Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
There is a quote today in the Times (££) from a senior Tory MP (I think, I read it late last night), which says "hopefully growth will be strong enough to avoid us actually raising CT all the way to 25%"
So maybe our wishful speculations were right. Sunak made his 25% CT announcement to calm the markets, and appear prudent - but HMG is secretly hoping they won't have to do it, or, at least, not as dramatically
Still stupid.
It sets up the argument that raising corporation taxes raises revenue, even the Tories said that. Leaves Labour in a position to argue for higher taxes and how can we say that's bad when it had been our own plan when it suited us?
Just put Aladdin on as our family movie on Disney+ and it's got the 'cultural stereotypes' disclaimer they had already for Dumbo and other older movies. First time I've noticed the disclaimer on Aladdin so guessing it was recently added.
Amusing that Aladdin from the 90s is now in the same category as having disclaimers as films from the 40s and 50s now.
In the long run it seems everything will have a disclaimer.
Is it because it depicts people with blue skins as unpredictable and carpets as overly-excited?
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Absolute unadulterated twaddle. The amount of new red tape my own employer (nothing to do with agriculture or fisheries) has to deal with is vast. There's no doubt that this will eat away at the competitiveness of British business. You're very talented - you give the impression of knowing what you're talking about, but scratch beneath the surface and you clearly know diddly squat about bugger all.
The amount of red tape my partner needed just to give a guest lecture Online at University absolutely dwarfed the amount last year.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Did he really have a choice? the low tax alternative might have meant even higher bond borrowing in the short term that is already being planned. V. risky, given where rates are trending.
Ultimately the BoE has monetised all of our virus debt, we pay ourselves the interest so even in an inflationary environment ~60% of our debt interest is funneled back to the treasury via the APF so Rishi wasn't playing a completely straight bat on those warnings of debt interest rising as a share of GDP becuase the net interest bill is about half of that figure.
So yes, he did have a choice, he chose to put taxes up on businesses and set us on a path of lower trend growth, something that has been made clear in the OBR's own forecast.
One way or another the government has to look like its concerned about 'fairness'.
But that brings us back to triple lock guarantee and the NI bung to working pensioners.
Certainly, both disgraceful anomalies and both near impossible to change.
Starmer would be tweeting about pension cuts and tax rises on the poor oldies.
93% is high but its over 100% for some age groups in some areas.
Nor is it 93% in London where it seems 15% of NHS staff are anti-vaxxers.
Checked our local area, about 20 wards. All 93% or higher for all the upper age groups except one ward which is 83% in the 85+ and only 66% in the 65-70 group.
I'm afraid to say that this is the only ward with a mosque (there are two, in fact) or a significant BAME population. There's lots of other wards with deprivation but this one rather stands out.
What this doesn't tell us is whether this is this due to some level of anti-vaxxing or whether it is just due to a lack of information. If the take up can be raised to 80% that might just be enough to stop any fires, but if that isn't high enough or there's an even lower take up in the younger population, there's going to be a problem.
Still, even 66% is better than a lot of countries look like achieving.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Switzerland is in the single market.
Meanwhile financial services equivalence status with the EU looks dead in the water.
Switzerland isn't in the single market. It's not in the EEA and isn't subject to the ECJ.
Once again, you're talking about stuff you don't really understand beyond the headline. Financial services equivalence might be nice to have but ultimately the proposed 33% corporation tax rate for the industry is going to be 10x more damaging than anything to do with LCH having to operate it's clearing business outside of the scope of the ECB.
Switzerland is in the single market via bilateral agreement.
If you don’t get that basic fact it does tend to cast doubt on your other prognostications.
Switzerland isn't in the EEA, the EEA is the single market. If Switzerland was in the single market it wouldn't be relying on financial equivalence the same as we are, they'd be in the financial passporting system.
The Government might yet back down, but it places itself in an extremely awkward situation if it lets NHS workers have an inflation busting settlement. That is, there's no way on Earth the RCN is getting 12.5%, but even 3% or 4% would open the floodgates. The teaching unions have been very iffy about reopening the schools at various points through all of this, have greater latitude and willingness to strike, and will clearly be after danger money if the Government caves into the nurses, The Police Federation had an apoplectic fit of rage simply over failing to have its members shunted to the front of the vaccination queue.
And quite what hosing the public sector down with cash would say to the majority of workers who don't have a guaranteed job for life, Lord only knows. I'm in the middle, effectively, of a substantial multi-year pay cut (already modest wage rises were cancelled by Covid, whilst my pension contributions are being relentlessly hiked) but I'm one of the lucky ones. Widespread redundancies have already occurred, all the people on furlough who don't have generous and solvent employers willing to top up their wages have suffered a 20% pay cut, and may of them will be thrown on the scrapheap when the scheme ends as well.
If the confrontation with the health workers escalates then it'll be fascinating to see exactly how many people cleave towards each side.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Switzerland is in the single market.
Meanwhile financial services equivalence status with the EU looks dead in the water.
Switzerland isn't in the single market. It's not in the EEA and isn't subject to the ECJ.
Once again, you're talking about stuff you don't really understand beyond the headline. Financial services equivalence might be nice to have but ultimately the proposed 33% corporation tax rate for the industry is going to be 10x more damaging than anything to do with LCH having to operate it's clearing business outside of the scope of the ECB.
Switzerland is in the single market via bilateral agreement.
If you don’t get that basic fact it does tend to cast doubt on your other prognostications.
Switzerland isn't in the EEA, the EEA is the single market. If Switzerland was in the single market it wouldn't be relying on financial equivalence the same as we are, they'd be in the financial passporting system.
Just to expand on this, Switzerland has agreed full regulatory alignment in certain areas which grants it single market access for those areas, including agriculture. That doesn't mean it's a single market member, to characterise Switzerland as being in the single market is simply wrong. The Swiss people twice voted against membership because they refused to be under ECJ jurisdiction.
There would never have been a better time to abolish the triple lock.
I would like to see the Government look at a much more radical review of tax and benefits. Set a minimum income level, sufficient to live on without needing benefits or charity. £16,200 per year would equate to a 35 hour week at the living wage. Set that as the personal allowance. Receive a rebate if your income is less. Pay tax if your income is more. Combine tax and NI for a basic rate of 32%. Same rate for self-employed. Income based on earned and unearned income (dividends and Capital Gains) at the same rate. Higher tax rates of 52% and 57%, so no upper limit on NI contributions. Don’t know what the net cost would be. A job for a think tank, maybe?
Why should the taxpayer subsidise low paying companies? If you want to improve people's standards of living in that way then increase the minimum wage to a level where someone working a standard week is earning whatever you consider to be the living wage level. If companies cannot afford to operate whilst paying their employees a basic living wage and paying their taxes under normal operating circumstances then they do not deserve to be in business.
UBI or anything like it is merely the taxpayer subsidising the profits of companies.
No it is not. For two childless adults working full-time the minimum wage already does reach that threshold. No subsidies to any company at all.
The issue that needs to be fixed though is that if people aren't working we don't tell them "go get a job then" and let them and their children end up on the streets or starving to death if they don't. They get benefits to ensure that they have enough to survive.
