Funny as @TheJezziah is, there is a serious point to make - the political antennae of Keir Starmer.
In the Pools by-election, IDStarmer decided that he wanted Dr Paul Williams to be the candidate and had the selection process cancelled and the candidate imposed. This is hardly a new thing in the party - and the Corbyn cult were just as bad at doing it as other past leaders.
The problem is that his choice of candidate was perhaps the worst one possible. Dr Paul is a genuinely great guy, dedicated to the people he represents, a medical leader, a pragmatist. But he was also the poster boy for the People's Vote campaign. And was inserted into a seat that was the most batshit of leave in the region with a long history of batshittery.
When I heard they had selected Paul I posted on here "Tory gain nailed on". I was astonished they would select him AND pull him from the PCC election he had a reasonable chance to win. That their pledge rate is down to 40% is a disaster beyond anything I could imagine - the people of Hartlepool are going to punish Labour for this misstep.
Jezziah might be droning on and on and on until he starts foaming at the mouth, but he is absolutely right to question Starmer's leadership. If he can personally intervene in Hartlepool and personally get the decision this decision so massively wrong, then what else is he getting wrong? Aside from the photo of him taking the knee...
Jezziah and BJO want the solution to be a return to Corbynism - that would be an even bigger disaster. So here we are Labour - what you were under Corbyn was a disaster, what you are under Starmer is a disaster. The way forward cannot be a return to x or to y, it needs to be something new.
And there is their big problem. The two sides are so busy fighting the opposing ferrets in their sack that they are unaware that the river they are adrift on is heading for the waterfall. A 3rd way is needed, neither side will agree it, so over they go. This much is self-evident, England is lost to the Tories and to the reactionary ideas of gammon, hence my move north of the wall.
Another part of the issue is that I don't think Hartlepool was in a position to pick a sane Labour candidate so someone did need to be imposed. The issue then came to who was the best suitable candidate and then the only real option was Dr Paul Williams.
The great unknown is did Dr Williams seek to be the Hartlepool candidate or did he switch because SKS asked him to.
Of its the former then Dr Williams is a fool and if it's the latter than Dr Williams is again a fool for not understanding what that consequences would be - as both you and me could see the end result from miles away.
Honestly not sure what happened. The candidate went dark for almost a week in the run-up to the decision being made. His own PCC campaign team couldn't get hold of him.
If I am being generous he has been told by Starmer that if he does this he will be given a genuinely safe seat if he loses - that being PCC wasn't his area of interest anyway.
If I am being ungenerous, that he was PCC candidate in the first place demonstrated some hubris...
I would love to know what a safe labour seats looks like nowadays - outside of city centres I can't imagine many genuinely safe seats exist.
We will see what happens tomorrow. At the moment all the soundings seem to be that I have called this one utterly wrong and am about to lose the price of a curry night out.
So ComRes reckons SNP 42% in the Constituency vote. YouGov reckons SNP 52% in the Constituency vote. Crazy.
Well, at least we have our range of likely possibilities laid bare. From crushing SNP win to just an SNP win (which unionists would practically take as a win compared to the former)
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
This was a message from a few on the left after 2019. To basically abandon the working class. Labour really is moving away from it’s roots and I expect Thursday to solidify this. The labour votes are going somewhere.
BIden got in by targeting similar seats, but now that he's in, many of his policies and plans are focused on the working class, arguably more than Trump's, I would say.
Before: Jersey authorities talk directly to Normandy authorities who talk to their fishermen.
Now: Normandy fishermen talk to Normandy authorities who relay info to French government, who tell the EU, who tell the UK, who then tell the Jersey authorities.
Is it any wonder its got cocked up? The issue appears to be that some Normandy fishermen haven't provided all the information the treaty requires them to do....and Jersey is sticking to the letter of the treaty....
I’m assuming that the whole electricity concept was a daft question from a backbencher that the Mail has got overexcited by?
Although I feel sorry for Guernsey if their power was switched off as well due to a dispute between Jersey and France
Ps missed that the shellfish war has been resolved by reclassifying UK waters in line with EU environmental norms vs our own higher standards
That may not help all UK shellfish waters aiui - just a minority so far.
Presumably NI are still operating on Single Market standards where these checks do not apply(?)
Funny as @TheJezziah is, there is a serious point to make - the political antennae of Keir Starmer.
In the Pools by-election, IDStarmer decided that he wanted Dr Paul Williams to be the candidate and had the selection process cancelled and the candidate imposed. This is hardly a new thing in the party - and the Corbyn cult were just as bad at doing it as other past leaders.
The problem is that his choice of candidate was perhaps the worst one possible. Dr Paul is a genuinely great guy, dedicated to the people he represents, a medical leader, a pragmatist. But he was also the poster boy for the People's Vote campaign. And was inserted into a seat that was the most batshit of leave in the region with a long history of batshittery.
When I heard they had selected Paul I posted on here "Tory gain nailed on". I was astonished they would select him AND pull him from the PCC election he had a reasonable chance to win. That their pledge rate is down to 40% is a disaster beyond anything I could imagine - the people of Hartlepool are going to punish Labour for this misstep.
Jezziah might be droning on and on and on until he starts foaming at the mouth, but he is absolutely right to question Starmer's leadership. If he can personally intervene in Hartlepool and personally get the decision this decision so massively wrong, then what else is he getting wrong? Aside from the photo of him taking the knee...
Jezziah and BJO want the solution to be a return to Corbynism - that would be an even bigger disaster. So here we are Labour - what you were under Corbyn was a disaster, what you are under Starmer is a disaster. The way forward cannot be a return to x or to y, it needs to be something new.
And there is their big problem. The two sides are so busy fighting the opposing ferrets in their sack that they are unaware that the river they are adrift on is heading for the waterfall. A 3rd way is needed, neither side will agree it, so over they go. This much is self-evident, England is lost to the Tories and to the reactionary ideas of gammon, hence my move north of the wall.
Another part of the issue is that I don't think Hartlepool was in a position to pick a sane Labour candidate so someone did need to be imposed. The issue then came to who was the best suitable candidate and then the only real option was Dr Paul Williams.
The great unknown is did Dr Williams seek to be the Hartlepool candidate or did he switch because SKS asked him to.
Of its the former then Dr Williams is a fool and if it's the latter than Dr Williams is again a fool for not understanding what that consequences would be - as both you and me could see the end result from miles away.
"The issue then came to who was the best suitable candidate and then the only real option was Dr Paul Williams."
The "only real option" was someone who was obviously going to get pummelled for their ultra anti-Brexit stance? If so, Labour is in a far, far worse position than we imagine.
Labour needs to find a way of ending the Brexit Wars. They need to say they respect Brexit was a legitimate outcome - and they respect the people who voted for it. Even then, they are still years behind Boris on "implementing the will of the voters". Boris (on this at least) comes across as natural. Whenever Brexit is mentioned, Labour continue to look like you've dropped a scorpion down their pants.
The Tories are equally split on Brexit but have shut up about it bar using it as a stick to beat Labour with.
Not sure the Conservatives (as they exist now) are that split on Brexit- mostly because of a "make a desert, call it peace" approach. For better or worse, they have become a party of a jolly hard Brexit indeed. And right now, that works.
The problem for both big parties is that the Great British Public remains split on the subject. There's a hefty minority who would rejoin in a heartbeat. There's a plurality who think, despite the vaccine wars, that the outcome of the 2016 vote was a mistake.
For the Conservatives, the problem is that they have a flagship policy which currently appeals to a lot of people, but is close to the level where it will sink them. I'm not expecting a national howl of betrayal and remorse, but a gradual seepage- a few fishermen here, a few Unionists there and after a while you're talking serious numbers of votes. Plus the whole demographic drift factor- there is a generation, roughly born in the 50's, who were the backbone of the unsuccessful Leave vote in 1975 and the successful one in 2016. Leave as an idea has to run pretty fast to stand still.
For Labour, the problem is more acute. Whatever they do, embrace Leave or reject it, they will annoy a chunk of their voters. Starmer's current position- it's happened and there's no point arguing, but the government are doing it wrong- annoys everyone. It's not a good equilibrium, but it's probably better than the alternatives. And if it boils down to "1 step closer to the EU than the Conservatives would do" at any time, it's probably the right answer.
On social care. Exclusive in Telegraph this morning:
"multiple Whitehall insiders claim the Prime Minister is leaning towards proposals first put forward a decade ago by Sir Andrew Dilnot, a social care expert, which recommended capping lifetime care costs for individuals"
FFS. Ten years on and still arguing internally whether to do Dilnot.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
This was a message from a few on the left after 2019. To basically abandon the working class. Labour really is moving away from it’s roots and I expect Thursday to solidify this. The labour votes are going somewhere.
