fraser Nelson charts.
This is a crux of the matter, people understand crime does happen, but when they go to the police and they just say here is a crime number go away, its not surprising if they think the system is broken.
The politicians do indeed cut current spending, and call it "austerity". The problem is the big ticket cuts are often things that promote growth or reduce costs. After they get cut, often, like HS2, at a higher cost than actually building the thing, everyone wonders why public administration is so crap and nothing works. The biggest thing that could be done now is to cut the triple lock on pensions. That alone would bring public finances into primary surplus. However "they/we contributed all their/our lives", even though, actually they/we mostly didn't. So in the end unless the voters are prepared to bite the bullet, you can hardly blame the politicians if they choose not to do so either.
The claim that: cut the triple lock on pensions. That alone would bring public finances into primary surplus seems far-fetched. Cutting the state pension in half might do it but that would be, in Sir Humphrey's parlance, courageous.
In the immediate term, ending the triple lock will save no money at all because pension payments would continue at the current rate. In the medium term, ending it will save money only in those years when the triple lock would mandate a higher pension rise than whatever replaces it, presumably a single or double lock, or tying the pension to inflation as it used to be, or to wages as it used to be.
In the immediate term, ending the triple lock will quite possibly save money within the next 12 months and should save vast sums of money within the next five years, since a single lock as it should be would not see yo-yo ratchetting as we have seen in the past decade.
It would save far, far, far more than any other policy could, because no other policy touches the sides of the expenditure this one does.
It sounds like you have mistaken the whole pension bill for the annual increase, and are then aggregating future years pensions but not the rest of government spending.
No mistake.
Increasing the pension bill by (for example) 0.2% less next year would save a very significant sum of money. More than almost any other feasible change.
Doing so, compound, over the next few years would save many billions of pounds, in the short term of our upcoming years let alone medium or long term.
So as I said, no immediate saving, and future savings only from the time the triple lock increase would be higher than whatever replaces the triple lock (assuming the state pension will not be frozen in perpetuity).
No, you're wrong.
Within the next 12 months is an immediate saving on a Budgetary level.
You're setting an insane bar if you mean "from tonight" as immediate, very few items in the Budget work that way.
No you're wrong. There is no guarantee of a saving because we don't know which of the three locks is going to be higher over the next 12 months. If we link to wages and they grow faster than 2.5% or inflation for the next 5 years then there is no saving in this parliament at all.
The triple lock has to go because of the long term fiscal implications but it makes next to no difference to the cash Reeves has available at the budget. You need to make an actual cut in something to free up some money.
I’m convinced that announcing an end to triple lock would lower long-cost borrowing costs (ie reduce long term gilt rates)
That's an excellent point and it turns out BartholomewRoberts was accidentally correct.
A really strange one from Kemi. She does not even explain what she is referring to precisely, never mind link to any actual evidence. Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch 18h Every day under Labour, an extra 1000 people sign on to out of work sickness benefits.
If you’re too weak to fix that, you have no right to increase taxes on people in work.
Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, points out that approval rates for both face-to-face and remote assessments are largely unchanged since the pandemic. "What has changed is way more people are claiming Pip - the government's own figures show there are around 1,000 new awards made each day," she says.
About 5/6 according to OBR, but it's still not an out-of-work sickness benefit.
(There's a valid question about whether the claims are justified)
All claims are justified every 3 years or sooner. There is a very large form to fill out. I've completed a few and the questions are quite detailed if somewhat intrusive. A lot are rejected by the DWP (poor staff training) but are paid after a visit to a Tribunal and a long delay.
The payments are lawful and justified under the current legislation. If people want it changed then Parliament has to sit down and change the legislation after consultation, impact assessments, reference to linked legislation etc. No-one wants to touch it and Kemi is just making noise as she will be aware of the issue.
She really is a dud.
One would have thought after the blowback Reeves and Starmer received for attacking disabled related benefits, she would steer clear without copper bottomed advice. Suggesting PIP is an out of work benefit suggests she hasn't bothered with any due diligence.