So then the difference between someone not working and someone who is working full time is not the difference in income the working person earns because there is a corresponding loss of benefits to go with that.
Between loss of benefits, NIC and income tax the state can be reclaiming 90% of someone's income.
Not a penny of this goes to the company.
Rubbish. If it is the unemployed or those unable to work we are talking about then they get money from the Government already. You can debate about increasing that amount but that has nothing to do with a UBI. And yes, if companies pay less than a living wage and the Government is expected to make up the difference as it is having to do now then it is absolutely the case that you are subsidising the companies. If they are, as you foolishly claim, already paying that amount then there is no need for UBI anyway.
Sorry but you don't understand the issue so are talking rubbish it seems. Yes the minimum wage already today covers basic minimum income required for two adults working full-time with no children. Anyone in that situation is NOT entitled to any benefits.
However not everyone is in that situation. Some people work part-time. Some people don't work. Some people have lots of kids that the state has said it will help pay for.
That is where the benefits bill goes. Not to couples working full-time in secure even if minimum wage jobs.
The problem is if someone on benefits today works sixteen hours per week then they're "taxed" 90% on every pound after that 16 hours. What would you do if facing a marginal tax rate of 90%?
A UBI would smooth the transition from not working, to working part time, to working full time encouraging people to work more. Because currently they're not.
My father in law has some friends in France. He's French, 92, and just gone I to a care home. She's 86 and English but lived in France most of her adult life. Neither of them have had a vaccine and she has been unable to get one at all. Their son and his wife in their mid 50s have both been jabbed.
Clearly the ban on AZ in the over 65s has had a massive impact. They have been vaccinating those massive less at risk. So it will not help much in reducing deaths.
Given now no one in France wants the AZ jab they have a serious self-inflicted problem on their hands.
I can't quite believe the cheek of the EU in stopping vaccine exports and yet demanding the US fulfills exports to them!
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
No reason why the points can't be combined: the abolition of private schools would be an intolerably brutal constraint upon personal liberty and the expression of human nature, it would vandalize a world-leading model of educational excellence that benefits everyone in the UK, AND the people who moan about them the most tend to be lefty hypocrites who find their own methods of making sure that their kids are not disadvantaged. That combination of the macro and the micro you dislike so much is why the left can never win on this issue in the UK.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
Using your hands to walk instead of your feet is also a greater achievement. But that doesn't make it a necessary, sensible, or popular thing to do...
It's an ok analogy because I did simply mean greater achievement as in harder to do.
I think it's because the Thatcher revolution went deep and did something to our wiring. People now believe success comes mainly through hard work and talent rather than birth circumstances. Much in politics flows from this. Indeed imo almost everything flows from this. If you believe it's mainly hard work and talent deciding life outcomes you'll be on the right. If you believe it's mainly birth circumstances, to whom and where you are born, you'll be on the left.
And what's interesting is we get an inversion of the usual 'heart v head' trope when we follow this through. Because the right's view - it's mainly about hard work and talent - is the romantic one. A dreamy idealistic vision even people on the left would love to embrace if they could. Whereas the left's view - birth circumstances dominate - is the hard headed, rational assessment, and far closer to objective reality.
So, for me, if you're not a Tory when you're 21 you have no soul. But if you're still a Tory when you're 51 you have no brain.
Hope for you yet (if I have your age right).
I seem to be doing surprisingly well on both soul and brain so far then.
I also see you've been returning to the well of Toby Senior's monitory tome The Rise of the Meritocracy - he saw what was coming long before the 80s. Thatcher was indeed a right old romantic (who knew?), but obviously Tories know all about the influence of birth circumstances; we just don't consider them to be in need of radical corrective action from the state. I like to think that our vision is appealing precisely because it embraces both meritocracy and privilege, the modern and the antique: certainly many of the proudest moments of my life have been the result of things I earned entirely through my own efforts, but many of the most enjoyable were the result of pure, unmerited privilege, and all the more delightful for it...
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Switzerland is in the single market.
Meanwhile financial services equivalence status with the EU looks dead in the water.
Switzerland isn't in the single market. It's not in the EEA and isn't subject to the ECJ.
Once again, you're talking about stuff you don't really understand beyond the headline. Financial services equivalence might be nice to have but ultimately the proposed 33% corporation tax rate for the industry is going to be 10x more damaging than anything to do with LCH having to operate it's clearing business outside of the scope of the ECB.
Switzerland is in the single market via bilateral agreement.
If you don’t get that basic fact it does tend to cast doubt on your other prognostications.
Switzerland isn't in the EEA, the EEA is the single market. If Switzerland was in the single market it wouldn't be relying on financial equivalence the same as we are, they'd be in the financial passporting system.
Just to expand on this, Switzerland has agreed full regulatory alignment in certain areas which grants it single market access for those areas, including agriculture. That doesn't mean it's a single market member, to characterise Switzerland as being in the single market is simply wrong. The Swiss people twice voted against membership because they refused to be under ECJ jurisdiction.
Please will you tell, among other people, the U.K. govt.
Switzerland is not an EU or EEA member but is part of the single market.
The Swiss voted against EEA membership in 1992, but after 10 years of stagnant growth, they gained access to the single market as part of the 2002 bilateral agreement(s).
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
No reason why the points can't be combined: the abolition of private schools would be an intolerably brutal constraint upon personal liberty and the expression of human nature, it would vandalize a world-leading model of educational excellence that benefits everyone in the UK, AND the people who moan about them the most tend to be lefty hypocrites who find their own methods of making sure that their kids are not disadvantaged. That combination of the macro and the micro you dislike so much is why the left can never win on this issue in the UK.
@ Kinabalu. I'd add a bit to the micro argument you make. Namely, that micro good - giving kids the best start in life parents can, instills an attitude which by example can spread to become a culture of agency - i.e. the decisions and actions we take can improve our individual lives and those of others around us, which when aggregated has a beneficial macro effect.
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Switzerland is in the single market.
Meanwhile financial services equivalence status with the EU looks dead in the water.
Switzerland isn't in the single market. It's not in the EEA and isn't subject to the ECJ.
Once again, you're talking about stuff you don't really understand beyond the headline. Financial services equivalence might be nice to have but ultimately the proposed 33% corporation tax rate for the industry is going to be 10x more damaging than anything to do with LCH having to operate it's clearing business outside of the scope of the ECB.
Switzerland is in the single market via bilateral agreement.
If you don’t get that basic fact it does tend to cast doubt on your other prognostications.
Switzerland isn't in the EEA, the EEA is the single market. If Switzerland was in the single market it wouldn't be relying on financial equivalence the same as we are, they'd be in the financial passporting system.
Just to expand on this, Switzerland has agreed full regulatory alignment in certain areas which grants it single market access for those areas, including agriculture. That doesn't mean it's a single market member, to characterise Switzerland as being in the single market is simply wrong. The Swiss people twice voted against membership because they refused to be under ECJ jurisdiction.
Please will you tell, among other people, the U.K. govt.
Switzerland is not an EU or EEA member but is part of the single market.
The Swiss voted against EEA membership in 1992, but after 10 years of stagnant growth, they gained access to the single market as part of the 2002 bilateral agreement(s).