The poorest voters still vote Labour, especially if they live in social housing and do not own a property but the white skilled working class who are property owners have now abandoned Labour and gave the Tories their biggest voteshare in 2019, especially in Northern and Midlands working class Leave areas.
In fact according to Yougov Labour got a higher voteshare with upper middle class ABs at 34% at the 2019 election than the 31% they got with skilled working class C2s and most ABs live in London and the South
Brussels’ decision will reportedly be at odds with several EU countries, including the Baltic nations and the Netherlands, that are said to support the UK joining.
TheCityUK CEO Miles Celic said it was “hard to understand” the recommendation.
“All of the non-EU parties to Lugano: Iceland, Norway and Switzerland, have indicated their support for the UK’s application and a relationship with the Single Market is not listed as a requirement of membership of the Convention,” he continued.
“We now hope that EU Member States will vote to support the UK’s application, as doing so has clear benefits for the citizens of all signatories to the treaty. However, other mechanisms exist which mean UK court judgments will continue to be enforceable throughout EU and EFTA.”
I think that it is a QMV decision.
I wonder how they will enforce their Belgian judgement if the *inevitable victory* (cough) affects things in the UK.
At least if either of them get really ill, they'll be able to receive proper treatment and it will be one or two people that aren't adding to the pressure back home. Drop in the ocean, I know.
Let's hope the infection doesn't spread among the other delegates. Are they all vaccinated? If not, can they be vaccinated while they're here, I wonder?
Ref discussion on previous thread about poverty in WVA, I looked at the Zillow site for real estate in Princeton WVA, and Welch WVA, both in McDowell County. Houses available for under $50k. Not necessarily anything you'd want to live in ...
On Rightmove there are terraced houses starting at £5000 in Hartlepool.
Auctions with a starting price of £5000, from memory. Not the same thing...
@Foxy can you post a link on this. The lowest prices seem to be more like 50k for the lower end liveable 2 bed terraced.
This is the only 5k I can find, which is a come and get me auction EPC F small terrace, which looks as though it needs a full refurb, which will be several 10s of K.
Yes, it is the auction reserve of £5000, and many of those are in poor condition. West Virginia type prices.
Well - afaik the rental market is currently red hot because the extension of notice periods for removing tenants, whether at fault or not, has strangled supply.
Personally I have two and a shop sitting empty for a number of months as I am awaiting probate on a parental estate, and can't take the risk of re-renting in case I have to sell. Getting lots of interest from people who are asking neighbours for my telno.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
This was a message from a few on the left after 2019. To basically abandon the working class. Labour really is moving away from it’s roots and I expect Thursday to solidify this. The labour votes are going somewhere.
Labour doesn't need to abandon the working class - that isn't their problem.
The problem is a combination of the Labour party being perceived to have abandoned the working class and the Tory party doing a lot better job of targeting them.
Their problem is that term - "working class". If you have to get out of bed in a morning to work so that you can pay your bills, you are working class. But for so many in Labour that term refers to an ever-diminishing group of unionised people.
Bournemouth and Wycombe were referred to earlier - why are the people who live there seen as totally different to the people who live in Barnsley or Whitehaven? There are people who every kind of job and have no job and have retired and are poor, comfortable and well off.
Labour cannot reach out to all these people because of class identity. Its the working class against the monies class and there can be no dissent. It needs to bin off class and labels and just talk to people as people.
Funny as @TheJezziah is, there is a serious point to make - the political antennae of Keir Starmer.
In the Pools by-election, IDStarmer decided that he wanted Dr Paul Williams to be the candidate and had the selection process cancelled and the candidate imposed. This is hardly a new thing in the party - and the Corbyn cult were just as bad at doing it as other past leaders.
The problem is that his choice of candidate was perhaps the worst one possible. Dr Paul is a genuinely great guy, dedicated to the people he represents, a medical leader, a pragmatist. But he was also the poster boy for the People's Vote campaign. And was inserted into a seat that was the most batshit of leave in the region with a long history of batshittery.
When I heard they had selected Paul I posted on here "Tory gain nailed on". I was astonished they would select him AND pull him from the PCC election he had a reasonable chance to win. That their pledge rate is down to 40% is a disaster beyond anything I could imagine - the people of Hartlepool are going to punish Labour for this misstep.
Jezziah might be droning on and on and on until he starts foaming at the mouth, but he is absolutely right to question Starmer's leadership. If he can personally intervene in Hartlepool and personally get the decision this decision so massively wrong, then what else is he getting wrong? Aside from the photo of him taking the knee...
Jezziah and BJO want the solution to be a return to Corbynism - that would be an even bigger disaster. So here we are Labour - what you were under Corbyn was a disaster, what you are under Starmer is a disaster. The way forward cannot be a return to x or to y, it needs to be something new.
And there is their big problem. The two sides are so busy fighting the opposing ferrets in their sack that they are unaware that the river they are adrift on is heading for the waterfall. A 3rd way is needed, neither side will agree it, so over they go. This much is self-evident, England is lost to the Tories and to the reactionary ideas of gammon, hence my move north of the wall.
Another part of the issue is that I don't think Hartlepool was in a position to pick a sane Labour candidate so someone did need to be imposed. The issue then came to who was the best suitable candidate and then the only real option was Dr Paul Williams.
The great unknown is did Dr Williams seek to be the Hartlepool candidate or did he switch because SKS asked him to.
Of its the former then Dr Williams is a fool and if it's the latter than Dr Williams is again a fool for not understanding what that consequences would be - as both you and me could see the end result from miles away.
"The issue then came to who was the best suitable candidate and then the only real option was Dr Paul Williams."
The "only real option" was someone who was obviously going to get pummelled for their ultra anti-Brexit stance? If so, Labour is in a far, far worse position than we imagine.
Labour needs to find a way of ending the Brexit Wars. They need to say they respect Brexit was a legitimate outcome - and they respect the people who voted for it. Even then, they are still years behind Boris on "implementing the will of the voters". Boris (on this at least) comes across as natural. Whenever Brexit is mentioned, Labour continue to look like you've dropped a scorpion down their pants.
One of my biggest problems with Starmer is his total capitulation over Brexit
Brexit should be called out every day of the week for the out of plain-sight fiasco it has become.
I am more inclined towards the LDs because in their heart of hearts they have not given up on the EU dream in the way Labour have, to pander to their xenophobic former base.
That would simply turn Labour into a lost cause society.
The RT surge continues, Tories up to 29% on the Senedd constituency vote and 25% on the list compared to the 21% and 19% respectively they got in 2016 and heading for their best ever Senedd result.
It looks that outside of Hartlepool and Andy Street in the WM then the best Tory result in GB on Thursday will come from RT's Tories in Wales
Funny as @TheJezziah is, there is a serious point to make - the political antennae of Keir Starmer.
In the Pools by-election, IDStarmer decided that he wanted Dr Paul Williams to be the candidate and had the selection process cancelled and the candidate imposed. This is hardly a new thing in the party - and the Corbyn cult were just as bad at doing it as other past leaders.
The problem is that his choice of candidate was perhaps the worst one possible. Dr Paul is a genuinely great guy, dedicated to the people he represents, a medical leader, a pragmatist. But he was also the poster boy for the People's Vote campaign. And was inserted into a seat that was the most batshit of leave in the region with a long history of batshittery.
When I heard they had selected Paul I posted on here "Tory gain nailed on". I was astonished they would select him AND pull him from the PCC election he had a reasonable chance to win. That their pledge rate is down to 40% is a disaster beyond anything I could imagine - the people of Hartlepool are going to punish Labour for this misstep.
Jezziah might be droning on and on and on until he starts foaming at the mouth, but he is absolutely right to question Starmer's leadership. If he can personally intervene in Hartlepool and personally get the decision this decision so massively wrong, then what else is he getting wrong? Aside from the photo of him taking the knee...
Jezziah and BJO want the solution to be a return to Corbynism - that would be an even bigger disaster. So here we are Labour - what you were under Corbyn was a disaster, what you are under Starmer is a disaster. The way forward cannot be a return to x or to y, it needs to be something new.
And there is their big problem. The two sides are so busy fighting the opposing ferrets in their sack that they are unaware that the river they are adrift on is heading for the waterfall. A 3rd way is needed, neither side will agree it, so over they go. This much is self-evident, England is lost to the Tories and to the reactionary ideas of gammon, hence my move north of the wall.
