I see Ms Kuennnsberg is saying what Cummimgs says matters. It couldn't because she is publicising her BBC interview with Cummings who wants to vent his spleen, could it..... Barnard Castle did for Cummings. The public is in no mood to pay attention to such a man whom they would not trust with their shopping.
Boris on the other hand..different kettle of fish altogether. He got Brexit done as he promised and those who support him are still very grateful.
Excoriating column from Hugo Rifkind in the Times this morning about the disdain BoZo has for the people who vote for him
I hate “nobody is interested in this”. I hate “the public doesn’t care”. I hate it because of what it coyly admits, which is “we, the government don’t care, because we don’t have to”. According to Johnson, he and Sunak “did look briefly at the idea” of dodging quarantine, before concluding that it wasn’t the right thing to do. Only that’s just brazen rubbish, isn’t it? They were going to do it because they could, and they changed their minds because they belatedly realised that the ubiquitous defence of “the public doesn’t care” suddenly wouldn’t work, because the public did.
A year and a half of “trusting the science” makes it too easy to forget that this is a government forged in populist fires. Loath as I am to rake over old wounds, it is worth remembering that before there was Covid, and lockdown, and data, and graphs, there was instead an unconcealed disdain for parliament, courts, expertise, conventions, expectations, watchdogs, regulators, the rule of law and basically anything else that stood in the way of the crassest possible interpretation of majority will. This is Johnsonism. It is doing whatever you want, whenever you can get away with it. And it will get ugly. Wait and see.
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
I now think Labour will take poll leads in the next few months. This isn't wishful thinking on my part. The wheels are coming off the Johnson blunderbus.
After Black Wednesday there wasn't an instant Armageddon poll loss. It took months for it to seep through.
If they are serious about a 1% tax rise by way of national insurance then they will quickly get themselves into a mess. It heavily penalises the economically active, to essentially subsidise the economically inactive. Perhaps the labour party will start to honour its name.
Raising national insurance also breaks the manifesto pledge not to raise income tax or NI.
Manifestos don't mean a thing. There's always an excuse
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
We will have to disagree but I think you are very wrong. People don't trust Labour because of Corbyn and because of its pro brexit stance.. the left in the shape of Momentum are there in force behind the scenes as well as Corbyn.Voters know this. Hence the appaling showing in the polls.
Mr. B2, you can think deception is generally a bad thing, whether on a large or small scale.
Mr. JohnL, that's true, although we are in exceptional circumstances. I think a bigger potential problem is that people are never thrilled by new taxes and, for some, this will come at a very difficult time.
You can also think that a big deception is a bad thing and a very small one, not so much.
I now think Labour will take poll leads in the next few months. This isn't wishful thinking on my part. The wheels are coming off the Johnson blunderbus.
After Black Wednesday there wasn't an instant Armageddon poll loss. It took months for it to seep through.
If they are serious about a 1% tax rise by way of national insurance then they will quickly get themselves into a mess. It heavily penalises the economically active, to essentially subsidise the economically inactive. Perhaps the labour party will start to honour its name.
Raising national insurance also breaks the manifesto pledge not to raise income tax or NI.
Manifestos don't mean a thing. There's always an excuse
That's what Nick Clegg thought and now his party can fit in a taxi (provided they wear masks).
I now think Labour will take poll leads in the next few months. This isn't wishful thinking on my part. The wheels are coming off the Johnson blunderbus.
After Black Wednesday there wasn't an instant Armageddon poll loss. It took months for it to seep through.
If they are serious about a 1% tax rise by way of national insurance then they will quickly get themselves into a mess. It heavily penalises the economically active, to essentially subsidise the economically inactive. Perhaps the labour party will start to honour its name.
Raising national insurance also breaks the manifesto pledge not to raise income tax or NI.
Manifestos don't mean a thing. There's always an excuse
That's what Nick Clegg thought and now his party can fit in a taxi (provided they wear masks).
Aye but that was their headline pledge. It would be like the Conservative Party deciding after 2019 that they didn't fancy Brexit after all.
Nobody voted Conservative primarily because they promised not to raise income tax or NI
I see Ms Kuennnsberg is saying what Cummimgs says matters. It couldn't because she is publicising her BBC interview with Cummings who wants to vent his spleen, could it..... Barnard Castle did for Cummings. The public is in no mood to pay attention to such a man whom they would not trust with their shopping.
Boris on the other hand..different kettle of fish altogether. He got Brexit done as he promised and those who support him are still very grateful.
“…the public is in no mood to pay attention to such a man…”
Big Dom had popped up again dropping his truth....
I think he’s actually reaching the point where he’s damaging the process of government
The line “I don’t buy this overwhelming the NHS argument” or a trade off between the economic and health costs of a lock down are *exactly* the debates a government should be having without someone leaking the sausage making process
Mr. B2, tolerate grains of sand in your shoes and soon you'll have a beach.
Mr. JohnL, jein. Labour broke manifesto pledges on both tax rises and tuition fees. Clegg's problem was a combination of his own tuition fees approach, forced upon him by the party, was way beyond a standard manifesto pledge and many of his supporters were outraged anyway that he had the temerity to actually seek power through office by a coalition with the eeeevil Tories. It wasn't helped by the Lib Dems odd inability to try and gain credit for the actions of the Coalition.
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
The Brexit he "got done" isn't done, and is a million miles away from what he "promised" it would look like.
You just don't get it. We are out of Europe. The ffing Eurolean block.is going to.help Boris by being nasty to the UK. The nastier the better.. especially around election times...That suits Boris very well indeed.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
Mr. B2, tolerate grains of sand in your shoes and soon you'll have a beach.