That's up to the government to characterise the relationship in that manner but the actual wording is "access" to the single market which is a different thing entirely to membership. The UK has access to the single market also, it doesn't mean we're members of it. The 2002 treaty outlined areas in which Switzerland would align with single market regulations in return for access, as I've said all along, that doesn't make them members of it.
93% is high but its over 100% for some age groups in some areas.
Nor is it 93% in London where it seems 15% of NHS staff are anti-vaxxers.
Checked our local area, about 20 wards. All 93% or higher for all the upper age groups except one ward which is 83% in the 85+ and only 66% in the 65-70 group.
I'm afraid to say that this is the only ward with a mosque (there are two, in fact) or a significant BAME population. There's lots of other wards with deprivation but this one rather stands out.
What this doesn't tell us is whether this is this due to some level of anti-vaxxing or whether it is just due to a lack of information. If the take up can be raised to 80% that might just be enough to stop any fires, but if that isn't high enough or there's an even lower take up in the younger population, there's going to be a problem.
Still, even 66% is better than a lot of countries look like achieving.
My working theory on this is that the vaccine planners are takin the view that they will slowly work away on such areas while the main program has no trouble finding arms to jab.
In the longrun the case for removing the Triple Lock re- the State Pension is strong. I can,however, see a case for continuing with above average inceases relative to Inflation and and Average Earnings for a limited period - simply to undo the effects of the break with Earnings announced in the early Thatcher years. Effectively we have already had a few years of 'catch up'. It remains greatly to Labour's discredit that the post 1997 Government failed to restore the link with earnings - despite pressure from many within its own ranks - including Barbara Castle.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
No reason why the points can't be combined: the abolition of private schools would be an intolerably brutal constraint upon personal liberty and the expression of human nature, it would vandalize a world-leading model of educational excellence that benefits everyone in the UK, AND the people who moan about them the most tend to be lefty hypocrites who find their own methods of making sure that their kids are not disadvantaged. That combination of the macro and the micro you dislike so much is why the left can never win on this issue in the UK.
The first sentence up to "nature" is the solid argument, then you drift into hogwash territory. But I do (reluctantly) agree with you about this issue not being a good one for Labour and I predict they'll steer clear of it under Starmer. It will (pleasantly) surprise me if they even include the abolition of the tax breaks this time.
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
Well, it has been awful for them. Look at how upset they are that everyone else has more vaccine than they do.
Its a disastrous policy as we will be stuck with it for basically ever*.
* By ever, i mean many parliaments into the future and until it has caused so much damage. And when Labour get in, perhaps 2024, perhaps 2029, they won't cut it.
Rangers fans have broken coronavirus lockdown rules in Scotland by gathering in numbers outside Ibrox Stadium setting off flares. Fans were seen crowding around a car entering the ground as police tried to hold them back.
Under coronavirus rules, public gatherings are banned and a maximum of two people from two households are allowed to meet outdoors. Football games are taking place behind closed doors with no fans in the stadium.
Rangers could win the league title this weekend if they beat St Mirren on Saturday and Celtic drop points against Dundee United on Sunday. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has previously criticised fans for gathering in large numbers.
My father in law has some friends in France. He's French, 92, and just gone I to a care home. She's 86 and English but lived in France most of her adult life. Neither of them have had a vaccine and she has been unable to get one at all. Their son and his wife in their mid 50s have both been jabbed.
Clearly the ban on AZ in the over 65s has had a massive impact. They have been vaccinating those massive less at risk. So it will not help much in reducing deaths.
Given now no one in France wants the AZ jab they have a serious self-inflicted problem on their hands.
I can't quite believe the cheek of the EU in stopping vaccine exports and yet demanding the US fulfills exports to them!
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries go back to semi-normal.
Politically, they are trying to sell the idea that it is all down to other people being nasty.
Its a disastrous policy as we will be stick with it for basically ever.
I'm not sure that's true. I too hate the policy, and that's the point. A great number of people right of centre (even centre left) are appalled by this prospect. It's economic self-harm.
If the Tories win again in 2024 (and there is a reasonable chance they will) the pressure to drop it back will be immense. Sadly it won't go straight back down to 19%. But 22%? Sure.
Note that Northern Ireland, which is able to set its own CT) -is considering using that power, and lowering their rate nearer to Ireland's, for reasons I talked about on here the other day (businesses will flock south to Dublin unless they do this). So there is already pressure building AGAINST the hike
I still wonder if Sunak will ever impose this tax-rise, as it is framed at the moment
93% is high but its over 100% for some age groups in some areas.
Nor is it 93% in London where it seems 15% of NHS staff are anti-vaxxers.
Checked our local area, about 20 wards. All 93% or higher for all the upper age groups except one ward which is 83% in the 85+ and only 66% in the 65-70 group.
I'm afraid to say that this is the only ward with a mosque (there are two, in fact) or a significant BAME population. There's lots of other wards with deprivation but this one rather stands out.
What this doesn't tell us is whether this is this due to some level of anti-vaxxing or whether it is just due to a lack of information. If the take up can be raised to 80% that might just be enough to stop any fires, but if that isn't high enough or there's an even lower take up in the younger population, there's going to be a problem.
Still, even 66% is better than a lot of countries look like achieving.
My working theory on this is that the vaccine planners are takin the view that they will slowly work away on such areas while the main program has no trouble finding arms to jab.
I think that is absolutely right and a sensible strategy to take. They are not going to leave people behind just because they were not finished with their cohort.
Rangers fans have broken coronavirus lockdown rules in Scotland by gathering in numbers outside Ibrox Stadium setting off flares. Fans were seen crowding around a car entering the ground as police tried to hold them back.
Under coronavirus rules, public gatherings are banned and a maximum of two people from two households are allowed to meet outdoors. Football games are taking place behind closed doors with no fans in the stadium.
Rangers could win the league title this weekend if they beat St Mirren on Saturday and Celtic drop points against Dundee United on Sunday. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has previously criticised fans for gathering in large numbers.
I don’t remember you being quite so keen to lock up half of Liverpool last summer.
Rangers fans have broken coronavirus lockdown rules in Scotland by gathering in numbers outside Ibrox Stadium setting off flares. Fans were seen crowding around a car entering the ground as police tried to hold them back.
Under coronavirus rules, public gatherings are banned and a maximum of two people from two households are allowed to meet outdoors. Football games are taking place behind closed doors with no fans in the stadium.
Rangers could win the league title this weekend if they beat St Mirren on Saturday and Celtic drop points against Dundee United on Sunday. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has previously criticised fans for gathering in large numbers.
I don’t remember you being quite so keen to lock up half of Liverpool last summer.
I was, I said lock them up, and take away their season tickets for the rest of their lives.
The thing most likely to ruin a Government, short of the country being successfully invaded, destroyed by an asteroid, or freezing the state pension, is negative equity. Just ask John Major.
Besides, the laws of supply and demand prevail: realistically, the only way house prices are likely to go into reverse is with a truly massive campaign of building, which is politically impossible. Even quite trivial developments frequently take years to get past local Nimbies, if they do at all; housebuilders aren't interested in mass volume construction because choking supply optimises prices; and Government won't want to confront either group because house price inflation enriches much of its client base, which also includes most of the Nimbies.