Another part of the issue is that I don't think Hartlepool was in a position to pick a sane Labour candidate so someone did need to be imposed. The issue then came to who was the best suitable candidate and then the only real option was Dr Paul Williams.
The great unknown is did Dr Williams seek to be the Hartlepool candidate or did he switch because SKS asked him to.
Of its the former then Dr Williams is a fool and if it's the latter than Dr Williams is again a fool for not understanding what that consequences would be - as both you and me could see the end result from miles away.
"The issue then came to who was the best suitable candidate and then the only real option was Dr Paul Williams."
The "only real option" was someone who was obviously going to get pummelled for their ultra anti-Brexit stance? If so, Labour is in a far, far worse position than we imagine.
Labour needs to find a way of ending the Brexit Wars. They need to say they respect Brexit was a legitimate outcome - and they respect the people who voted for it. Even then, they are still years behind Boris on "implementing the will of the voters". Boris (on this at least) comes across as natural. Whenever Brexit is mentioned, Labour continue to look like you've dropped a scorpion down their pants.
One of my biggest problems with Starmer is his total capitulation over Brexit
Brexit should be called out every day of the week for the out of plain-sight fiasco it has become.
I am more inclined towards the LDs because in their heart of hearts they have not given up on the EU dream in the way Labour have, to pander to their xenophobic former base.
That would simply turn Labour into a lost cause society.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
This was a message from a few on the left after 2019. To basically abandon the working class. Labour really is moving away from it’s roots and I expect Thursday to solidify this. The labour votes are going somewhere.
Labour doesn't need to abandon the working class - that isn't their problem.
The problem is a combination of the Labour party being perceived to have abandoned the working class and the Tory party doing a lot better job of targeting them.
Their problem is that term - "working class". If you have to get out of bed in a morning to work so that you can pay your bills, you are working class. But for so many in Labour that term refers to an ever-diminishing group of unionised people.
Bournemouth and Wycombe were referred to earlier - why are the people who live there seen as totally different to the people who live in Barnsley or Whitehaven? There are people who every kind of job and have no job and have retired and are poor, comfortable and well off.
Labour cannot reach out to all these people because of class identity. Its the working class against the monies class and there can be no dissent. It needs to bin off class and labels and just talk to people as people.
Brilliant piece in Guardian yesterday on exactly this.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
theory: a significant number of swing-voters find the vague idea of independence appealing, but only until they think through the reality of what separation would mean - so the more people engage with the question of indy,the less popular it becomes
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Labour need to find a set of big ideas and policies that can speak across these boundaries, these policies will exist. Labour just needs to actually do a bit of thinking.
Nobody is talking about really big, bold, new ideas. Labour needs to get on with it.
Yep, they need to find a couple of very popular ideas - popular in the country as a whole, and especially with voters in marginal seats - that they know the Tories would never go for, that they can introduce as the pandemic ends then push relentlessly for the next two or three years.
Blair was very good at this, in opposition he wasn’t just opposing the government but talking about his own ideas, and having the debate on his terms.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
I disagree.
Almost everyone everywhere wants infrastructure spending on the infrastructure they like. Almost everyone everywhere wants low taxes on themselves.
There is no red wall/heartland divide on this.
No government is ever going to abolish infrastructure spending altogether. As for "jobs" - it is Conservative principles that say that low taxes helps create more and better jobs, if that is what people get then they don't care how they get it, so long as they get it.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
I'm not so sure. The Conservative's coalition seems to be a collection of fairly affluent southern voters, a bunch of 'white working class' voters concentrated primarily in the north all firmed up by Brexit and 'never Corbyners'. Brexit has helped unite these two tribes but surely there must be a way for Labour to build a coalition out of 'white working class' northerners and metro liberals. How to do that is the £350 million question!
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
And that takes us back to the indispensability of Johnson. He is probably the only Conservative politician prepared to completely overlook that problem as a matter of principle. Spending money without worrying about where it's coming from has worked for him personally, so why shouldn't it work for the country?
As a strategy, it will work brilliantly... right up to the second it doesn't.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
I disagree.
Almost everyone everywhere wants infrastructure spending on the infrastructure they like. Almost everyone everywhere wants low taxes on themselves.
There is no red wall/heartland divide on this.
No government is ever going to abolish infrastructure spending altogether. As for "jobs" - it is Conservative principles that say that low taxes helps create more and better jobs, if that is what people get then they don't care how they get it, so long as they get it.
The fact is that taxes cannot stay low long term to support the level of spending. We have already seen that in the budget, with Rishi doing the whole personal allowance silent tax hike.
I feel you’re missing the point, speaking as a northerner yourself. How long will the wealthy Tories in the Home Counties be willing to support higher and higher taxes needed to support the level of state intervention the former red wall wants before being tempted by the Lib Dems or whoever?
There’s only so many government departments that can be cheaply dumped on teesside.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
The problem here is that the taper is not 90% it's 63% and given the additional costs involved in a Universal Basic income I suspect the tax rates required wouldn't be far off 63%. At the very least I suspect they would be on the wrong side of the Laffer curve.
The taper alone is 63%, but you've forgotten to account for Income Tax, National Insurance. Let alone other marginal means tested benefits like Council Tax support. Add up Income Tax, NIC, Taper and Council Tax support and you're at 90% even without considering anything incidental like free dentistry. Or childcare, or anything else.
So if someone is on enough part time hours to be on a 90% marginal tax rate then absolutely I would say they already are today on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve - even without considering the fact its in my opinion immoral to be having a real marginal tax rate of 90% on anyone let alone the poorest in society.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
This was a message from a few on the left after 2019. To basically abandon the working class. Labour really is moving away from it’s roots and I expect Thursday to solidify this. The labour votes are going somewhere.
Labour doesn't need to abandon the working class - that isn't their problem.
The problem is a combination of the Labour party being perceived to have abandoned the working class and the Tory party doing a lot better job of targeting them.
Their problem is that term - "working class". If you have to get out of bed in a morning to work so that you can pay your bills, you are working class. But for so many in Labour that term refers to an ever-diminishing group of unionised people.
Bournemouth and Wycombe were referred to earlier - why are the people who live there seen as totally different to the people who live in Barnsley or Whitehaven? There are people who every kind of job and have no job and have retired and are poor, comfortable and well off.
Labour cannot reach out to all these people because of class identity. Its the working class against the monies class and there can be no dissent. It needs to bin off class and labels and just talk to people as people.
The adult population of England is of the order 40m and each and every one of them is a unique individual. However you can't have 40m tailored conversations going on, not even at a superficial level. You have to identify common interests, reflecting that people are both atomized units and also part of definable groupings. So, for me, the exhortation to "talk to people as people" is somewhat of an empty soundbite. It sounds good but means nothing.
lots of discussion on scotland and hartlepool, but less on the police and crime commissioners. A lot has changed since 2016 and a lot of those elections were surprisingly close.
Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi: 'It's great to see Spain and France and Germany really beginning to accelerate their vaccination programmes. We send millions of the nanoparticles that carry the Pfizer messenger RNA that delivers those jabs from the UK to the EU...
...'and they send us back both the Pfizer vaccine and of course other vaccines. It's much better to work together on this stuff than to allow some of these operational challenges to become confrontational.'
Zahawi is excellent. I have been really impressed with his efficiency and diplomacy during this pandemic. I don’t share much in common with him politically, but he strikes me as highly competent. The unsung hero of the government?
Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi: 'It's great to see Spain and France and Germany really beginning to accelerate their vaccination programmes. We send millions of the nanoparticles that carry the Pfizer messenger RNA that delivers those jabs from the UK to the EU...
...'and they send us back both the Pfizer vaccine and of course other vaccines. It's much better to work together on this stuff than to allow some of these operational challenges to become confrontational.'
Zahawi is excellent. I have been really impressed with his efficiency and diplomacy during this pandemic. I don’t share much in common with him politically, but he strikes me as highly competent. The unsung hero of the government?
Everyone involved in the government side of the vaccine rollout has done exceptionally well.
By pure co-incidence, my brother (41) and sister (40) both got their first AZ vaccine doses yesterday, 300 miles from each other.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
I disagree.
Almost everyone everywhere wants infrastructure spending on the infrastructure they like. Almost everyone everywhere wants low taxes on themselves.
There is no red wall/heartland divide on this.
No government is ever going to abolish infrastructure spending altogether. As for "jobs" - it is Conservative principles that say that low taxes helps create more and better jobs, if that is what people get then they don't care how they get it, so long as they get it.