Mr. JohnL, jein. Labour broke manifesto pledges on both tax rises and tuition fees. Clegg's problem was a combination of his own tuition fees approach, forced upon him by the party, was way beyond a standard manifesto pledge and many of his supporters were outraged anyway that he had the temerity to actually seek power through office by a coalition with the eeeevil Tories. It wasn't helped by the Lib Dems odd inability to try and gain credit for the actions of the Coalition.
Peppa Pig has a lot to answer for. My eldest grandson in Sydney developed a middle-class English accent at the age of two. When his mother was pulled up for a routine traffic stop, he announced to the constable. "Leave this to me." in a perfect British accent.
It didn't last. After he started to school, he became Crocodile Dundee.
Ms Cyclefree, I agree with your header. It annoys the more-left wing, they can't understand it. It's so unfair!
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
We will have to disagree but I think you are very wrong. People don't trust Labour because of Corbyn and because of its pro brexit stance.. the left in the shape of Momentum are there in force behind the scenes as well as Corbyn.Voters know this. Hence the appaling showing in the polls.
I think this is right. Of course Lab needs to start opposing but take the sample size one. Of me. Lab could have all the brilliant policies in the world but I would not consider voting for them until and unless I knew the party was rid of its Corbyn faction.
Ok let's be fair. There of course can be some Corbynistas; there were still a few if not plenty of horrible Cons MPs when I voted for them. But they cannot be in any way relevant to the front bench or policy making.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
Because we need to fund social care mate
I agree. Just why attack a specific small group. Tax should be broad based, unavoidable and at low rates.
American kids watched so much Peppa Pig during the pandemic that they developed British accents and started regularly using British words like “holiday” instead of “vacation,” confusing their parents.
Where's the crime? It might be misleading to omit 100-odd pages or an ellipsis but at first glance, the two sentences fit well together and express more-or-less the same thought. Whether it is misleading depends on what Smith said in the rest of the book.
You think that? Seriously?
Fabricating a quote by pretending someone said or wrote something that they did not? Then passing it off as a real quote in their literal words? And that the fabricated quote representing what you think the book says is some sort of jusification?
In this case the second sentence is not even a complete sentence in the original.
There are three issues here:
1 is Murphy's absent integrity of process. It's all of a piece with how he (mis)handles evidence, and has done since I started occasionally reading him about 15 years ago. 2 is Murphy deceiving his followers by pretending that this is a quote. For an academic of sorts that is fatal. It would be embarrassing for a 12 year old blogger. 3 Is that he doesn't seem to think there is a problem.
It's the Johann Hari playbook revisited.
Yes, there should be an ellipsis. But the larger question is whether it distorts what Adam Smith wrote. At first glance, the two sentences express more-or-less the same idea. This is not the same as corpses cavorting round unbuilt palaces.
You cannot tell if the sentences express more-or-less the same idea out of their context. They may; or they be an expression of an argument that the writer then demolishes.
It's crass and sh*t. it'd be relatively easy to take (say) your posts on here and construct a hateful argument you'd never agree with from sentences you have made. There are over 8,500 posts to choose from, most containing multiple sentences.
Yes, that's the point. I am asking if concatenating the two sentences does express a meaning other than that intended by Adam Smith. Does it?
We cannot tell, as we don't know whether Adam Smith would have agreed with them being concatenated in that manner. He certainly did not write them together. Putting them together, and not making it clear they're from different passages, is essentially misrepresentation.
Where's the crime? It might be misleading to omit 100-odd pages or an ellipsis but at first glance, the two sentences fit well together and express more-or-less the same thought. Whether it is misleading depends on what Smith said in the rest of the book.
You think that? Seriously?
Fabricating a quote by pretending someone said or wrote something that they did not? Then passing it off as a real quote in their literal words? And that the fabricated quote representing what you think the book says is some sort of jusification?
In this case the second sentence is not even a complete sentence in the original.
There are three issues here:
1 is Murphy's absent integrity of process. It's all of a piece with how he (mis)handles evidence, and has done since I started occasionally reading him about 15 years ago. 2 is Murphy deceiving his followers by pretending that this is a quote. For an academic of sorts that is fatal. It would be embarrassing for a 12 year old blogger. 3 Is that he doesn't seem to think there is a problem.
It's the Johann Hari playbook revisited.
Yes, there should be an ellipsis. But the larger question is whether it distorts what Adam Smith wrote. At first glance, the two sentences express more-or-less the same idea. This is not the same as corpses cavorting round unbuilt palaces.
You cannot tell if the sentences express more-or-less the same idea out of their context. They may; or they be an expression of an argument that the writer then demolishes.
It's crass and sh*t. it'd be relatively easy to take (say) your posts on here and construct a hateful argument you'd never agree with from sentences you have made. There are over 8,500 posts to choose from, most containing multiple sentences.
Yes, that's the point. I am asking if concatenating the two sentences does express a meaning other than that intended by Adam Smith. Does it?
That's one of the points.
I don't know Adam Smith broadly enough to comment on the content. But I did check the quotes.
Concatenating one sentence with half of another sentence, then not being transparent about what has been done, is a far more basic failing - it is a lack of respect for integrity of process, and if you don't have that that you have nothing.
If it is a true representation of what Adam Smith said, then why deceive? Someone making a claim needs to be able to make a coherent checkableargument ie an intellectual audit trail.
Excoriating column from Hugo Rifkind in the Times this morning about the disdain BoZo has for the people who vote for him
I hate “nobody is interested in this”. I hate “the public doesn’t care”. I hate it because of what it coyly admits, which is “we, the government don’t care, because we don’t have to”. According to Johnson, he and Sunak “did look briefly at the idea” of dodging quarantine, before concluding that it wasn’t the right thing to do. Only that’s just brazen rubbish, isn’t it? They were going to do it because they could, and they changed their minds because they belatedly realised that the ubiquitous defence of “the public doesn’t care” suddenly wouldn’t work, because the public did.