It was Liz Kendall actually and it was simply slowing the rate of growth not cutting the total spent.
When it was said 35% of people would be worse off that simply means the vast majority don’t need the money.
They’re smart enough to know this is not sustainable.
I’d be interested to see similar graphs for other OECD countries.
As I’ve posted before, the UK seems to have set up a system that feels extremely punitive on the striving middle classes (let’s say income earners 60k - 200k) who essentially keep the whole economy going.
It all encourages a society where building wealth is seen as suspect.
Yes, all anti aspirational. Profit is a dirty word. You only have to look at the commentators who scream about the likes of Tesco making a £3 Billion profit implying they are ripping people off.
Bart posts a bit about the cliff edges we have in our tax system and is quite knowledgable about it. It seems extremely punitive.
Also recall that the Tory/Lib Dems took a lot of lowest income earners out of taxation altogether. Which sounded like a nice idea at the time, but it has meant that the burden of tax must fall ever more heavily on the middle class.
The basic tax allowance in 2010 is worth about £10,100 in today’s money, whereas the allowance as the coalition left it in 2015 is worth about £14,800. The personal allowance currently js actually £12,570 - so the extended Tory freeze has undone about half of the coalition’s increase.
Isn’t the problem with PIP simply that the costs seem to escalate exponentially?
Are people in the UK becoming increasingly sickly and disabled?
Something is wrong, surely.
An epidemic of laziness disguised as anxiety and depression, is the reality.
The modern version of the ‘bad back’
I've posted on this before but the figures are stark. Of Baths new intake of students (maybe 4000?) over 1000 have already declared a disability.
Yep, 1 in 4 of our mostly 18 year olds is 'disabled'.
Its bullshit, all of it.
(Apart from the one with the wheelchair, obv.)
LOL. I've just remembered that when I started my chemistry degree I was on large doses of valium to suppress a hand tremor. Would that have counted? (And btw, what sort of idiot wants to handle beakers of acid with a hand tremor? Still, it was chemistry or brain surgery.)
You can be certain many people living day to day are living a more fulfilling honest life valuing things money cannot buy
For some people, their net worth is how they keep score, how they know that they are winning at life. (After all, once you are living well off the interest on the interest, what else can you do but view it as a number in a game?) Dying rich equalling dying disgraced has gone out of fashion.
I suspect it's part of why taxes are so toxic at the top end- it's not about the value of the money, it's about a sense of the government taking a chunk of their life away.
See also: the power of inheritance tax to scare people, when rationally it's the one time we pay taxes without losing.
Interesting perspective. My parents have been quite frugal. Never earned big money, Labour voters, Dad a PE teacher, Mum worked in local govt, but paid off the mortgage and would never dodge taxes, yet they see inheritance tax as the devil, and are trying to symphonic the money to me and the grandkids before the gift get their hands on 40% of it. They don’t see the kids being taxed heavily on inheritance as them not losing
Yet IHT is effectively a wealth tax and people seem to overwhelmingly support it.
Worse now without the IHT exemptions on businesses and agriculture it's a tax on investment for family run businesses. Indeed, there has been an entirely predictable crash in business investment among small businesses.
A wealth tax paid annually is completely different to a one off wealth tax paid at an unknown time in the future.
I'm still considering whether to pay HMRC their IHT "dues" or give the excess to charitable purposes. I'm definitely leaning towards the latter.
Comments
Less severe disability or conditions that can change quite rapidly are assessed or reassessed much more frequently
It may be that Sandy's point is reasonable about longer distance trains though - my knowledge of such things is a tad parochial!
And yet people keep saying - including some on here - that we need to cut spending further.
Have I mentioned Kemi is a dud?
I know multiple people who receive PIP, and some use it to obtain the tools or services they need to be able to make it possible or practical for them to work.
The process is an unprofessional mess that makes one or two scared saying that they can cycle on an adapted bike funded with their PIP, even though they cannot walk more than a few steps (example condition: Fibromyalgia), because they are frightened the insufficiently-knowledgeable officer will make a false assumption in their assessment and they will not receive the help they need.