The fact is that taxes cannot stay low long term to support the level of spending. We have already seen that in the budget, with Rishi doing the whole personal allowance silent tax hike.
I feel you’re missing the point, speaking as a northerner yourself. How long will the wealthy Tories in the Home Counties be willing to support higher and higher taxes needed to support the level of state intervention the former red wall wants before being tempted by the Lib Dems or whoever?
There’s only so many government departments that can be cheaply dumped on teesside.
Higher taxes don't fund higher spending. We should be cutting taxes, especially on the poorest, to generate more growth, to create better jobs, to have more spending, to be in a virtuous circle and move down the Laffer Curve.
If the Home Counties get tempted by the Lib Dems and the Tories keep the North then I can live with that.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
I disagree.
Almost everyone everywhere wants infrastructure spending on the infrastructure they like. Almost everyone everywhere wants low taxes on themselves.
There is no red wall/heartland divide on this.
No government is ever going to abolish infrastructure spending altogether. As for "jobs" - it is Conservative principles that say that low taxes helps create more and better jobs, if that is what people get then they don't care how they get it, so long as they get it.
The fact is that taxes cannot stay low long term to support the level of spending. We have already seen that in the budget, with Rishi doing the whole personal allowance silent tax hike.
I feel you’re missing the point, speaking as a northerner yourself. How long will the wealthy Tories in the Home Counties be willing to support higher and higher taxes needed to support the level of state intervention the former red wall wants before being tempted by the Lib Dems or whoever?
There’s only so many government departments that can be cheaply dumped on teesside.
Higher taxes don't fund higher spending. We should be cutting taxes, especially on the poorest, to generate more growth, to create better jobs, to have more spending, to be in a virtuous circle and move down the Laffer Curve.
If the Home Counties get tempted by the Lib Dems and the Tories keep the North then I can live with that.
I thought the whole point of the Laffer Curve was that beyond a certain tax rate you actually bring in less money? So the Government doesn’t want to arbitrarily “move down the Laffer Curve”, it wants to sit at the sweet spot where returns are maximised.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
This won't change any minds, it will be dismissed by those who want/need to ignore it, and people of a similar viewpoint to mine will find their views about the process of Brexit reinforced:
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
This was a message from a few on the left after 2019. To basically abandon the working class. Labour really is moving away from it’s roots and I expect Thursday to solidify this. The labour votes are going somewhere.
Labour doesn't need to abandon the working class - that isn't their problem.
The problem is a combination of the Labour party being perceived to have abandoned the working class and the Tory party doing a lot better job of targeting them.
Their problem is that term - "working class". If you have to get out of bed in a morning to work so that you can pay your bills, you are working class. But for so many in Labour that term refers to an ever-diminishing group of unionised people.
Bournemouth and Wycombe were referred to earlier - why are the people who live there seen as totally different to the people who live in Barnsley or Whitehaven? There are people who every kind of job and have no job and have retired and are poor, comfortable and well off.
Labour cannot reach out to all these people because of class identity. Its the working class against the monies class and there can be no dissent. It needs to bin off class and labels and just talk to people as people.
The adult population of England is of the order 40m and each and every one of them is a unique individual. However you can't have 40m tailored conversations going on, not even at a superficial level. You have to identify common interests, reflecting that people are both atomized units and also part of definable groupings. So, for me, the exhortation to "talk to people as people" is somewhat of an empty soundbite. It sounds good but means nothing.
Not really. What unifies most people in this country? To advance themselves in life. To provide a better life for their kids than they had. To have a house with stuff in it. To bridge across all of these people is to speak the politics of aspiration - how if you vote for the Letterbox Party you can be better off and have more stuff and live a better life.
That works for a sufficiently broad group of people to deliver landslides for both Thatcher and Blair when aspiration and hope is up front as the policy objectives. Labour's problem is that it sees aspiration as dirty, acquisition as theft etc etc.
Mandelson may not have had a problem with the rich getting richer if they lifted kids and pensioners out of poverty, but a lot of their people did. It wasn't enough to lift kids out of poverty, it should have been done by punishing the wealthy, squeezing them until their pips squeaked.
Drop all this class war shit and Labour has a chance. It won't so it doesn't.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
Thank you.
This "how" is the most difficult question to answer and the problem is neither side of politics wants to answer it. The left because they believe in means-testing since they think helping the poor is generous rather than keeps them trapped in poverty. The right because its too difficult and will result in very tough choices.
But it almost doesn't matter how. It can't be right, it can't be ethical and it can't be defended to tax people 90%. Anyone. We wouldn't tax the richest in society 90% so why the fuck do we tax the poorest in society that way? And it used to be worse, pre-Universal Credit it could be over 100%.
Like "how do we fund furlough" I view fixing this as something it almost doesn't matter how we do it, we simply have to do it.
Anyone that was prepared to grasp the nettle of fixing this I would vote for.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
This was a message from a few on the left after 2019. To basically abandon the working class. Labour really is moving away from it’s roots and I expect Thursday to solidify this. The labour votes are going somewhere.
Labour doesn't need to abandon the working class - that isn't their problem.
The problem is a combination of the Labour party being perceived to have abandoned the working class and the Tory party doing a lot better job of targeting them.
Their problem is that term - "working class". If you have to get out of bed in a morning to work so that you can pay your bills, you are working class. But for so many in Labour that term refers to an ever-diminishing group of unionised people.
Bournemouth and Wycombe were referred to earlier - why are the people who live there seen as totally different to the people who live in Barnsley or Whitehaven? There are people who every kind of job and have no job and have retired and are poor, comfortable and well off.
Labour cannot reach out to all these people because of class identity. Its the working class against the monies class and there can be no dissent. It needs to bin off class and labels and just talk to people as people.
The adult population of England is of the order 40m and each and every one of them is a unique individual. However you can't have 40m tailored conversations going on, not even at a superficial level. You have to identify common interests, reflecting that people are both atomized units and also part of definable groupings. So, for me, the exhortation to "talk to people as people" is somewhat of an empty soundbite. It sounds good but means nothing.
Not really. What unifies most people in this country? To advance themselves in life. To provide a better life for their kids than they had. To have a house with stuff in it. To bridge across all of these people is to speak the politics of aspiration - how if you vote for the Letterbox Party you can be better off and have more stuff and live a better life.
That works for a sufficiently broad group of people to deliver landslides for both Thatcher and Blair when aspiration and hope is up front as the policy objectives. Labour's problem is that it sees aspiration as dirty, acquisition as theft etc etc.
Mandelson may not have had a problem with the rich getting richer if they lifted kids and pensioners out of poverty, but a lot of their people did. It wasn't enough to lift kids out of poverty, it should have been done by punishing the wealthy, squeezing them until their pips squeaked.
Drop all this class war shit and Labour has a chance. It won't so it doesn't.
As mentioned previously, Labour needs a message sufficiently broad to encompass aspiration and genuine social idealism. Blairism and Corbynism were never equal to the task in any durable way, but it can be done. Harold Wilson managed it.
The RT surge continues, Tories up to 29% on the Senedd constituency vote and 25% on the list compared to the 21% and 19% respectively they got in 2016 and heading for their best ever Senedd result.
It looks that outside of Hartlepool and Andy Street in the WM then the best Tory result in GB on Thursday will come from RT's Tories in Wales
I don't think the Tory improvement has anything to do with ARTDavies, in fact its despite him. They are benefiting from UK wide vaccine bounce and brexit. Labour are fortunate that Mark Drakeford has generally been perceived to be a steady pair of hands during the pandemic. Otherwise it could have been disastrous,although results are still not likely to be good.l Yet again Plaid are caught between the two and are being squeezed.
So YouGov has SNP on 52% in the constituency vote and Savanta Comres on 42% . Quite some difference . I look forward to seeing what Ipsos Mori have to say but shouldn’t conventional wisdom suggest that any drop in SNP support should see those voters move to Labour or the Greens not the Tories .
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
I disagree.
Almost everyone everywhere wants infrastructure spending on the infrastructure they like. Almost everyone everywhere wants low taxes on themselves.
There is no red wall/heartland divide on this.
No government is ever going to abolish infrastructure spending altogether. As for "jobs" - it is Conservative principles that say that low taxes helps create more and better jobs, if that is what people get then they don't care how they get it, so long as they get it.
The fact is that taxes cannot stay low long term to support the level of spending. We have already seen that in the budget, with Rishi doing the whole personal allowance silent tax hike.
I feel you’re missing the point, speaking as a northerner yourself. How long will the wealthy Tories in the Home Counties be willing to support higher and higher taxes needed to support the level of state intervention the former red wall wants before being tempted by the Lib Dems or whoever?