Did Rishi actually change anything for students in the Budget?
To be the obvious-as-abolishing-triple-lock move was to bring the Student Loan interest rate down to either base rate or CPI, from the current 6.1%.
May only be a start, but needed.
Wouldn’t that only benefit the high earners who may one day pay off the debt?
Surely raising the threshold at which you start to pay it back would benefit all students.
I think 6.1% is just too high - personal loans are cheaper. And it would prevent the debt still increasing every year even when chinks are being paid off.
I think the current threshold for starting payments is 21k-ish, which is not "high earners". That is 20-30% below average salary for the country.
93% is high but its over 100% for some age groups in some areas.
Nor is it 93% in London where it seems 15% of NHS staff are anti-vaxxers.
Checked our local area, about 20 wards. All 93% or higher for all the upper age groups except one ward which is 83% in the 85+ and only 66% in the 65-70 group.
I'm afraid to say that this is the only ward with a mosque (there are two, in fact) or a significant BAME population. There's lots of other wards with deprivation but this one rather stands out.
What this doesn't tell us is whether this is this due to some level of anti-vaxxing or whether it is just due to a lack of information. If the take up can be raised to 80% that might just be enough to stop any fires, but if that isn't high enough or there's an even lower take up in the younger population, there's going to be a problem.
Still, even 66% is better than a lot of countries look like achieving.
My working theory on this is that the vaccine planners are takin the view that they will slowly work away on such areas while the main program has no trouble finding arms to jab.
Yes, I think that's a good theory. Take up might be slower but the percentage will hopefully creep up over time as word gets round from people who have already had it.
The thing most likely to ruin a Government, short of the country being successfully invaded, destroyed by an asteroid, or freezing the state pension, is negative equity. Just ask John Major.
Besides, the laws of supply and demand prevail: realistically, the only way house prices are likely to go into reverse is with a truly massive campaign of building, which is politically impossible. Even quite trivial developments frequently take years to get past local Nimbies, if they do at all; housebuilders aren't interested in mass volume construction because choking supply optimises prices; and Government won't want to confront either group because house price inflation enriches much of its client base, which also includes most of the Nimbies.
So the slightly less dodgy porn site is winning...
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
Rangers fans have broken coronavirus lockdown rules in Scotland by gathering in numbers outside Ibrox Stadium setting off flares. Fans were seen crowding around a car entering the ground as police tried to hold them back.
Under coronavirus rules, public gatherings are banned and a maximum of two people from two households are allowed to meet outdoors. Football games are taking place behind closed doors with no fans in the stadium.
Rangers could win the league title this weekend if they beat St Mirren on Saturday and Celtic drop points against Dundee United on Sunday. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has previously criticised fans for gathering in large numbers.
I don’t remember you being quite so keen to lock up half of Liverpool last summer.
I was, I said lock them up, and take away their season tickets for the rest of their lives.
If this is correct then in little more than 18 months the world will have gone from identifying a novel coronavirus to vaccinating nearly a fifth of the world’s population against it. Which is quite astonishing. It also implies that most of the world could be vaccinated by summer 2022.
Rangers fans have broken coronavirus lockdown rules in Scotland by gathering in numbers outside Ibrox Stadium setting off flares. Fans were seen crowding around a car entering the ground as police tried to hold them back.
Under coronavirus rules, public gatherings are banned and a maximum of two people from two households are allowed to meet outdoors. Football games are taking place behind closed doors with no fans in the stadium.
Rangers could win the league title this weekend if they beat St Mirren on Saturday and Celtic drop points against Dundee United on Sunday. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has previously criticised fans for gathering in large numbers.
I don’t remember you being quite so keen to lock up half of Liverpool last summer.
I was, I said lock them up, and take away their season tickets for the rest of their lives.
Giving with one hand taking with the other.
Is the only way I'm likely to get a season ticket, though I live in hope I may finally get a season ticket when the Anfield Road expansion is finished.
If this is correct then in little more than 18 months the world will have gone from identifying a novel coronavirus to vaccinating nearly a fifth of the world’s population against it. Which is quite astonishing. It also implies that most of the world could be vaccinated by summer 2022.
But at the current rate, some EU countries still won't be close to their 70% target....
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
If this is correct then in little more than 18 months the world will have gone from identifying a novel coronavirus to vaccinating nearly a fifth of the world’s population against it. Which is quite astonishing. It also implies that most of the world could be vaccinated by summer 2022.
But at the current rate, some EU countries still won't be close to their 70% target....
The “at the current rate” thing is a bit of a fallacy. It is unlikely the rate will stay constant. It’s possible it might drop but more likely to accelerate.
If this is correct then in little more than 18 months the world will have gone from identifying a novel coronavirus to vaccinating nearly a fifth of the world’s population against it. Which is quite astonishing. It also implies that most of the world could be vaccinated by summer 2022.
But at the current rate, some EU countries still won't be close to their 70% target....
The “at the current rate” thing is a bit of a fallacy. It is unlikely the rate will stay constant. It’s possible it might drop but more likely to accelerate.
I was being so what facetious. I am sure it will, but so far the ramp up has been very slow. It could well be the rest of this year for some in the EU.
My father in law has some friends in France. He's French, 92, and just gone I to a care home. She's 86 and English but lived in France most of her adult life. Neither of them have had a vaccine and she has been unable to get one at all. Their son and his wife in their mid 50s have both been jabbed.
Clearly the ban on AZ in the over 65s has had a massive impact. They have been vaccinating those massive less at risk. So it will not help much in reducing deaths.
Given now no one in France wants the AZ jab they have a serious self-inflicted problem on their hands.
I can't quite believe the cheek of the EU in stopping vaccine exports and yet demanding the US fulfills exports to them!
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries go back to semi-normal.
Politically, they are trying to sell the idea that it is all down to other people being nasty.
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries the UK go back to semi-normal goes back to normal.
Brexit Britain, waving from across the Channel. It's driving them quite bonkers.
If this is correct then in little more than 18 months the world will have gone from identifying a novel coronavirus to vaccinating nearly a fifth of the world’s population against it. Which is quite astonishing. It also implies that most of the world could be vaccinated by summer 2022.
But at the current rate, some EU countries still won't be close to their 70% target....
The “at the current rate” thing is a bit of a fallacy. It is unlikely the rate will stay constant. It’s possible it might drop but more likely to accelerate.
I was being so what facetious. I am sure it will, but so far the ramp up has been very slow. It could well be the rest of this year for most.
If you take supply out of the equation then there is no real reason to differentiate EU and non-EU countries. Distribution into arms is the job of the member states, Malta’s doing a grand job, the less grand efforts are extensively discussed on here.
If this is correct then in little more than 18 months the world will have gone from identifying a novel coronavirus to vaccinating nearly a fifth of the world’s population against it. Which is quite astonishing. It also implies that most of the world could be vaccinated by summer 2022.
But at the current rate, some EU countries still won't be close to their 70% target....
The “at the current rate” thing is a bit of a fallacy. It is unlikely the rate will stay constant. It’s possible it might drop but more likely to accelerate.
I was being so what facetious. I am sure it will, but so far the ramp up has been very slow. It could well be the rest of this year for most.