For particular cases, I know one professional woman mum of four who works in disabled advocacy with a progressive condition, who believes she does not get the higher rate because of false assumptions.
If Kemi wants to tackle abuse and marginal cases, then that is what she should say - and not attack the whole lot.
You would need to leave it for 11 days to double the effort required to search 2 hours (assuming you need to get it down to a minute of footage).
Quibble is one of those words that becomes increasingly ridiculous the more you write it.
Are people in the UK becoming increasingly sickly and disabled?
Something is wrong, surely.
vat is different but high deductions are a real issue. The marginal rate of deduction is about 50% even for a lot of people on middle incomes.
So depressing.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/outofworkbenefits/datasets/cla02claimantcountbyagegroup
I’m guessing the usual suspects on either side will be more interested in the ethnicity of the attacker rather than the victims.
https://fullfact.org/health/what-did-courts-rule-pip
I suspect it's more to do with the public learning how to claim, and lowered shame thresholds. Our system is held together by people not claiming what they are due.
I have been watching the Freddie Flintoff programme where he provides cricketing opportunities to "naughty" teenagers. Early on, many display signs of ADHD. When they are engaged deep in the programme all these signs disappear.
Dig deep young uns with Uni debt in the tens of thousands.
These are the people the Lib Dem’s and some others want to hand your cash to.
https://x.com/theipaper/status/1973619543302865345?s=61
I’m guessing fruit given you’d have had to harvest grapes absurdly early to be already at the racking stage. Blackberry?
Politically impossible because of all the widows who would kick up a fuss.
When it was said 35% of people would be worse off that simply means the vast majority don’t need the money.
They’re smart enough to know this is not sustainable.
Cartons of fruit juice from the supermarket. That is how I started.
Dried fruit such as raisins, dates, sultanas, apricot. These really are first class. The drying of the fruit intensifies the flavour and they are full of sugar. It is messy. But worth it. The apricots need to be organic as non organic has sulfites in that retard fermentation. Raisins need a wash as they are coated in sunflower oil and dates chopped have flour on them.
Frozen fruit from the supermarket. Mixed berries, the sainsburys value range, give some rather good results.
Fruit I have grown, or bought from the shops. So Rhubarb, banana, apple, ginger.
It have made some kits as well. The red ones I don’t do as I found they lack depth.
I have a small garden and no chance of an allotment for many years so I used to get fruit from a co worker. Now I retired I have started growing rhubarb and strawberries and have a couple of apple trees.
It’s great fun. I enjoy drinking it but I make far too much. I don’t have many spare wine bottles so will bottle in beer bottles next week.
Then it’s the fun of the annual clean down 😂
Its always been a thing that some women rather like a slightly bad boy. Only later do they come to realise that spending time with the nice ones you overlooked as not exciting, is a better bet in the long run.
(At least Sunil hopes they do).
I understand why people think the limit is fair - people should only have lots of kids if they have the cash to do so. But what is grotesquely unfair is keeping it even while rich pensioners continue to get WFP, and the long term effects of kids growing up in poverty harm both our society and long term spending (just look at rates of crime, health etc etc).
As I’ve posted before, the UK seems to have set up a system that feels extremely punitive on the striving middle classes (let’s say income earners 60k - 200k) who essentially keep the whole economy going.
It all encourages a society where building wealth is seen as suspect.
The bomb vest in question, per BBC.
That problem, of making far too much, is a real headache. I used to make wine from the back garden grapes every year and the batches were too small to avoid spoilage most of the time, but last year I took a small amount from the vineyard to make at home and now have a load of bottles of that I wouldn’t be allowed to sell but will struggle ever to drink through.
https://ifs.org.uk/publications/health-related-benefit-claims-post-pandemic-uk-trends-and-global-context
Figure 7 is rather shocking.
Bart posts a bit about the cliff edges we have in our tax system and is quite knowledgable about it. It seems extremely punitive.
Within the next 12 months is an immediate saving on a Budgetary level.