There’s only so many government departments that can be cheaply dumped on teesside.
Higher taxes don't fund higher spending. We should be cutting taxes, especially on the poorest, to generate more growth, to create better jobs, to have more spending, to be in a virtuous circle and move down the Laffer Curve.
If the Home Counties get tempted by the Lib Dems and the Tories keep the North then I can live with that.
I thought the whole point of the Laffer Curve was that beyond a certain tax rate you actually bring in less money? So the Government doesn’t want to arbitrarily “move down the Laffer Curve”, it wants to sit at the sweet spot where returns are maximised.
Indeed that is true.
But I am of the opinion that taxing people 90% in real terms is past the peak of the Laffer Curve.
theory: a significant number of swing-voters find the vague idea of independence appealing, but only until they think through the reality of what separation would mean - so the more people engage with the question of indy,the less popular it becomes
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 due to housing supply keeping up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
This was a message from a few on the left after 2019. To basically abandon the working class. Labour really is moving away from it’s roots and I expect Thursday to solidify this. The labour votes are going somewhere.
Labour doesn't need to abandon the working class - that isn't their problem.
The problem is a combination of the Labour party being perceived to have abandoned the working class and the Tory party doing a lot better job of targeting them.
Their problem is that term - "working class". If you have to get out of bed in a morning to work so that you can pay your bills, you are working class. But for so many in Labour that term refers to an ever-diminishing group of unionised people.
Bournemouth and Wycombe were referred to earlier - why are the people who live there seen as totally different to the people who live in Barnsley or Whitehaven? There are people who every kind of job and have no job and have retired and are poor, comfortable and well off.
Labour cannot reach out to all these people because of class identity. Its the working class against the monies class and there can be no dissent. It needs to bin off class and labels and just talk to people as people.
The adult population of England is of the order 40m and each and every one of them is a unique individual. However you can't have 40m tailored conversations going on, not even at a superficial level. You have to identify common interests, reflecting that people are both atomized units and also part of definable groupings. So, for me, the exhortation to "talk to people as people" is somewhat of an empty soundbite. It sounds good but means nothing.
Not really. What unifies most people in this country? To advance themselves in life. To provide a better life for their kids than they had. To have a house with stuff in it. To bridge across all of these people is to speak the politics of aspiration - how if you vote for the Letterbox Party you can be better off and have more stuff and live a better life.
That works for a sufficiently broad group of people to deliver landslides for both Thatcher and Blair when aspiration and hope is up front as the policy objectives. Labour's problem is that it sees aspiration as dirty, acquisition as theft etc etc.
Mandelson may not have had a problem with the rich getting richer if they lifted kids and pensioners out of poverty, but a lot of their people did. It wasn't enough to lift kids out of poverty, it should have been done by punishing the wealthy, squeezing them until their pips squeaked.
Drop all this class war shit and Labour has a chance. It won't so it doesn't.
As discussed before, Labour needs a message sufficiently broad to encompass aspiration and social idealism. Blairism and Corbynism were never quite equal to the task, but it can be done. Harold Wilson managed it.
I don't think it can be done. As I realised that Labour was broken and didn't fundamentally match my own perspectives any more, I left. Despite a wobble when I went bonkers under lockdown I am quite happy in the LibDems who seem to balance off prosperity with social responsibility quite well.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
The taper alone is 63%, but you've forgotten to account for Income Tax, National Insurance. Let alone other marginal means tested benefits like Council Tax support. Add up Income Tax, NIC, Taper and Council Tax support and you're at 90% even without considering anything incidental like free dentistry. Or childcare, or anything else.
12. Recent modelling shows UC does tend to improve financial work incentives overall compared to the legacy system.[5],[6],[7] It tends to allow people to keep more of their earnings when they move into work – seen in lower ‘Participation Tax Rates’ (‘PTR’s)[i] - and to keep more of their earnings as they increase hours - seen in lower ‘Marginal Effective Tax Rates’ (‘METR’s)[ii]. 13. Significantly, UC reduces the number of families facing the highest METRs of over 80%. Under the legacy system, some workers keep just nine pence of any extra pound earned;[iii] claimants of out-of-work legacy benefits like JSA see benefit withdrawn pound for pound as earnings rise.
The taper alone is 63%, but you've forgotten to account for Income Tax, National Insurance. Let alone other marginal means tested benefits like Council Tax support. Add up Income Tax, NIC, Taper and Council Tax support and you're at 90% even without considering anything incidental like free dentistry. Or childcare, or anything else.
12. Recent modelling shows UC does tend to improve financial work incentives overall compared to the legacy system.[5],[6],[7] It tends to allow people to keep more of their earnings when they move into work – seen in lower ‘Participation Tax Rates’ (‘PTR’s)[i] - and to keep more of their earnings as they increase hours - seen in lower ‘Marginal Effective Tax Rates’ (‘METR’s)[ii]. 13. Significantly, UC reduces the number of families facing the highest METRs of over 80%. Under the legacy system, some workers keep just nine pence of any extra pound earned;[iii] claimants of out-of-work legacy benefits like JSA see benefit withdrawn pound for pound as earnings rise.
It reduces it doesn't eliminate the number of families facing it.
As I said, the system is better than it used to be (and we've seen more people get into work and earn more hours as a result) but its still nowhere near good enough.
Hence that's on your own link.
16. Despite this overall improvement in financial work incentives under UC, they remain weak. Most single parents still face METRs over 60% and have some of the weakest incentives compared to other family types, especially at 20+ hours per week. Hence, UC is relatively good at incentivising ‘mini-jobs’ but could incentivise some single parents to reduce hours below 16.[9]
As I said the 63% taper is on top of Tax and NIC and there are still other means testing that exists too.
lots of discussion on scotland and hartlepool, but less on the police and crime commissioners. A lot has changed since 2016 and a lot of those elections were surprisingly close.
The taper alone is 63%, but you've forgotten to account for Income Tax, National Insurance. Let alone other marginal means tested benefits like Council Tax support. Add up Income Tax, NIC, Taper and Council Tax support and you're at 90% even without considering anything incidental like free dentistry. Or childcare, or anything else.
12. Recent modelling shows UC does tend to improve financial work incentives overall compared to the legacy system.[5],[6],[7] It tends to allow people to keep more of their earnings when they move into work – seen in lower ‘Participation Tax Rates’ (‘PTR’s)[i] - and to keep more of their earnings as they increase hours - seen in lower ‘Marginal Effective Tax Rates’ (‘METR’s)[ii]. 13. Significantly, UC reduces the number of families facing the highest METRs of over 80%. Under the legacy system, some workers keep just nine pence of any extra pound earned;[iii] claimants of out-of-work legacy benefits like JSA see benefit withdrawn pound for pound as earnings rise.
With statistics the devil is in the detail and as far as I can see that doesn't actually say the new system is better than the old one. It provides some lovely anecdotes and excuses but it really is comparing apples with sheep.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Problem with building homes in the SE is it just creates more draw factor for both jobs and people.
You can't counter the demand/supply curve (ie build more houses than there is demand), as the demand is elastic and meets it.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
That wasn't my point - my point was that the South East isn't (and won't) build enough homes because being blunt it can't.
The homes that people want require space and that requires building on the green belt. It also results in house prices dropping so Nimbys do what they can to stop it occurring.
The taper alone is 63%, but you've forgotten to account for Income Tax, National Insurance. Let alone other marginal means tested benefits like Council Tax support. Add up Income Tax, NIC, Taper and Council Tax support and you're at 90% even without considering anything incidental like free dentistry. Or childcare, or anything else.
12. Recent modelling shows UC does tend to improve financial work incentives overall compared to the legacy system.[5],[6],[7] It tends to allow people to keep more of their earnings when they move into work – seen in lower ‘Participation Tax Rates’ (‘PTR’s)[i] - and to keep more of their earnings as they increase hours - seen in lower ‘Marginal Effective Tax Rates’ (‘METR’s)[ii]. 13. Significantly, UC reduces the number of families facing the highest METRs of over 80%. Under the legacy system, some workers keep just nine pence of any extra pound earned;[iii] claimants of out-of-work legacy benefits like JSA see benefit withdrawn pound for pound as earnings rise.
With statistics the devil is in the detail and as far as I can see that doesn't actually say the new system is better than the old one. It provides some lovely anecdotes and excuses but it really is comparing apples with sheep.
To be fair that's from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation not the government. But it was very selectively quoted from. UC has been a step in the right direction, but a baby step. Merging it with NIC and IC to create a UBI and flatish tax rate would be a giant leap.