If you take supply out of the equation then there is no real reason to differentiate EU and non-EU countries. Distribution into arms is the job of the member states, Malta’s doing a grand job, the less grand efforts are extensively discussed on here.
Malta has secured supply of vaccines from outside the scheme.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
If this is correct then in little more than 18 months the world will have gone from identifying a novel coronavirus to vaccinating nearly a fifth of the world’s population against it. Which is quite astonishing. It also implies that most of the world could be vaccinated by summer 2022.
But at the current rate, some EU countries still won't be close to their 70% target....
The “at the current rate” thing is a bit of a fallacy. It is unlikely the rate will stay constant. It’s possible it might drop but more likely to accelerate.
I was being so what facetious. I am sure it will, but so far the ramp up has been very slow. It could well be the rest of this year for most.
If you take supply out of the equation then there is no real reason to differentiate EU and non-EU countries. Distribution into arms is the job of the member states, Malta’s doing a grand job, the less grand efforts are extensively discussed on here.
Malta has secured supply of vaccines from outside the scheme.
Didn’t know that. I think my point remains valid though. Many EU countries can’t use what they’ve got.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
Using your hands to walk instead of your feet is also a greater achievement. But that doesn't make it a necessary, sensible, or popular thing to do...
It's an ok analogy because I did simply mean greater achievement as in harder to do.
I think it's because the Thatcher revolution went deep and did something to our wiring. People now believe success comes mainly through hard work and talent rather than birth circumstances. Much in politics flows from this. Indeed imo almost everything flows from this. If you believe it's mainly hard work and talent deciding life outcomes you'll be on the right. If you believe it's mainly birth circumstances, to whom and where you are born, you'll be on the left.
And what's interesting is we get an inversion of the usual 'heart v head' trope when we follow this through. Because the right's view - it's mainly about hard work and talent - is the romantic one. A dreamy idealistic vision even people on the left would love to embrace if they could. Whereas the left's view - birth circumstances dominate - is the hard headed, rational assessment, and far closer to objective reality.
So, for me, if you're not a Tory when you're 21 you have no soul. But if you're still a Tory when you're 51 you have no brain.
Hope for you yet (if I have your age right).
I seem to be doing surprisingly well on both soul and brain so far then.
I also see you've been returning to the well of Toby Senior's monitory tome The Rise of the Meritocracy - he saw what was coming long before the 80s. Thatcher was indeed a right old romantic (who knew?), but obviously Tories know all about the influence of birth circumstances; we just don't consider them to be in need of radical corrective action from the state. I like to think that our vision is appealing precisely because it embraces both meritocracy and privilege, the modern and the antique: certainly many of the proudest moments of my life have been the result of things I earned entirely through my own efforts, but many of the most enjoyable were the result of pure, unmerited privilege, and all the more delightful for it...
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
That indeed is the message of the book, "The rise of the Meritocracy" that such a scheme entrenches social inequality.
Sir Keir seems to have forgotten what all the Labour party supporters on this blog have forgotten.
Labour are in power. Labour are in power in Wales.
The NHS is devolved. Labour can set the nurse's pay rise in Wales. Right now.
Personally, I hope the nurses get more money.
But, let's see what Labour actually DO, as opposed to what SKS tweets.
Old Starmer has called not only for pay rises for nurses, but above inflation pay rises for all public sector workers.
Of course he has. It is Labour's muscle memory.
It's almost as if the Covid pandemic hadn't inflicted terrible hardship on the private sector. You know, the private sector that has to pay for all the expenditure and the borrowing needs of the public sector.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
In practice very few assisted places went to poor families. Indeed I think the greatest share was to children of posh parents in the clergy and children of teachers in independent schools.
Sir Keir seems to have forgotten what all the Labour party supporters on this blog have forgotten.
Labour are in power. Labour are in power in Wales.
The NHS is devolved. Labour can set the nurse's pay rise in Wales. Right now.
Personally, I hope the nurses get more money.
But, let's see what Labour actually DO, as opposed to what SKS tweets.
Old Starmer has called not only for pay rises for nurses, but above inflation pay rises for all public sector workers.
Of course he has. It is Labour's muscle memory.
It's almost as if the Covid pandemic hadn't inflicted terrible hardship on the private sector. You know, the private sector that has to pay for all the expenditure and the borrowing needs of the public sector.
Problem is - public sector workers are more likely to vote Labour.
So this is what his voters want to hear even though it will scare away potential voters who work in the private sector.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
My father in law has some friends in France. He's French, 92, and just gone I to a care home. She's 86 and English but lived in France most of her adult life. Neither of them have had a vaccine and she has been unable to get one at all. Their son and his wife in their mid 50s have both been jabbed.
Clearly the ban on AZ in the over 65s has had a massive impact. They have been vaccinating those massive less at risk. So it will not help much in reducing deaths.
Given now no one in France wants the AZ jab they have a serious self-inflicted problem on their hands.
I can't quite believe the cheek of the EU in stopping vaccine exports and yet demanding the US fulfills exports to them!
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries go back to semi-normal.
Politically, they are trying to sell the idea that it is all down to other people being nasty.
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries the UK go back to semi-normal goes back to normal.
Brexit Britain, waving from across the Channel. It's driving them quite bonkers.
If it's driven then bonkers now - imagine what it will be like in June / July as we host the Euro 21 championship with full stadiums full of vaccinated people happy to be in large crowds.
Sir Keir seems to have forgotten what all the Labour party supporters on this blog have forgotten.
Labour are in power. Labour are in power in Wales.
The NHS is devolved. Labour can set the nurse's pay rise in Wales. Right now.
Personally, I hope the nurses get more money.
But, let's see what Labour actually DO, as opposed to what SKS tweets.
Old Starmer has called not only for pay rises for nurses, but above inflation pay rises for all public sector workers.
Of course he has. It is Labour's muscle memory.
It's almost as if the Covid pandemic hadn't inflicted terrible hardship on the private sector. You know, the private sector that has to pay for all the expenditure and the borrowing needs of the public sector.
Problem is - public sector workers are more likely to vote Labour.
So this is what his voters want to hear even though it will scare away potential voters who work in the private sector.
Shrinking public sector = shrinking Labour client vote.
My father in law has some friends in France. He's French, 92, and just gone I to a care home. She's 86 and English but lived in France most of her adult life. Neither of them have had a vaccine and she has been unable to get one at all. Their son and his wife in their mid 50s have both been jabbed.
Clearly the ban on AZ in the over 65s has had a massive impact. They have been vaccinating those massive less at risk. So it will not help much in reducing deaths.
Given now no one in France wants the AZ jab they have a serious self-inflicted problem on their hands.
I can't quite believe the cheek of the EU in stopping vaccine exports and yet demanding the US fulfills exports to them!
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries go back to semi-normal.
Politically, they are trying to sell the idea that it is all down to other people being nasty.
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries the UK go back to semi-normal goes back to normal.
Brexit Britain, waving from across the Channel. It's driving them quite bonkers.
If it's driven then bonkers now - imagine what it will be like in June / July as we host the Euro 21 championship with full stadiums full of vaccinated people happy to be in large crowds.