You're setting an insane bar if you mean "from tonight" as immediate, very few items in the Budget work that way.
Yep, 1 in 4 of our mostly 18 year olds is 'disabled'.
Its bullshit, all of it.
(Apart from the one with the wheelchair, obv.)
Yep, 1 in 4 of our mostly 18 year olds is 'disabled'.
Its bullshit, all of it.
(Apart from the one with the wheelchair, obv.)
These are books about rape of young women, where the young woman is often violently abused - choked, tied up, assaulted at gunpoint, knifed, spat on, you get the idea - and then the woman falls in love with the guy that did this. And he's a serial killer, gangster, psycho. Actual psychos
And the people buying this? Young women
I've no idea what their investigation-rate on queries raised is normally.
I know life can be tough, but really? We are not under immediate threat of Nazi stormtroopers landing at Dover, or Junkers dropping incendaries on your house.
https://x.com/onlyfoolsnews/status/1973712489893462331?s=61
Up 2 points to 19, and only 16 behind Reform, who are also up 2 to 35%. More than a third of Britons, who are "racists" are now supporting "racist" Reform
Otherwise the Godfather and many other stories would be prohibited.
Many people like reading, or watching, fictional stories that would break the law if they happened in real life. Key word is fiction.
This reporter has called it a ‘mosque’ twice in 15 secs.
https://x.com/richardjacobs1/status/1973697144528998423?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
(Also, refuse collection is privatised which is a pain in the arse)
The triple lock has to go because of the long term fiscal implications but it makes next to no difference to the cash Reeves has available at the budget. You need to make an actual cut in something to free up some money.
I'm not saying this should be prohibited, or criminalised, or whatever
I am saying it is a fascinating cultural phenomenon, which is is. Or at least it is to all the people I talk to in publishing and the arts, which I have been doing today, they are mesmerised by it. So much money is being made, so fast
It is also richly paradoxical. Authors are still getting cancelled by the Woke-Nazis for wrongly attempting to write about, say, a black character, without being black and employing 2000 sensitivity readers. At the same time other authors are making millions while cheerfully writing about enjoyable anal rape at gunpoint
Once you hit a point in your life. Probably with a house and car and employment, if you sat down... really sat down... and worked it all out, you'd find more than 50% of your monthly expenditure goes on tax, and that's not even factoring in the Ers NI element.
Income tax, national insurance, student 'loan', VAT on loads of stuff you buy, fuel duty (plus VAT) on filling your car, council tax, and IPT on all your insurances. The 'telly tax' as well.
Easily more than 50% of your monthly expenditure.
Governments, of all stripes, don't like to admit this, so it's death by a thousand cuts instead. One tax at 55% is eyewatering.... so there are 55 taxes at 1% instead. Plus that generates huge numbers of civil servents in each of the 55 departments managing the 55 taxes, rather than managing just 1 department.
Now - just to make my position clear. I don't mind paying that sort of level of tax. What I object to is the lies governments and political parties tell, to convince you the tax rate is 20%.... not 55%. Stop lying. But I suppose they can't be honest with their people, few people are like me who'd prefer honesty over hypocricy.
With a suspected bomb vest then the only option is to shoot to kill as soon as you are within an appropriate range.
If everyone had the same or similar marginal rate then I think politics would be different.
Anyone under 50 has increasingly been part of generation short shrift.
From one perspective, it’s no wonder that young people are increasingly claiming disabled status in the hope of some kind of handout. Legitimate ways to get ahead are in ever-shorter supply.
It’s late Soviet Britain, innit.
IHT is a silly tax precisely for this reason.
Checks notes about what happened to shoplifing after the government / police made it clear that was their policy.....I have no idea why people think crime is out of control despite Fraser Nelson charts.
This is a crux of the matter, people understand crime does happen, but when they go to the police and they just say here is a crime number go away, its not surprising if they think the system is broken.
I'm still considering whether to pay HMRC their IHT "dues" or give the excess to charitable purposes. I'm definitely leaning towards the latter.