It reduces it doesn't eliminate the number of families facing it.
You said "the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%." But most don't, and most that do are on legacy benefits not the new system.
With statistics the devil is in the detail and as far as I can see that doesn't actually say the new system is better than the old one.
"UC does tend to improve financial work incentives overall compared to the legacy system" is pretty explicit, and coming from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation thats about as much as you'll get.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Problem with building homes in the SE is it just creates more draw factor for both jobs and people.
You can't counter the demand/supply curve (ie build more houses than there is demand), as the demand is elastic and meets it.
Demand from where? There's not an endless stream of people wanting to move to the SE from the North.
If you discourage 2nd home ownership and foreign investment ownership, the main 'demand', the effect of more supply should suppress prices.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
Yes, in an ideal world house prices would rise in value by no more than inflation. Ideally they'd get cheaper, though I recognise there's all sorts of problems around debt etc why that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing unless it was very gradual. There's no other consumer good for which we celebrate seeing the price rise.
I own a £500k house. After a couple of years it increases in value to £600k. But I am no better off - it's still the same house that I own, and I need it to live. And if I wanted to move to another house that will have increased in value too (indeed, if I want a better house, it will have increased by more). And meanwhile, the prospect of home ownership for my children gets ever more improbable.
And we can all play the game of feeling slightly smug because the particular area where we own a home has been one of the 'winners' of the housing market. But its an empty victory unless we intend in the near future to move to one of the areas which hasn't seen such a growth. And it's particularly empty if we want our children to one day own a home where we are. And even more empty, of course, for the vast numbers of people who are locked out of the game because they can't afford to buy a home.
It reduces it doesn't eliminate the number of families facing it.
You said "the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%." They don't.
They do. "Upto" at a marginal level yes that is the rate.
Tax+NIC+Taper alone is automatically 75%. 32% basic rate tax and NI, plus 63% taper on the 68% remaining equals a real marginal basic tax rate of 75%. Then add in Council Tax support and other means-tested benefits and you get upto about 90%.
Though even if you "just" say 75% that is utterly unacceptable tax rate for the poorest in society.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Problem with building homes in the SE is it just creates more draw factor for both jobs and people.
You can't counter the demand/supply curve (ie build more houses than there is demand), as the demand is elastic and meets it.
Demand from where? There's not an endless stream of people wanting to move to the SE from the North.
If you discourage 2nd home ownership and foreign investment ownership, the main 'demand', the effect of more supply should suppress prices.
We still have significant levels of immigration, and that will continue to drive demand( and thats concentrated in the SE), and yes, people will 'go south' for jobs. We had levels of 300k per year or more, which equates to maybe 100k of new houses.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Problem with building homes in the SE is it just creates more draw factor for both jobs and people.
You can't counter the demand/supply curve (ie build more houses than there is demand), as the demand is elastic and meets it.
Demand from where? There's not an endless stream of people wanting to move to the SE from the North.
If you discourage 2nd home ownership and foreign investment ownership, the main 'demand', the effect of more supply should suppress prices.
We still have significant levels of immigration, and that will continue to drive demand( and thats concentrated in the SE), and yes, people will 'go south' for jobs. We had levels of 300k per year or more, which equates to maybe 100k of new houses.
Free movement has ended, we've "taken back control" of immigration now. No more excuses.
Yes immigration has happened and we may choose to let more happen in the future, and we need to build to match supply for that.
The most sickening politicians in this country are the likes of the Greens who advocate for free movement, mass immigration, and NIMBYism and zero construction. Not sure where the Greens want immigrants to live?
It reduces it doesn't eliminate the number of families facing it.
You said "the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%." But most don't, and most that do are on legacy benefits not the new system.
With statistics the devil is in the detail and as far as I can see that doesn't actually say the new system is better than the old one.
"UC does tend to improve financial work incentives overall compared to the legacy system" is pretty explicit, and coming from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation thats about as much as you'll get.
UC works up to the boundary where the taper kicks in after that it really doesn't
Which is why my neighbour has 6 part time workers for his cafe and not 3 full time workers as they all work up to the 14 / 20 hour taper point where it kicks in and no more.
UC works but it creates weird boundaries which result in people doing the bare minimum and no more because going beyond that opens whole levels of random pain for both the workers and my neighbour (who has to work out WTF happened when they complain their money has gone "down").
Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi: 'It's great to see Spain and France and Germany really beginning to accelerate their vaccination programmes. We send millions of the nanoparticles that carry the Pfizer messenger RNA that delivers those jabs from the UK to the EU...
...'and they send us back both the Pfizer vaccine and of course other vaccines. It's much better to work together on this stuff than to allow some of these operational challenges to become confrontational.'
Zahawi is excellent. I have been really impressed with his efficiency and diplomacy during this pandemic. I don’t share much in common with him politically, but he strikes me as highly competent. The unsung hero of the government?
Everyone involved in the government side of the vaccine rollout has done exceptionally well.
By pure co-incidence, my brother (41) and sister (40) both got their first AZ vaccine doses yesterday, 300 miles from each other.
My clinically vulnerable 62 year old friend in Belgium was jabbed a few days ago....
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
It reduces it doesn't eliminate the number of families facing it.
You said "the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%." But most don't, and most that do are on legacy benefits not the new system.
With statistics the devil is in the detail and as far as I can see that doesn't actually say the new system is better than the old one.
"UC does tend to improve financial work incentives overall compared to the legacy system" is pretty explicit, and coming from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation thats about as much as you'll get.
UC works up to the boundary where the taper kicks in after that it really doesn't
Which is why my neighbour has 6 part time workers for his cafe and not 3 full time workers as they all work up to the 14 / 20 hour taper point where it kicks in and no more.
UC works but it creates weird boundaries which result in people doing the bare minimum and no more because going beyond that opens whole levels of random pain for both the workers and my neighbour (who has to work out WTF happened when they complain their income has gone "down").
Bingo! The amount of people I've hired who'd say in the past "I can't work more than 16 hours or I'll lose my benefits" is absolutely flabbergasting.
Its better now than it used to be but the tapering is still there and still absolutely rotten. Just because its better doesn't mean its good enough.
We ask again: where are these phantom Labour votes?
Twitter.
It’s a serious point though, with potentially lucrative betting implications.
The national polls are heading for neck and neck. Which means labour is piling up votes somewhere.
Where?
I don’t believe it’s close to neck and neck. We’ve had 2 polls where the Tories have had a one point lead, is we believe that this has been caused by sleazegate then I also expect the Labour bounce to unravel within days and the Tories to be back on a 6 point plus lead now it’s out the news.
It’s all very well taking 2 of the past 50 polls suggesting it’s very close but I’d say folk are more likely to vote in line with the previous 9 polls they responded to than the most recent 1. Nothing about the London polling suggests Starmer is stacking up more voters there than Corbyn. I’d suggest he’ll be up significantly across the South though.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
I don't think we've abolished inflation have we - just made debt incredibly attractive by abolishing interest rates. Surely that can't go on for ever. Where will it end?
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
The mystery is - how come inflation has disappeared as in theory it shouldn't have done given the amount of printing within the economy..
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
Well, up to a point. Or at least, that's what it seemed like once. But is West Bromwich, say, really clamouring for government job creation any more than Buckinghamshire is? If it is, I don't think it's to any great extent. There are huge numbers of private sector employees in West Bromwich whose ask of the government is largely limited to not cocking things up. And there are vast numbers of people in Buckinghamshire who believe in government spending. Both want low taxes - who doesn't - but low taxes are probably a more pressing matter to the C1C2Ds of West Bromwich than the ABs of Buckinghamshire who can take a rather more relaxed view of these things (up to a point - I'm not suggesting they'll be voting for Corbynism any time soon). And more to the point, it doesn't seem a massive ideological dividing line any more. In retrospect, it seems slightly ridiculous that we spent the Major/Blair/Brown/Cameron years falling out so furiously over whether to spend 40% or 42% of GDP on state spending.
I'd say the divide is more a) cultural (this has been done to death, of course, but 'what is our identity' seems a more fundamental dividing line than 'how much of our GDP does the public sector spend', and through the early years of democracy this WAS the dividing line, and remains so in much of the world), and b) between public sector and private sector. I'm not necessarily saying this is healthy. I'd much rather live in a world where we were agreed on our identity* and we could debate the minutiae of economics. But that seems the way it is, for now.
*provided it was an identity I was happy with, of course!
I wish they'd hurry up with authorising it for use here though!
No.