My father in law has some friends in France. He's French, 92, and just gone I to a care home. She's 86 and English but lived in France most of her adult life. Neither of them have had a vaccine and she has been unable to get one at all. Their son and his wife in their mid 50s have both been jabbed.
Clearly the ban on AZ in the over 65s has had a massive impact. They have been vaccinating those massive less at risk. So it will not help much in reducing deaths.
Given now no one in France wants the AZ jab they have a serious self-inflicted problem on their hands.
I can't quite believe the cheek of the EU in stopping vaccine exports and yet demanding the US fulfills exports to them!
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries go back to semi-normal.
Politically, they are trying to sell the idea that it is all down to other people being nasty.
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries the UK go back to semi-normal goes back to normal.
Brexit Britain, waving from across the Channel. It's driving them quite bonkers.
If it's driven then bonkers now - imagine what it will be like in June / July as we host the Euro 21 championship with full stadiums full of vaccinated people happy to be in large crowds.
Sir Keir seems to have forgotten what all the Labour party supporters on this blog have forgotten.
Labour are in power. Labour are in power in Wales.
The NHS is devolved. Labour can set the nurse's pay rise in Wales. Right now.
Personally, I hope the nurses get more money.
But, let's see what Labour actually DO, as opposed to what SKS tweets.
Old Starmer has called not only for pay rises for nurses, but above inflation pay rises for all public sector workers.
Of course he has. It is Labour's muscle memory.
It's almost as if the Covid pandemic hadn't inflicted terrible hardship on the private sector. You know, the private sector that has to pay for all the expenditure and the borrowing needs of the public sector.
Problem is - public sector workers are more likely to vote Labour.
So this is what his voters want to hear even though it will scare away potential voters who work in the private sector.
Shrinking public sector = shrinking Labour client vote.
They need a third sector to save them.
We have a third sector. They're called pensioners.
Agree with most of what you say, David. The Tories haven't got any kind of easy to understand message on the economy and the CT rise has trashed the nation's reputation as an economy that invites globally facing businesses and is comfortable with the idea of low taxes on businesses who drive up employment.
You seem to have forgotten about Covid 19. Everyone's plans that they had are no longer valid.
I've forgotten about nothing. The government is scapegoating businesses and targeting then for tax rises despite big corporations being the driving force of the UK economy and employment (despite what the small businesses like to say it's big business that makes the difference in the UK and US).
Rishi has turned the UK into a high debt, high tax, low growth economy that looks much more like France than he would like to admit.
High debt is not Rishi’s fault.
I’ll give you the others, plus of course high red tape, in our case pursuant to the Brexit agreement.
High debt is is fault to some degree, look at the EFO, the government's pledge to balance the budget has changed into one that balances the current budget but that still equates to a £70bn annual deficit. I can let the £450bn worth of COVID costs slide, but the £300bn after that is on him, the 2023 slowdown is on him.
Also, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, banging on about brexit really doesn't help you make your points. It just gets eyerolls, especially from people who actually have EU based clients and are seeing little to no change in the operating relationship.
The trouble is Max it’s not credible to pretend that Brexit hasn’t added red tape to exporters.
If we can’t accept that, then we continue to live in a fantasy world which is not conducive to good policy-making.
Like you say we need a pro-business, pro-investment, pro-jobs government and Rishi has put a bullet through that strategy with his corporate tax hike.
It's added some red tape for some exporters, specifically in agriculture and fisheries. Everyone else is just quietly getting on with the job. Both sectors are tiny, tiny parts of our overall economy and absolute export volumes from the UK to EU are basically back to where we were at the same time last year and non-EU exports are up slightly. The big losers so far look to be agriculture and fisheries (the latter less so as they have got a much larger quota and need time to develop new markets).
The fantasy is on your side, IMO, you live in a world where it's impossible to not be in the EU or the single market. Clearly it is possible, Switzerland has proven that for the last 40 years.
I'd advise you to look at the UK-Singapore joint statement on our CPTPP entry, it's all services, services, services. Stuff that we would never have been able to do while in the EU and the part of trade that's most important to us given how our economy is focussed. There are a lot of nations in the world who want to access our huge base of world class services companies and want access to our gigantic consumer market for their exporters. We have a huge opportunity but unfortunately I think Rishi is throwing it away with miserly short termism that will hamper business investment, start up growth and R&D.
Did he really have a choice? the low tax alternative might have meant even higher bond borrowing in the short term that is already being planned. V. risky, given where rates are trending.
Ultimately the BoE has monetised all of our virus debt, we pay ourselves the interest so even in an inflationary environment ~60% of our debt interest is funneled back to the treasury via the APF so Rishi wasn't playing a completely straight bat on those warnings of debt interest rising as a share of GDP becuase the net interest bill is about half of that figure.
So yes, he did have a choice, he chose to put taxes up on businesses and set us on a path of lower trend growth, something that has been made clear in the OBR's own forecast.
One way or another the government has to look like its concerned about 'fairness'.
But that brings us back to triple lock guarantee and the NI bung to working pensioners.
Certainly, both disgraceful anomalies and both near impossible to change.
Starmer would be tweeting about pension cuts and tax rises on the poor oldies.
Thank you, as always, @david_herdson, for another interesting Saturday read.
I've two or three concerns on the economic front - first, the release of pent up demand this summer is not only going to see a rebound in the economy but it's also going to see the return of inflation and interest rates as measures of note for the first time in more than a decade.
I always thought inflation was when too much money was chasing too few goods and services. The middle-class home workers have been saving their cash for a year and now want (it seems almost a febrile thing) to spend it on holidays, gadgets, haircuts and the like. That influx of money into the economy is going to have an impact - it will help business and the Exchequer but it won't last for ever.
After the holidays, the haircuts and the gadgets, what then?
If the aim is to restore the public finances, the Corporation Tax rise will help and there will be a push from the aforementioned spending but to what extent will the post-Covid costs ease and return to some form of normal? What if we have to do a second round of booster vaccinations this autumn?
If Sunak is going to cut, what and where? Clearly, some things are sacrosanct but other things aren't and I wonder whether it will be the poor local Councils which will again be in the frontline. With business rates holidays and increased demands on care services, it might not just be Croydon which is facing a Section 116 notice this time last year.
As an aside, I'm not sure why Sunak set up a UK Infrastructure Bank for local authorities when the PWLB already exists as a vehicle from which local authorities can borrow. In any case, if we are seeing interest rates on the way up, what will that do to borrowing and borrowing costs?
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Lets be honest about it.
We don't.
We don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, education or lifetime learning and training in general.
My father in law has some friends in France. He's French, 92, and just gone I to a care home. She's 86 and English but lived in France most of her adult life. Neither of them have had a vaccine and she has been unable to get one at all. Their son and his wife in their mid 50s have both been jabbed.
Clearly the ban on AZ in the over 65s has had a massive impact. They have been vaccinating those massive less at risk. So it will not help much in reducing deaths.
Given now no one in France wants the AZ jab they have a serious self-inflicted problem on their hands.
I can't quite believe the cheek of the EU in stopping vaccine exports and yet demanding the US fulfills exports to them!
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries go back to semi-normal.