A year and a half of “trusting the science” makes it too easy to forget that this is a government forged in populist fires. Loath as I am to rake over old wounds, it is worth remembering that before there was Covid, and lockdown, and data, and graphs, there was instead an unconcealed disdain for parliament, courts, expertise, conventions, expectations, watchdogs, regulators, the rule of law and basically anything else that stood in the way of the crassest possible interpretation of majority will. This is Johnsonism. It is doing whatever you want, whenever you can get away with it. And it will get ugly. Wait and see.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
The Brexit he "got done" isn't done, and is a million miles away from what he "promised" it would look like.
You just don't get it. We are out of Europe. The ffing Eurolean block.is going to.help Boris by being nasty to the UK. The nastier the better.. especially around election times...That suits Boris very well indeed.
Making the case, quite elegantly, that the big tech firms have backed the wrong horse here and that automated driver assistance has a much brighter future than full self-driving vehicles and if self-driving is ever achieved its more likely in increments from automated assistance rather than by a giant leap to fully automated vehicles.
Though one quote that caught my, as an example of being mistaken: Chris Urmson, Aurora chief executive, put it eloquently in 2015 when he was Google’s leading driverless engineer: “Conventional wisdom would say that we’ll just take these driver assistance systems and we’ll kind of push them and . . . over time, they’ll turn into self-driving cars,” he said. “Well, that’s like me saying that if I work really hard at jumping, one day I’ll be able to fly.”
Its worth remembering that Superman's ability to fly is because he is a good jumper. He is so good at jumping he can leap over tall buildings, which became the ability to fly.
So...
Does anybody remember speech recognition back in 1999? At that time, all the leading players were boasting of 99% accuracy, and IBM said their speech recognition business could be a leading driver of growth, etc.
But it turned out that 99% speech recognition was rubbish. Correcting that 1% took far longer than typing everything.
And so it stagnated until Google in about 2016-17. You see, it turned out you needed 99.95% accuracy before people would use it.
That's where we are with ADAS. It's really cool. But a system that throws it's hands in the air and says "YOU TAKE OVER NOW!" is pretty useless, as it means you have to pay attention all the time.
Yes, we had basically this level of self driving tech in the 1980s/1990s
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
Yes, rule number one of politics is that people do not vote for split parties. That was a problem for May in 2017, but not for the purged Johnsonite party of 2019. The odd backbencher opposed is tolerable, but widespread differences over major issues are not.
Starmer has to unify his party around a coherent vision that comprises more than "not the Tories". It was ten years after Kinnock purged Militant before Labour won power.
I think @Cyclefree makes valid points in the header, but none are deal-breakers. There are always core voters who would vote for a donkey in a party rosette, but that is never enough on its own.
Labour needs a clear and coherent vision of what it would look like in government, and a clear communicator of that vision. It has neither of those at the moment. I think SKS is a decent bloke and would probably run a good government, but that is not enough to get elected.
Blair was not just a great communicator (I saw him speak live in 1996 and he had real charisma then) but also had a ruthless back office spin machine that came out with punchy winning slogans and ideas.
Johnsons confused Populism is defeatable, but it does require Labour to get its act together. It just needs to figure out what being centre-left means in the modern world, and assemble that rainbow coalition within the party. I cannot see it happening at the next GE though. Labour are 8 years off regaining power.
Sumpers going down the ‘only hundreds not thousands have died directly of Covid and most would have died within a year anyway’ rabbit hole on R4 atm. How long before he’s pasting anti mask stickers on underground trains with Piers?
Tbf he seems to be largely on the same page as our PM if what Dom says is correct.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I did say public sector fatcats.
The trouble is, that won't bring very much in, as very few Public Sector fat cats exist, Most Civil Servants don't earn £60k per year when working,
Put DB schemes on income tax rates of 30% and 50%. It would raise a significant amount of money. Enough to not need to put taxes up on working people for social care.
I doubt you could target it that specifically.
If your issue is that the government has cravenly failed to reform senior public sector pensions you are correct. But why should private sector people with legacy DB schemes be penalised simply because of the savings mechanism that the company chose to use for my father’s pension?
Isn't a better solution to just add a social care levy to the income tax of people over retirement age, whatever percentage is necessary to plug the gap? would hit the wealthy but not affect those on low incomes.
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
Where's the crime? It might be misleading to omit 100-odd pages or an ellipsis but at first glance, the two sentences fit well together and express more-or-less the same thought. Whether it is misleading depends on what Smith said in the rest of the book.
You think that? Seriously?
Fabricating a quote by pretending someone said or wrote something that they did not? Then passing it off as a real quote in their literal words? And that the fabricated quote representing what you think the book says is some sort of jusification?
In this case the second sentence is not even a complete sentence in the original.
There are three issues here:
1 is Murphy's absent integrity of process. It's all of a piece with how he (mis)handles evidence, and has done since I started occasionally reading him about 15 years ago. 2 is Murphy deceiving his followers by pretending that this is a quote. For an academic of sorts that is fatal. It would be embarrassing for a 12 year old blogger. 3 Is that he doesn't seem to think there is a problem.
It's the Johann Hari playbook revisited.
I'm with you until the last sentence. It's a long, long way from Mr Hari's antics.
I disagree with that. One of Hari's failings was conflating quotes.
But one of his less publicised failings was not being able to handle basic data well. He often mis-categorised or exaggerated things in order to justify assaults on whoever he wanted to assault that day, and was careless with easily checkable facts.
It is the same problems underlying Twitter panics today. I have been looking at one this morning where data is presented about alleged danger to ICU capacity in the NHS, but the analysis is based on comparing Wave 1 with a conflation of Waves 2 and 3. So firstly the impact of vaccination is mainly ignored, and so is the capacity of ICUs which has significantly increased.