For two reasons:
1 - Because the grumbling about the UK is 90% performative distraction, and that need will exist until UVDL and chums are kicked out. And perhaps after the French Elections. 2 - Because the order is for 2022 overwhelmingly so numbers will not kick in.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
There’s definitely a potential for some inflation in the next 12 months, as the recovery from recession happens.
The Fed were saying yesterday that we might need to see a small rise in interest rates to cool things down a little.
The welfare system isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better now than it was before UC. Reducing the taper means having either a much less generous or much more expensive system overall, neither of which are politically popular.
As mentioned by others, any and all solutions involve making housing cheaper. Having various areas of government release brownfield land they are sitting on would be a good start, alongside relaxation of planning laws and investment in road infrastructure.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
The mystery is - how come inflation has disappeared as in theory it shouldn't have done given the amount of printing within the economy..
I think the answer is that the printing is pushing against what would otherwise be Japanese-style deflation.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
There’s definitely a potential for some inflation in the next 12 months, as the recovery from recession happens.
The Fed were saying yesterday that we might need to see a small rise in interest rates to cool things down a little.
The welfare system isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better now than it was before UC. Reducing the taper means having either a much less generous or much more expensive system overall, neither of which are politically popular.
As mentioned by others, any and all solutions involve making housing cheaper. Having various areas of government release brownfield land they are sitting on would be a good start, alongside relaxation of planning laws and investment in road infrastructure.
Very well said.
My final thought on this as I need to go, is that cutting the marginal tax rate could end up resulting in a "less generous" and a "cheaper" system for many people, who see their livelihoods improve - if people go from working 20 hours a week to working full time instead.
The Laffer curve doesn't just apply to the richest in society.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
I don't think we've abolished inflation have we - just made debt incredibly attractive by abolishing interest rates. Surely that can't go on for ever. Where will it end?
Any large increase in interest rates would plunge people into poverty as no one could afford their mortgage.
Re the recommended cessation of advanced maths classes for gifted students, am I right in thinking we have never had these sorts of classes in Britain, at least not in state schools?
My sister was in a scheme for languages and it allowed her to do an additional language at GCSE. She went to a comp.
I went to a comp. I had an additional lesson every week so that I could do two languages. I was also invited due to my prowess at science - I got two As at GCSE in the end - to take part in a amateur radio club. It was highly tedious, and whilst I enjoyed the theoretical physics of how the radios worked I didn't care for building them. We were set in maths only at y10 and above so despite being told I could sit my maths early I got stuck with the worst teacher in the department in yr9 and wrote 6 pages in my book the whole year. The lessons were complete chaos, and I lost my appetite for the subject.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
The mystery is - how come inflation has disappeared as in theory it shouldn't have done given the amount of printing within the economy..
I think the answer is that the printing is pushing against what would otherwise be Japanese-style deflation.
Yep. The effects of QE have also been lessened by the fact that everyone in the West has been doing it, so things like currency depreciations among the major traded groups haven’t happened either.
The problems are being stored up for the future though, for example as we see with China hoarding massive amounts of foreign currency and playing games with exchange rates. The micro effects such as asset price inflation are already visible in the housing market and over-inflated stock market.
Not good. I don't see any problem with things like Pride happening.
Lewes Bonfire is the one thing I really want to go to this year. Fingers crossed Nov 5 isn't cancelled again.
I was surprised given many will have had two jabs by then and aiui its largely outdoors.....so if we can't hold large outdoor gatherings in the UK in August, what chance foreign holidays? Crowded beaches & streets in Spain fine, crowded beaches & streets in the UK a danger to public health?
House price appreciation isn't meaningless, but after you hit ~ 50% equity it has very little true value to you and locks others out the market. You absolubtely don't want negative equity though - so the sweet spot is precisely inflation rises or a smidgen below.
First bylined piece for @spectator looks at expected timings for key election races including the 'big three' of Hartlepool (4am Friday), Tees Valley (7pm Friday) and West Midlands (2:30pm Saturday)
Not good. I don't see any problem with things like Pride happening.
Lewes Bonfire is the one thing I really want to go to this year. Fingers crossed Nov 5 isn't cancelled again.
I used to live in Crowborough and the bonfire societies are fantastic. I would recommend anyone go and see the events from around September onwards. Although the people running them are clearly pyromaniac lunatics. Anyone who thinks we go over the top on health and safety clearly hasn't been to one of these events.
How do you manage to get into Lewes? From memory I believe you are in Woking. The trains and buses are cancelled and roads closed on the day and accommodation is impossible to get. I would love to go. I have been to many, but never Lewes which is the grand finale really.
Comments
Presumably NI are still operating on Single Market standards where these checks do not apply(?)
The problem for both big parties is that the Great British Public remains split on the subject. There's a hefty minority who would rejoin in a heartbeat. There's a plurality who think, despite the vaccine wars, that the outcome of the 2016 vote was a mistake.
https://whatukthinks.org/eu/questions/in-highsight-do-you-think-britain-was-right-or-wrong-to-vote-to-leave-the-eu/
For the Conservatives, the problem is that they have a flagship policy which currently appeals to a lot of people, but is close to the level where it will sink them. I'm not expecting a national howl of betrayal and remorse, but a gradual seepage- a few fishermen here, a few Unionists there and after a while you're talking serious numbers of votes. Plus the whole demographic drift factor- there is a generation, roughly born in the 50's, who were the backbone of the unsuccessful Leave vote in 1975 and the successful one in 2016. Leave as an idea has to run pretty fast to stand still.
For Labour, the problem is more acute. Whatever they do, embrace Leave or reject it, they will annoy a chunk of their voters. Starmer's current position- it's happened and there's no point arguing, but the government are doing it wrong- annoys everyone. It's not a good equilibrium, but it's probably better than the alternatives. And if it boils down to "1 step closer to the EU than the Conservatives would do" at any time, it's probably the right answer.
Telegraph saying some in Treasury are trying to block Dilnot implementation saying too expensive.
Just seems to be no sense of the crisis.
In fact according to Yougov Labour got a higher voteshare with upper middle class ABs at 34% at the 2019 election than the 31% they got with skilled working class C2s and most ABs live in London and the South
https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2021-05-05/exclusive-poll-predicts-labour-conservative-battle-for-crucial-senedd-seats
I wonder how they will enforce their Belgian judgement if the *inevitable victory* (cough) affects things in the UK.
Let's hope the infection doesn't spread among the other delegates. Are they all vaccinated? If not, can they be vaccinated while they're here, I wonder?
Good morning, everyone.
Personally I have two and a shop sitting empty for a number of months as I am awaiting probate on a parental estate, and can't take the risk of re-renting in case I have to sell. Getting lots of interest from people who are asking neighbours for my telno.
Bournemouth and Wycombe were referred to earlier - why are the people who live there seen as totally different to the people who live in Barnsley or Whitehaven? There are people who every kind of job and have no job and have retired and are poor, comfortable and well off.
Labour cannot reach out to all these people because of class identity. Its the working class against the monies class and there can be no dissent. It needs to bin off class and labels and just talk to people as people.
The parly worker blasted chiefs after one of the politicians he complained about — Patricia Gibson — issued a statement attacking him.
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/politics/7063035/snp-sexual-harassment-patricia-gibson-mp/
It looks that outside of Hartlepool and Andy Street in the WM then the best Tory result in GB on Thursday will come from RT's Tories in Wales
(Patron saint of lost causes)
One for @MarqueeMark - apols if already known.
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
https://twitter.com/kevverage/status/1389851787541286913?s=20
Blair was very good at this, in opposition he wasn’t just opposing the government but talking about his own ideas, and having the debate on his terms.
Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
The national polls are heading for neck and neck. Which means labour is piling up votes somewhere.
Where?
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
Almost everyone everywhere wants infrastructure spending on the infrastructure they like.
Almost everyone everywhere wants low taxes on themselves.
There is no red wall/heartland divide on this.
No government is ever going to abolish infrastructure spending altogether. As for "jobs" - it is Conservative principles that say that low taxes helps create more and better jobs, if that is what people get then they don't care how they get it, so long as they get it.
As a strategy, it will work brilliantly... right up to the second it doesn't.
I feel you’re missing the point, speaking as a northerner yourself. How long will the wealthy Tories in the Home Counties be willing to support higher and higher taxes needed to support the level of state intervention the former red wall wants before being tempted by the Lib Dems or whoever?
There’s only so many government departments that can be cheaply dumped on teesside.