Politically, they are trying to sell the idea that it is all down to other people being nasty.
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries the UK go back to semi-normal goes back to normal.
Brexit Britain, waving from across the Channel. It's driving them quite bonkers.
If it's driven then bonkers now - imagine what it will be like in June / July as we host the Euro 21 championship with full stadiums full of vaccinated people happy to be in large crowds.
Careful...we're not out of the woods yet...
But we can dream.
Unlike our friends on the Continent. Best they can hope for is to suppress their nightmares.
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
You have lost me there, William. That sounds like a comment from somebody not comprehending the first thing about what we're discussing.
"Reducing the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, and promoting a society with less privilege of class, race and gender."
"Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful."
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Lets be honest about it.
We don't.
We don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, education or lifetime learning and training in general.
This country does not do training. Even the apprenticeship levy isn't used that widely you if your payroll is over £3m you can't escape paying it.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Abolishing private schools wouldn't abolish elite schools which is the point you always fail to realise.
The very rich will send their kids to elite schools abroad. The fairly rich will buy up housing around good schools and squeeze the poor out then make donations to the school to fund things. They would also set up groups where they band together and hire private tutors outside of school time so their kids could still mix.
All you will in effect do is create elite comprehensives where only the well off can afford to live. Currently we have good grammars and comprehensives where they still have a percentage of the poor in the catchement. You would reduce that percentage to zero and condemn all poor kids to failing state schools.
The problem with your ideology and the solutions you propose as always is it fails to account for human nature and those wealthy enough to send their kids to private schools will always get round what you claim and inequality will be even more entrenched.
93% is high but its over 100% for some age groups in some areas.
Nor is it 93% in London where it seems 15% of NHS staff are anti-vaxxers.
Checked our local area, about 20 wards. All 93% or higher for all the upper age groups except one ward which is 83% in the 85+ and only 66% in the 65-70 group.
I'm afraid to say that this is the only ward with a mosque (there are two, in fact) or a significant BAME population. There's lots of other wards with deprivation but this one rather stands out.
What this doesn't tell us is whether this is this due to some level of anti-vaxxing or whether it is just due to a lack of information. If the take up can be raised to 80% that might just be enough to stop any fires, but if that isn't high enough or there's an even lower take up in the younger population, there's going to be a problem.
Still, even 66% is better than a lot of countries look like achieving.
My working theory on this is that the vaccine planners are takin the view that they will slowly work away on such areas while the main program has no trouble finding arms to jab.
Yes, I think that's a good theory. Take up might be slower but the percentage will hopefully creep up over time as word gets round from people who have already had it.
That is true. However, some people are motivated by a feeling of social injustice. In some cases they may be intentionally avoiding vaccination as a form of protest, in the hope of advancing their cause.
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
You have lost me there, William. That sounds like a comment from somebody not comprehending the first thing about what we're discussing.
"Reducing the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, and promoting a society with less privilege of class, race and gender."
"Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful."
How are these sentiments even remotely similar?
Because, like UvdL, your ideology predisposes you to prefer an outcome in which all fail equally, as long as you can avoid the intolerable prospect of some succeeding unequally.
My father in law has some friends in France. He's French, 92, and just gone I to a care home. She's 86 and English but lived in France most of her adult life. Neither of them have had a vaccine and she has been unable to get one at all. Their son and his wife in their mid 50s have both been jabbed.
Clearly the ban on AZ in the over 65s has had a massive impact. They have been vaccinating those massive less at risk. So it will not help much in reducing deaths.
Given now no one in France wants the AZ jab they have a serious self-inflicted problem on their hands.
I can't quite believe the cheek of the EU in stopping vaccine exports and yet demanding the US fulfills exports to them!
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries go back to semi-normal.
Politically, they are trying to sell the idea that it is all down to other people being nasty.
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries the UK go back to semi-normal goes back to normal.
Brexit Britain, waving from across the Channel. It's driving them quite bonkers.
If it's driven then bonkers now - imagine what it will be like in June / July as we host the Euro 21 championship with full stadiums full of vaccinated people happy to be in large crowds.
Careful...we're not out of the woods yet...
Quite, although it does look promising.
If we can get to Easter without the schools precipitating a disaster then we ought probably to be fine, although if the Government sticks to its guns then things won't begin to feel substantially more normal until May 17th.
Which may be behind parts of the continent. The Belgian Government has said it's planning to bin most restrictions on May 1st.
Comments
It sets up the argument that raising corporation taxes raises revenue, even the Tories said that. Leaves Labour in a position to argue for higher taxes and how can we say that's bad when it had been our own plan when it suited us?
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
https://www.politico.eu/coronavirus-in-europe/
But not as strong as Gibraltar:
https://www.politico.eu/article/vaccine-victory-within-gibraltars-reach/
'That's a bit tight, we know things are tough but maybe they could get a tiny bit more for their hard work.'
Public sees NHS nursing unions demanding a 12.5% rise:
'ARE THEY TAKING THE *&##*&# PISS?!'
Political battle done.
Starmer would be tweeting about pension cuts and tax rises on the poor oldies.
I'm afraid to say that this is the only ward with a mosque (there are two, in fact) or a significant BAME population. There's lots of other wards with deprivation but this one rather stands out.
What this doesn't tell us is whether this is this due to some level of anti-vaxxing or whether it is just due to a lack of information. If the take up can be raised to 80% that might just be enough to stop any fires, but if that isn't high enough or there's an even lower take up in the younger population, there's going to be a problem.
Still, even 66% is better than a lot of countries look like achieving.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
And quite what hosing the public sector down with cash would say to the majority of workers who don't have a guaranteed job for life, Lord only knows. I'm in the middle, effectively, of a substantial multi-year pay cut (already modest wage rises were cancelled by Covid, whilst my pension contributions are being relentlessly hiked) but I'm one of the lucky ones. Widespread redundancies have already occurred, all the people on furlough who don't have generous and solvent employers willing to top up their wages have suffered a 20% pay cut, and may of them will be thrown on the scrapheap when the scheme ends as well.
If the confrontation with the health workers escalates then it'll be fascinating to see exactly how many people cleave towards each side.
https://twitter.com/chriscurtis94/status/1367766241461559297
https://twitter.com/chriscurtis94/status/1367771503115255808
However not everyone is in that situation. Some people work part-time. Some people don't work. Some people have lots of kids that the state has said it will help pay for.
That is where the benefits bill goes. Not to couples working full-time in secure even if minimum wage jobs.
The problem is if someone on benefits today works sixteen hours per week then they're "taxed" 90% on every pound after that 16 hours. What would you do if facing a marginal tax rate of 90%?
A UBI would smooth the transition from not working, to working part time, to working full time encouraging people to work more. Because currently they're not.
The bigotry and inverse snobbery towards the privately educated has held me back.
THIS guy fed it every title for talks at EMF - a UK Festival for geeks, hackers, techies - and asked it to generate new ones
Some are pure genius, and I would read/listen to them immediately
"Jet-Powered Flies"
"Click. Boom! Exploding Grapes and Other Nuclear Experiments for Your Kitchen Table"
"Making A Living out of Broadcasting from Outer Space"
Some contain within them superb ideas that would make excellent stories, movies, novels, like this one
"In possession of an alien smart-phone: opportunities and constraints created by a world first"
What a brilliant idea. A guy finds a smartphone in the street - but it belongs to an alien. That's a Hollywood hit right there
And some of them are just FUNNY, and made me laugh out loud, because of their tone of voice:
"There are no Bees?"