Perhaps if someone at the Indy had pulled Hari up in 2005 or 2006 on something that seemed 'small' he could have been retrained as a decent journalist, and a lot of people would not have been bullied by him.
Isn't a better solution to just add a social care levy to the income tax of people over retirement age, whatever percentage is necessary to plug the gap? would hit the wealthy but not affect those on low incomes.
Get rid of the useless NI. Raise income tax. Apply it across the board. If you want fairness, that is the most "fair" system.
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
I agree - but it is education to age 18, and vocational education, that the focus needs to be on. Not university.
Sumpers going down the ‘only hundreds not thousands have died directly of Covid and most would have died within a year anyway’ rabbit hole on R4 atm. How long before he’s pasting anti mask stickers on underground trains with Piers?
Tbf he seems to be largely on the same page as our PM if what Dom says is correct.
He is definetly not aiming for a political career!
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
Yes, NHS Superannuation is already not what it was. The caps on lifetime allowance and penal taxation of annual allowances have done for that, and the other terms of the schemes are significantly worse.
The real need is for all to have access to decent pension schemes, but the problem here is the very low interest rates that make annuities very poor value. If private schemes had the annuity rates that were normal 20 years ago, they would be much more viable.
The biggest killer of private savings has been low interest rates. It means that those saving have to find a better form of investment, and for many that has been real estate, thereby pushing up house prices via speculation.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
It's not. It averages the risk of you living to 100 with a sufficiently large pool of those who won't so that you have a guaranteed income for your remaining life, however long that proves to be. Defined contribution schemes mean that your beneficiaries may well get a lump sum of "unspent" pension money (provided you haven't bought an annuity with the capital) but also runs the risk that you run out of money before you die.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
What we need is some raging Trot to lead the Party and send the Labour figures through the roof. Now there's a thought. Why did the party never think of that before? What? We did try that before. So what happened?
Is Andy Burnham a "raging Trot?"
What we need is a competent leader with an actual personality like Andy Burnham
What we need is a competent leader with some actual policies like Andy Burnham
What we need is not to be to the right of the Tories on NHS pay. Funding Social Care etc as Andy Burnham isnt
What we need now is a unifying figure as leader like Andy Burnham
SKS fails on every single count.
If you cant see he is shit now Pete what will it take?
Andy Burnham is about as available as Clement Attlee. Politics is the art of the ------- (7 letters).
8?
Fuck. 8.
Bit early for the Christmas crossword.
Is it Copulate?
Copulate's 9 letters ;-)
Congress could work.
Copulate is eight letters!
Self-styled betting experts trying to work out how many letters there are in a word.
The joke was that the addition of the apostrophe S makes it 9
But I’m glad that you pay such attention to detail
I see Ms Kuennnsberg is saying what Cummimgs says matters. It couldn't because she is publicising her BBC interview with Cummings who wants to vent his spleen, could it..... Barnard Castle did for Cummings. The public is in no mood to pay attention to such a man whom they would not trust with their shopping.
Boris on the other hand..different kettle of fish altogether. He got Brexit done as he promised and those who support him are still very grateful.
I see Ms Kuennnsberg is saying what Cummimgs says matters. It couldn't because she is publicising her BBC interview with Cummings who wants to vent his spleen, could it..... Barnard Castle did for Cummings. The public is in no mood to pay attention to such a man whom they would not trust with their shopping.
Boris on the other hand..different kettle of fish altogether. He got Brexit done as he promised and those who support him are still very grateful.
Isn't a better solution to just add a social care levy to the income tax of people over retirement age, whatever percentage is necessary to plug the gap? would hit the wealthy but not affect those on low incomes.
Get rid of the useless NI. Raise income tax. Apply it across the board. If you want fairness, that is the most "fair" system.
It also gets rid of the tax on jobs
I agree. NI is unfair - it is particularly bad for penalising people with high salaries. If you can find a way of paying yourself by dividend through self employment you avoid a vast amount of tax.
Sumpers going down the ‘only hundreds not thousands have died directly of Covid and most would have died within a year anyway’ rabbit hole on R4 atm. How long before he’s pasting anti mask stickers on underground trains with Piers?
Tbf he seems to be largely on the same page as our PM if what Dom says is correct.
Mr. B2, tolerate grains of sand in your shoes and soon you'll have a beach.
Mr. JohnL, jein. Labour broke manifesto pledges on both tax rises and tuition fees. Clegg's problem was a combination of his own tuition fees approach, forced upon him by the party, was way beyond a standard manifesto pledge and many of his supporters were outraged anyway that he had the temerity to actually seek power through office by a coalition with the eeeevil Tories. It wasn't helped by the Lib Dems odd inability to try and gain credit for the actions of the Coalition.
When did Labour break tax pledges? The closest I can find is abolition of the 10p band but strictly speaking that does not count. Tuition fees, I'll grant you.
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
Daveyboy and I had a similar conversation yesterday about routes out of low-paid, low-esteem jobs. One of the side-effects of doing one's Family History, certainly mine, is to see how some parts climbed (were enabled to climb, perhaps) the educational and esteem trees and some weren't and didn't.
Isn't a better solution to just add a social care levy to the income tax of people over retirement age, whatever percentage is necessary to plug the gap? would hit the wealthy but not affect those on low incomes.
Get rid of the useless NI. Raise income tax. Apply it across the board. If you want fairness, that is the most "fair" system.
It also gets rid of the tax on jobs
I agree. NI is unfair - it is particularly bad for penalising people with high salaries. If you can find a way of paying yourself by dividend through self employment you avoid a vast amount of tax.
Once upon a time, before about 1981 as I recall, we had something called Investment Income surcharge which was an additional tax of about 15% that you paid on dividend income to reflect the fact that it did not bear NI. I have never really quite understood why it was abolished. No doubt the reasoning was that it would incentivise investment or something but it was a significant tax cut to the better off and it has distorted our tax system ever since.