So if someone is on enough part time hours to be on a 90% marginal tax rate then absolutely I would say they already are today on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve - even without considering the fact its in my opinion immoral to be having a real marginal tax rate of 90% on anyone let alone the poorest in society.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
By pure co-incidence, my brother (41) and sister (40) both got their first AZ vaccine doses yesterday, 300 miles from each other.
If the Home Counties get tempted by the Lib Dems and the Tories keep the North then I can live with that.
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/05/tory-quarrels-betrayals-uk-post-brexit-future-barnier-eu
That works for a sufficiently broad group of people to deliver landslides for both Thatcher and Blair when aspiration and hope is up front as the policy objectives. Labour's problem is that it sees aspiration as dirty, acquisition as theft etc etc.
Mandelson may not have had a problem with the rich getting richer if they lifted kids and pensioners out of poverty, but a lot of their people did. It wasn't enough to lift kids out of poverty, it should have been done by punishing the wealthy, squeezing them until their pips squeaked.
Drop all this class war shit and Labour has a chance. It won't so it doesn't.
This "how" is the most difficult question to answer and the problem is neither side of politics wants to answer it. The left because they believe in means-testing since they think helping the poor is generous rather than keeps them trapped in poverty. The right because its too difficult and will result in very tough choices.
But it almost doesn't matter how. It can't be right, it can't be ethical and it can't be defended to tax people 90%. Anyone. We wouldn't tax the richest in society 90% so why the fuck do we tax the poorest in society that way? And it used to be worse, pre-Universal Credit it could be over 100%.
Like "how do we fund furlough" I view fixing this as something it almost doesn't matter how we do it, we simply have to do it.
Anyone that was prepared to grasp the nettle of fixing this I would vote for.
Labour are fortunate that Mark Drakeford has generally been perceived to be a steady pair of hands during the pandemic. Otherwise it could have been disastrous,although results are still not likely to be good.l
Yet again Plaid are caught between the two and are being squeezed.
But I am of the opinion that taxing people 90% in real terms is past the peak of the Laffer Curve.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
12. Recent modelling shows UC does tend to improve financial work incentives overall compared to the legacy system.[5],[6],[7] It tends to allow people to keep more of their earnings when they move into work – seen in lower ‘Participation Tax Rates’ (‘PTR’s)[i] - and to keep more of their earnings as they increase hours - seen in lower ‘Marginal Effective Tax Rates’ (‘METR’s)[ii].
13. Significantly, UC reduces the number of families facing the highest METRs of over 80%. Under the legacy system, some workers keep just nine pence of any extra pound earned;[iii] claimants of out-of-work legacy benefits like JSA see benefit withdrawn pound for pound as earnings rise.
As I said, the system is better than it used to be (and we've seen more people get into work and earn more hours as a result) but its still nowhere near good enough.
Hence that's on your own link.
16. Despite this overall improvement in financial work incentives under UC, they remain weak. Most single parents still face METRs over 60% and have some of the weakest incentives compared to other family types, especially at 20+ hours per week. Hence, UC is relatively good at incentivising ‘mini-jobs’ but could incentivise some single parents to reduce hours below 16.[9]
As I said the 63% taper is on top of Tax and NIC and there are still other means testing that exists too.
You can't counter the demand/supply curve (ie build more houses than there is demand), as the demand is elastic and meets it.
The homes that people want require space and that requires building on the green belt. It also results in house prices dropping so Nimbys do what they can to stop it occurring.
If you discourage 2nd home ownership and foreign investment ownership, the main 'demand', the effect of more supply should suppress prices.
There's no other consumer good for which we celebrate seeing the price rise.
I own a £500k house. After a couple of years it increases in value to £600k. But I am no better off - it's still the same house that I own, and I need it to live. And if I wanted to move to another house that will have increased in value too (indeed, if I want a better house, it will have increased by more). And meanwhile, the prospect of home ownership for my children gets ever more improbable.
And we can all play the game of feeling slightly smug because the particular area where we own a home has been one of the 'winners' of the housing market. But its an empty victory unless we intend in the near future to move to one of the areas which hasn't seen such a growth. And it's particularly empty if we want our children to one day own a home where we are.
And even more empty, of course, for the vast numbers of people who are locked out of the game because they can't afford to buy a home.
Tax+NIC+Taper alone is automatically 75%. 32% basic rate tax and NI, plus 63% taper on the 68% remaining equals a real marginal basic tax rate of 75%. Then add in Council Tax support and other means-tested benefits and you get upto about 90%.
Though even if you "just" say 75% that is utterly unacceptable tax rate for the poorest in society.
Yes immigration has happened and we may choose to let more happen in the future, and we need to build to match supply for that.
The most sickening politicians in this country are the likes of the Greens who advocate for free movement, mass immigration, and NIMBYism and zero construction. Not sure where the Greens want immigrants to live?
Which is why my neighbour has 6 part time workers for his cafe and not 3 full time workers as they all work up to the 14 / 20 hour taper point where it kicks in and no more.
UC works but it creates weird boundaries which result in people doing the bare minimum and no more because going beyond that opens whole levels of random pain for both the workers and my neighbour (who has to work out WTF happened when they complain their money has gone "down").
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
Its better now than it used to be but the tapering is still there and still absolutely rotten. Just because its better doesn't mean its good enough.
It’s all very well taking 2 of the past 50 polls suggesting it’s very close but I’d say folk are more likely to vote in line with the previous 9 polls they responded to than the most recent 1. Nothing about the London polling suggests Starmer is stacking up more voters there than Corbyn. I’d suggest he’ll be up significantly across the South though.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
https://jerseyeveningpost.com/news/2021/05/05/french-threaten-to-blockade-island-as-fishing-row-erupts/
I wish they'd hurry up with authorising it for use here though!
https://twitter.com/ChrisMusson/status/1389872561585106947?s=20
But is West Bromwich, say, really clamouring for government job creation any more than Buckinghamshire is? If it is, I don't think it's to any great extent. There are huge numbers of private sector employees in West Bromwich whose ask of the government is largely limited to not cocking things up. And there are vast numbers of people in Buckinghamshire who believe in government spending. Both want low taxes - who doesn't - but low taxes are probably a more pressing matter to the C1C2Ds of West Bromwich than the ABs of Buckinghamshire who can take a rather more relaxed view of these things (up to a point - I'm not suggesting they'll be voting for Corbynism any time soon).
And more to the point, it doesn't seem a massive ideological dividing line any more. In retrospect, it seems slightly ridiculous that we spent the Major/Blair/Brown/Cameron years falling out so furiously over whether to spend 40% or 42% of GDP on state spending.
I'd say the divide is more a) cultural (this has been done to death, of course, but 'what is our identity' seems a more fundamental dividing line than 'how much of our GDP does the public sector spend', and through the early years of democracy this WAS the dividing line, and remains so in much of the world), and b) between public sector and private sector.
I'm not necessarily saying this is healthy. I'd much rather live in a world where we were agreed on our identity* and we could debate the minutiae of economics. But that seems the way it is, for now.
*provided it was an identity I was happy with, of course!
https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/19279523.2021-brighton-pride-cancelled-mass-gathering-fears/
For two reasons:
1 - Because the grumbling about the UK is 90% performative distraction, and that need will exist until UVDL and chums are kicked out. And perhaps after the French Elections.
2 - Because the order is for 2022 overwhelmingly so numbers will not kick in.
The Fed were saying yesterday that we might need to see a small rise in interest rates to cool things down a little.
The welfare system isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better now than it was before UC. Reducing the taper means having either a much less generous or much more expensive system overall, neither of which are politically popular.
As mentioned by others, any and all solutions involve making housing cheaper. Having various areas of government release brownfield land they are sitting on would be a good start, alongside relaxation of planning laws and investment in road infrastructure.
My final thought on this as I need to go, is that cutting the marginal tax rate could end up resulting in a "less generous" and a "cheaper" system for many people, who see their livelihoods improve - if people go from working 20 hours a week to working full time instead.
The Laffer curve doesn't just apply to the richest in society.
Lewes Bonfire is the one thing I really want to go to this year. Fingers crossed Nov 5 isn't cancelled again.
The problems are being stored up for the future though, for example as we see with China hoarding massive amounts of foreign currency and playing games with exchange rates. The micro effects such as asset price inflation are already visible in the housing market and over-inflated stock market.
You absolubtely don't want negative equity though - so the sweet spot is precisely inflation rises or a smidgen below.
https://twitter.com/JAHeale/status/1389874983036461059?s=20
How do you manage to get into Lewes? From memory I believe you are in Woking. The trains and buses are cancelled and roads closed on the day and accommodation is impossible to get. I would love to go. I have been to many, but never Lewes which is the grand finale really.