"How to Boil water: a look at what's available these days"
"Stop! Or my wifi will shoot!!
A machine made me laugh. It also created superb article ideas, and at least one idea for a movie that would gross $2bn
As I have said, this bloody machine is going to transform the creative world, because it does all this for free, in seconds
Thread here:
https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1367933008154656772?s=20
https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1367939357391413248?s=20
Rightmove now gets more page views a day than Pornhub.
You might be obsessed with it, but if you're young you're probably not getting any, writes Jessie Hewitson.
For the sake of my sons, house prices must plunge.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/for-the-sake-of-my-sons-house-prices-must-plunge-6680bq8f0
My father in law has some friends in France. He's French, 92, and just gone I to a care home. She's 86 and English but lived in France most of her adult life. Neither of them have had a vaccine and she has been unable to get one at all. Their son and his wife in their mid 50s have both been jabbed.
Clearly the ban on AZ in the over 65s has had a massive impact. They have been vaccinating those massive less at risk. So it will not help much in reducing deaths.
Given now no one in France wants the AZ jab they have a serious self-inflicted problem on their hands.
I can't quite believe the cheek of the EU in stopping vaccine exports and yet demanding the US fulfills exports to them!
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
First dose 385,681
Second dose 37,235
Total doses 422,916
https://www.gov.uk/eu-eea
Switzerland is not an EU or EEA member but is part of the single market.
The Swiss voted against EEA membership in 1992, but after 10 years of stagnant growth, they gained access to the single market as part of the 2002 bilateral agreement(s).
https://youtu.be/7PM4sYl3dsI
*puzzled frown*
* By ever, i mean many parliaments into the future and until it has caused so much damage. And when Labour get in, perhaps 2024, perhaps 2029, they won't cut it.
Rangers fans break coronavirus lockdown
Rangers fans have broken coronavirus lockdown rules in Scotland by gathering in numbers outside Ibrox Stadium setting off flares. Fans were seen crowding around a car entering the ground as police tried to hold them back.
Under coronavirus rules, public gatherings are banned and a maximum of two people from two households are allowed to meet outdoors. Football games are taking place behind closed doors with no fans in the stadium.
Rangers could win the league title this weekend if they beat St Mirren on Saturday and Celtic drop points against Dundee United on Sunday. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has previously criticised fans for gathering in large numbers.
Politically, they are trying to sell the idea that it is all down to other people being nasty.
Yes, pedantry insists I remind you 50% is a fraction because it translates as 1 over 2.
If the Tories win again in 2024 (and there is a reasonable chance they will) the pressure to drop it back will be immense. Sadly it won't go straight back down to 19%. But 22%? Sure.
Note that Northern Ireland, which is able to set its own CT) -is considering using that power, and lowering their rate nearer to Ireland's, for reasons I talked about on here the other day (businesses will flock south to Dublin unless they do this). So there is already pressure building AGAINST the hike
I still wonder if Sunak will ever impose this tax-rise, as it is framed at the moment
Besides, the laws of supply and demand prevail: realistically, the only way house prices are likely to go into reverse is with a truly massive campaign of building, which is politically impossible. Even quite trivial developments frequently take years to get past local Nimbies, if they do at all; housebuilders aren't interested in mass volume construction because choking supply optimises prices; and Government won't want to confront either group because house price inflation enriches much of its client base, which also includes most of the Nimbies.
I think the current threshold for starting payments is 21k-ish, which is not "high earners". That is 20-30% below average salary for the country.
Labour are in power. Labour are in power in Wales.
The NHS is devolved. Labour can set the nurse's pay rise in Wales. Right now.
Personally, I hope the nurses get more money.
But, let's see what Labour actually DO, as opposed to what SKS tweets.
https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1363958644740677634?s=20
Everyone else in the NHS would then demand a pay rise.
Followed by everyone else in the public sector.
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
some countriesthe UKgo back to semi-normalgoes back to normal.Brexit Britain, waving from across the Channel. It's driving them quite bonkers.
It's almost as if the Covid pandemic hadn't inflicted terrible hardship on the private sector. You know, the private sector that has to pay for all the expenditure and the borrowing needs of the public sector.
So this is what his voters want to hear even though it will scare away potential voters who work in the private sector.
It’s an increase. It may be a real terms decrease (I don’t know) but that not what the tweet says
They need a third sector to save them.
Oh dear. What a pity. Never mind.
Oh dear.
Thank you, as always, @david_herdson, for another interesting Saturday read.
I've two or three concerns on the economic front - first, the release of pent up demand this summer is not only going to see a rebound in the economy but it's also going to see the return of inflation and interest rates as measures of note for the first time in more than a decade.
I always thought inflation was when too much money was chasing too few goods and services. The middle-class home workers have been saving their cash for a year and now want (it seems almost a febrile thing) to spend it on holidays, gadgets, haircuts and the like. That influx of money into the economy is going to have an impact - it will help business and the Exchequer but it won't last for ever.
After the holidays, the haircuts and the gadgets, what then?
If the aim is to restore the public finances, the Corporation Tax rise will help and there will be a push from the aforementioned spending but to what extent will the post-Covid costs ease and return to some form of normal? What if we have to do a second round of booster vaccinations this autumn?
If Sunak is going to cut, what and where? Clearly, some things are sacrosanct but other things aren't and I wonder whether it will be the poor local Councils which will again be in the frontline. With business rates holidays and increased demands on care services, it might not just be Croydon which is facing a Section 116 notice this time last year.
As an aside, I'm not sure why Sunak set up a UK Infrastructure Bank for local authorities when the PWLB already exists as a vehicle from which local authorities can borrow. In any case, if we are seeing interest rates on the way up, what will that do to borrowing and borrowing costs?
We don't.
We don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, education or lifetime learning and training in general.
Unlike our friends on the Continent. Best they can hope for is to suppress their nightmares.
"Reducing the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, and promoting a society with less privilege of class, race and gender."
"Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful."
How are these sentiments even remotely similar?
The very rich will send their kids to elite schools abroad.
The fairly rich will buy up housing around good schools and squeeze the poor out then make donations to the school to fund things. They would also set up groups where they band together and hire private tutors outside of school time so their kids could still mix.
All you will in effect do is create elite comprehensives where only the well off can afford to live. Currently we have good grammars and comprehensives where they still have a percentage of the poor in the catchement. You would reduce that percentage to zero and condemn all poor kids to failing state schools.
The problem with your ideology and the solutions you propose as always is it fails to account for human nature and those wealthy enough to send their kids to private schools will always get round what you claim and inequality will be even more entrenched.
If we can get to Easter without the schools precipitating a disaster then we ought probably to be fine, although if the Government sticks to its guns then things won't begin to feel substantially more normal until May 17th.
Which may be behind parts of the continent. The Belgian Government has said it's planning to bin most restrictions on May 1st.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL3N2L341P