A situation where earned income is taxed more heavily than investment income is just wrong. It always has been and always will be. The major attraction of combining NI and IT is that this anomaly is corrected.
Mr. B2, tolerate grains of sand in your shoes and soon you'll have a beach.
Mr. JohnL, jein. Labour broke manifesto pledges on both tax rises and tuition fees. Clegg's problem was a combination of his own tuition fees approach, forced upon him by the party, was way beyond a standard manifesto pledge and many of his supporters were outraged anyway that he had the temerity to actually seek power through office by a coalition with the eeeevil Tories. It wasn't helped by the Lib Dems odd inability to try and gain credit for the actions of the Coalition.
When did Labour break tax pledges? The closest I can find is abolition of the 10p band but strictly speaking that does not count. Tuition fees, I'll grant you.
Labour pledged not to raise income tax then raised national insurance repeatedly instead.
National insurance of course is 2p on income tax for anyone salaried not dodging taxes.
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
We will have to disagree but I think you are very wrong. People don't trust Labour because of Corbyn and because of its pro brexit stance.. the left in the shape of Momentum are there in force behind the scenes as well as Corbyn.Voters know this. Hence the appaling showing in the polls.
I think this is right. Of course Lab needs to start opposing but take the sample size one. Of me. Lab could have all the brilliant policies in the world but I would not consider voting for them until and unless I knew the party was rid of its Corbyn faction.
Ok let's be fair. There of course can be some Corbynistas; there were still a few if not plenty of horrible Cons MPs when I voted for them. But they cannot be in any way relevant to the front bench or policy making.
Thank goodness none of those horrible Con mps are on the front bench or involved in policy making.
Where's the crime? It might be misleading to omit 100-odd pages or an ellipsis but at first glance, the two sentences fit well together and express more-or-less the same thought. Whether it is misleading depends on what Smith said in the rest of the book.
You think that? Seriously?
Fabricating a quote by pretending someone said or wrote something that they did not? Then passing it off as a real quote in their literal words? And that the fabricated quote representing what you think the book says is some sort of jusification?
In this case the second sentence is not even a complete sentence in the original.
There are three issues here:
1 is Murphy's absent integrity of process. It's all of a piece with how he (mis)handles evidence, and has done since I started occasionally reading him about 15 years ago. 2 is Murphy deceiving his followers by pretending that this is a quote. For an academic of sorts that is fatal. It would be embarrassing for a 12 year old blogger. 3 Is that he doesn't seem to think there is a problem.
It's the Johann Hari playbook revisited.
Yes, there should be an ellipsis. But the larger question is whether it distorts what Adam Smith wrote. At first glance, the two sentences express more-or-less the same idea. This is not the same as corpses cavorting round unbuilt palaces.
You cannot tell if the sentences express more-or-less the same idea out of their context. They may; or they be an expression of an argument that the writer then demolishes.
It's crass and sh*t. it'd be relatively easy to take (say) your posts on here and construct a hateful argument you'd never agree with from sentences you have made. There are over 8,500 posts to choose from, most containing multiple sentences.
Yes, that's the point. I am asking if concatenating the two sentences does express a meaning other than that intended by Adam Smith. Does it?
We cannot tell, as we don't know whether Adam Smith would have agreed with them being concatenated in that manner. He certainly did not write them together. Putting them together, and not making it clear they're from different passages, is essentially misrepresentation.
Only if it misrepresents Smith's views. It is not contested that he did write both sentences. Yes, there should have been an ellipsis, or even two separate quotes, but if both quotes express the same idea, it seems pretty harmless. What *would* be misrepresentation is if Adam Smith went on to argue against these propositions. Does he?
Isn't a better solution to just add a social care levy to the income tax of people over retirement age, whatever percentage is necessary to plug the gap? would hit the wealthy but not affect those on low incomes.
F right off. I've paid my taxes all.my life.. why burden me with limited pension in retirement. Put 1 pc on vat the poorest will be affected the least.
I see Ms Kuennnsberg is saying what Cummimgs says matters. It couldn't because she is publicising her BBC interview with Cummings who wants to vent his spleen, could it..... Barnard Castle did for Cummings. The public is in no mood to pay attention to such a man whom they would not trust with their shopping.
Boris on the other hand..different kettle of fish altogether. He got Brexit done as he promised and those who support him are still very grateful.
I'm not interested in Cummings's opinion. I am interested in his facts. Some of the WhatsApp messages he is leaking make for appalling reading - Boris had to be told in harsh terms not to go see the Queen in case he kills her etc
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
Yes, NHS Superannuation is already not what it was. The caps on lifetime allowance and penal taxation of annual allowances have done for that, and the other terms of the schemes are significantly worse.
The real need is for all to have access to decent pension schemes, but the problem here is the very low interest rates that make annuities very poor value. If private schemes had the annuity rates that were normal 20 years ago, they would be much more viable.
The biggest killer of private savings has been low interest rates. It means that those saving have to find a better form of investment, and for many that has been real estate, thereby pushing up house prices via speculation.
I also think it wrong that the lifetime allowance is imposed fully on an individual and not a joint basis, especially when pension savings are the only asset I can think of that cannot be transferred at will between spouses.
The cuts to the lifetime allowance and low annuity rates are a strong disincentive not just to pension savings but also impact risk allocation. What’s the point in running risk within a SIPP if the taxman will take so much of the reward?
The Tories have turned SIPPs into an unattractive home for retirement savings, with such continual tinkering. Another piece of long term vandalism committed by successive I’m Alright Jack Chancellors.
Isn't a better solution to just add a social care levy to the income tax of people over retirement age, whatever percentage is necessary to plug the gap? would hit the wealthy but not affect those on low incomes.
Get rid of the useless NI. Raise income tax. Apply it across the board. If you want fairness, that is the most "fair" system.
It also gets rid of the tax on jobs
I agree. NI is unfair - it is particularly bad for penalising people with high salaries. If you can find a way of paying yourself by dividend through self employment you avoid a vast amount of tax.
Fixed that for you.
If anything NI is worse for those on low to middling salaries as at a marginal rate they get whacked for the full amount of all 3 of Employers NI, Employees NI and Income Tax.
Anyone who doesn't include Employers NI as Income Tax every bit as much as the others is either misleading or a complete and utter idiot.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
It's not. It averages the risk of you living to 100 with a sufficiently large pool of those who won't so that you have a guaranteed income for your remaining life, however long that proves to be. Defined contribution schemes mean that your beneficiaries may well get a lump sum of "unspent" pension money (provided you haven't bought an annuity with the capital) but also runs the risk that you run out of money before you die.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
Isnt this pooling of risk ultimately what the state pension is, though? It has risen to the point where it provides a decent basic income every month in retirement.
From my point of view it just didn't seem like a particularly good deal, paying hundreds of pounds every month in to a scheme which may never pay anything out if I die prematurely.
Above all, I had a sneaking suspicion that the money will never materialise because of political interference.
What we need is some raging Trot to lead the Party and send the Labour figures through the roof. Now there's a thought. Why did the party never think of that before? What? We did try that before. So what happened?
Is Andy Burnham a "raging Trot?"
What we need is a competent leader with an actual personality like Andy Burnham
What we need is a competent leader with some actual policies like Andy Burnham
What we need is not to be to the right of the Tories on NHS pay. Funding Social Care etc as Andy Burnham isnt
What we need now is a unifying figure as leader like Andy Burnham
SKS fails on every single count.
If you cant see he is shit now Pete what will it take?
Andy Burnham is about as available as Clement Attlee. Politics is the art of the ------- (7 letters).
8?
Fuck. 8.
Bit early for the Christmas crossword.
Is it Copulate?
Copulate's 9 letters ;-)
Congress could work.
Copulate is eight letters!
Self-styled betting experts trying to work out how many letters there are in a word.
The joke was that the addition of the apostrophe S makes it 9
But I’m glad that you pay such attention to detail
I feel like I'm in at the birth of a new PB meme. Members will introduce themselves with the password "How many letters in copulate?" and anyone who answers 8 betrays himself as an outsider.
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
Sure, education is a great form of upward social mobility, but times change. In the 1940s the percentage of blue collar to white collar workers was much higher. The deindustrialisation of Britain and move to white collar service industries has changed that ratio. How much further could it go, and indeed would it be wise to go? The upward social mobility of the Fifties to Eighties has probably topped out.
The other issue is that a fair society is not one based on a pseudo-Darwinian meritocracy, but one that offers a decent life for all, even those lacking in attributes and skills. Dustbin men and cleaners should be equal citizens, not an invisible underclass.
Isn't a better solution to just add a social care levy to the income tax of people over retirement age, whatever percentage is necessary to plug the gap? would hit the wealthy but not affect those on low incomes.
F right off. I've paid my taxes all.my life.. why burden me with limited pension in retirement. Put 1 pc on vat the poorest will be affected the least.
Um, Vat is a regressive tax and would hit the poorest hardest.
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
Removing the lunatics the revolutionaries and the racists removes one of the barriers that stops people voting for the party.
Mr. JohnL, I believe they increased the top rate of tax or instituted the new higher level, but their defence (whatever the change was) was that the legislation was passed during one Parliament but would only become active during the next.
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
Removing the lunatics the revolutionaries and the racists removes one of the barriers that stops people voting for the party.
Isn't a better solution to just add a social care levy to the income tax of people over retirement age, whatever percentage is necessary to plug the gap? would hit the wealthy but not affect those on low incomes.
F right off. I've paid my taxes all.my life.. why burden me with limited pension in retirement. Put 1 pc on vat the poorest will be affected the least.
Isn't a better solution to just add a social care levy to the income tax of people over retirement age, whatever percentage is necessary to plug the gap? would hit the wealthy but not affect those on low incomes.
F right off. I've paid my taxes all.my life.. why burden me with limited pension in retirement. Put 1 pc on vat the poorest will be affected the least.
Our current pension system is a pyramid scheme that relies on more workers than pensioners. You are a big supporter of reducing immigration and as such the pyramid scheme will fail.
Thus the only option is more tax. This is what you voted for. Deal with it.
Quite clear already from this thread that taxes that hit the individual poster hardest are unfair, and taxes that dont hit that poster are fair. Good luck to the government!
Isn't a better solution to just add a social care levy to the income tax of people over retirement age, whatever percentage is necessary to plug the gap? would hit the wealthy but not affect those on low incomes.
Get rid of the useless NI. Raise income tax. Apply it across the board. If you want fairness, that is the most "fair" system.
It also gets rid of the tax on jobs
I agree. NI is unfair - it is particularly bad for penalising people with high salaries. If you can find a way of paying yourself by dividend through self employment you avoid a vast amount of tax.
Thankfully this govt has really clamped down on tax dodgers by properly applying IR35. Shamefully they allowed many tax dodgers who used EBTs to get away with it. They should have stuck to their guns and gone for all and not the relatively recent users only.
Isn't a better solution to just add a social care levy to the income tax of people over retirement age, whatever percentage is necessary to plug the gap? would hit the wealthy but not affect those on low incomes.
F right off. I've paid my taxes all.my life.. why burden me with limited pension in retirement. Put 1 pc on vat the poorest will be affected the least.
Our current pension system is a pyramid scheme that relies on more workers than pensioners. You are a big supporter of reducing immigration and as such the pyramid scheme will fail.
Thus the only option is more tax. This is what you voted for. Deal with it.
Not really.
Bringing in people without a visa so they can live on minimum wage and claim housing benefits and universal credit etc to supplement their income while needing to spend to provide infrastructure etc to them and in turn eventually a pension for them too is not cost-effective.
Bringing in people who can earn high salaries, where they can pay high taxes, is cost effective - and they can get a visa.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
It's not. It averages the risk of you living to 100 with a sufficiently large pool of those who won't so that you have a guaranteed income for your remaining life, however long that proves to be. Defined contribution schemes mean that your beneficiaries may well get a lump sum of "unspent" pension money (provided you haven't bought an annuity with the capital) but also runs the risk that you run out of money before you die.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
Isnt this pooling of risk ultimately what the state pension is, though? It has risen to the point where it provides a decent basic income every month in retirement.
From my point of view it just didn't seem like a particularly good deal, paying hundreds of pounds every month in to a scheme which may never pay anything out if I die prematurely.
Above all, I had a sneaking suspicion that the money will never materialise because of political interference.
Not really because the State Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Those who delude themselves into thinking that they paid for it by paying NI conveniently ignore the fact that they elected governments who spent their contributions rather than saving them. They spent those contributions in part paying the previous generation's pensions for which no provision had been paid either. The State Pension is paid by the current workforce, not the previous one.
I was involved in a case a few years ago now with a fund manager who was accused of mis selling pensions to people encouraged to come out of a final salary scheme. Several things became apparent. For high net worth individuals pensions are largely an Inheritance tax dodge. There is no real intention of spending the pension fund, it is simply a tax free way of transferring large lump sums to the next generation.
Secondly, those who have the benefit of final salary indexed linked pensions have something genuinely platinum plated which requires exceptional performance to achieve in your own fund. Public sector employees who have the benefit of such schemes seriously underestimate what those rights are worth when comparing their package with a private sector fixed contribution equivalent. The current generation of pensioners are likely to be the richest ever. The rights they have been given simply cannot be funded in a normal working life.
Isn't a better solution to just add a social care levy to the income tax of people over retirement age, whatever percentage is necessary to plug the gap? would hit the wealthy but not affect those on low incomes.
F right off. I've paid my taxes all.my life.. why burden me with limited pension in retirement. Put 1 pc on vat the poorest will be affected the least.
Our current pension system is a pyramid scheme that relies on more workers than pensioners. You are a big supporter of reducing immigration and as such the pyramid scheme will fail.
Thus the only option is more tax. This is what you voted for. Deal with it.
No, the other option is to put up taxes on DB pension income and income from non-equity investments such as property. Rates of 30% and 50% on both of these with an annual landlord surcharge would raise the £10bn the chancellor says he needs for social care. It would predominantly come from people over the age of 60 as it would target pension and property wealth.
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
Sure, education is a great form of upward social mobility, but times change. In the 1940s the percentage of blue collar to white collar workers was much higher. The deindustrialisation of Britain and move to white collar service industries has changed that ratio. How much further could it go, and indeed would it be wise to go? The upward social mobility of the Fifties to Eighties has probably topped out.
The other issue is that a fair society is not one based on a pseudo-Darwinian meritocracy, but one that offers a decent life for all, even those lacking in attributes and skills. Dustbin men and cleaners should be equal citizens, not an invisible underclass.
It's nothing to do with a meritocracy. If you educate someone to do just one thing, and those jobs go, they've got very little chance of getting other jobs. Give someone a good education and they can fill many potential roles. That's good for society, and for them personally, as they may find a role they are happiest in. Outside things like the NHS, there are few jobs for life nowadays.
I went to university to study geological engineering; I came out working in computer software. That could only happen because of a comprehensive education given to me by school and, to a large degree, by my parents and family.
I've got a little mantra about jobs: if it is a job that needs doing, and I wouldn't want to do it myself, then I should respect the person doing the job. Dustbin men is an example; so are nurses (as I am not fond of bodily excretions) or sewerage workers. For this reason, I try to loo favourably on people who do these jobs as there's no f'ing way I'd do them, yet they need doing.
Other jobs, such as bankers, builders, mechanics, etc: if I was qualified to do them, I'd have no problem doing them. I don't disrespect them, but I don't quite hold them in the same regard.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
It's not. It averages the risk of you living to 100 with a sufficiently large pool of those who won't so that you have a guaranteed income for your remaining life, however long that proves to be. Defined contribution schemes mean that your beneficiaries may well get a lump sum of "unspent" pension money (provided you haven't bought an annuity with the capital) but also runs the risk that you run out of money before you die.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
Isnt this pooling of risk ultimately what the state pension is, though? It has risen to the point where it provides a decent basic income every month in retirement.
From my point of view it just didn't seem like a particularly good deal, paying hundreds of pounds every month in to a scheme which may never pay anything out if I die prematurely.
Above all, I had a sneaking suspicion that the money will never materialise because of political interference.
Not really because the State Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Those who delude themselves into thinking that they paid for it by paying NI conveniently ignore the fact that they elected governments who spent their contributions rather than saving them. They spent those contributions in part paying the previous generation's pensions for which no provision had been paid either. The State Pension is paid by the current workforce, not the previous one.
I was involved in a case a few years ago now with a fund manager who was accused of mis selling pensions to people encouraged to come out of a final salary scheme. Several things became apparent. For high net worth individuals pensions are largely an Inheritance tax dodge. There is no real intention of spending the pension fund, it is simply a tax free way of transferring large lump sums to the next generation.
Secondly, those who have the benefit of final salary indexed linked pensions have something genuinely platinum plated which requires exceptional performance to achieve in your own fund. Public sector employees who have the benefit of such schemes seriously underestimate what those rights are worth when comparing their package with a private sector fixed contribution equivalent. The current generation of pensioners are likely to be the richest ever. The rights they have been given simply cannot be funded in a normal working life.
Which leads me back to my original point - tax DB pension income at rates of 30% and 50%. It would be impossible to avoid and would raise significant money for social care primarily from the people who will need it.
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
Removing the lunatics the revolutionaries and the racists removes one of the barriers that stops people voting for the party.
A lot of the Twitter revolutionaries of the Left that so anger the Culture Warrirs of the Right are not in the Labour Party in the first place. It makes it difficult to purge them.
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
Yes, rule number one of politics is that people do not vote for split parties. That was a problem for May in 2017, but not for the purged Johnsonite party of 2019. The odd backbencher opposed is tolerable, but widespread differences over major issues are not.
Starmer has to unify his party around a coherent vision that comprises more than "not the Tories". It was ten years after Kinnock purged Militant before Labour won power.
I think @Cyclefree makes valid points in the header, but none are deal-breakers. There are always core voters who would vote for a donkey in a party rosette, but that is never enough on its own.
Labour needs a clear and coherent vision of what it would look like in government, and a clear communicator of that vision. It has neither of those at the moment. I think SKS is a decent bloke and would probably run a good government, but that is not enough to get elected.
Blair was not just a great communicator (I saw him speak live in 1996 and he had real charisma then) but also had a ruthless back office spin machine that came out with punchy winning slogans and ideas.
Johnsons confused Populism is defeatable, but it does require Labour to get its act together. It just needs to figure out what being centre-left means in the modern world, and assemble that rainbow coalition within the party. I cannot see it happening at the next GE though. Labour are 8 years off regaining power.
This is right. There are different elements to governing and getting elected. The Big Choices (policy), trust and competence are three big ones.
At the moment there are central issues of Big Choices that Labour is unclear about. The UK union, medium and long term Brexit, social care, public finances.
Issues like Covid are less policy and more about general trust and competence, as no-one knows what the big policy should be in terms of divergent choices.
But Labour is not working well at any of the three. Not only do we not know the Brexit policy (which might be anything from 'rejoin' to 'pirate buccaneer UK') we don't really know if the left, the anti-semites, the 'never kissed Tory scum' tendency have been finally put back in their cave. And we don't know if they have a potential cabinet even as good as the present lot.
And, as a Labour majority alliance must involve the SNP, we must know but don't know where they stand on the UK.
To take a little test case: What is Labour's policy on the NI/GB/EU border/single market dilemma? I don't know. Does anyone?
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
Hugely true. This is the real tragedy of the "fuck education" policy of this government - instead of trying to transform the failings of the past it is doubling down. School failing? Slash its budget? Kids struggling? Let them starve? Parents not showing interest in education? Tell the the exams are too easy and the teachers are cheating them.
Literally the only way to lift people out of poverty long term is through education. It shouldn't matter that you grew up with nothing because the state will give you a top quality education and all the support you need to stick with it. Except that it doesn't do either. A starter for 10 is the crumbling school buildings in so many inner city schools. There had been a transformation in school facilities under Labour, axed without mercy by the Tories. Its back to the "why spend money on future criminals" mentality.
"Some people look down on manual workers. But if you car breaks down at night in the middle of nowhere, the man from the AA is the most important person in your universe."
Likewise, when our washing machine and oven broke down at the same time, we greeted the appliance repair man with more deference than we would the Queen.
If fairness has anything to do with it, rises with in NI or income tax should not now strike people as fair. Only a wealth tax could seem fair. Post pandemic, the wealth of the wealthiest has increased disproportionately. (Billionaires really have done ever so well.) Pre-pandemic, the median income taxpayer had a taxable income of £22,000 p.a.; the top 1% of them at least £160,000 p.a.; the top 0.1%, £650,000. And not only do the very few have so much more than enough, the pandemic has led many into poverty (austerity already having ensured they were deprived of adequate services).
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
It's not. It averages the risk of you living to 100 with a sufficiently large pool of those who won't so that you have a guaranteed income for your remaining life, however long that proves to be. Defined contribution schemes mean that your beneficiaries may well get a lump sum of "unspent" pension money (provided you haven't bought an annuity with the capital) but also runs the risk that you run out of money before you die.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
Isnt this pooling of risk ultimately what the state pension is, though? It has risen to the point where it provides a decent basic income every month in retirement.
From my point of view it just didn't seem like a particularly good deal, paying hundreds of pounds every month in to a scheme which may never pay anything out if I die prematurely.
Above all, I had a sneaking suspicion that the money will never materialise because of political interference.
Not really because the State Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Those who delude themselves into thinking that they paid for it by paying NI conveniently ignore the fact that they elected governments who spent their contributions rather than saving them. They spent those contributions in part paying the previous generation's pensions for which no provision had been paid either. The State Pension is paid by the current workforce, not the previous one.
I was involved in a case a few years ago now with a fund manager who was accused of mis selling pensions to people encouraged to come out of a final salary scheme. Several things became apparent. For high net worth individuals pensions are largely an Inheritance tax dodge. There is no real intention of spending the pension fund, it is simply a tax free way of transferring large lump sums to the next generation.
Secondly, those who have the benefit of final salary indexed linked pensions have something genuinely platinum plated which requires exceptional performance to achieve in your own fund. Public sector employees who have the benefit of such schemes seriously underestimate what those rights are worth when comparing their package with a private sector fixed contribution equivalent. The current generation of pensioners are likely to be the richest ever. The rights they have been given simply cannot be funded in a normal working life.
Which leads me back to my original point - tax DB pension income at rates of 30% and 50%. It would be impossible to avoid and would raise significant money for social care primarily from the people who will need it.
It's morally justifiable. It's economically justifiable. It's political suicide and will never happen.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
Sumpers going down the ‘only hundreds not thousands have died directly of Covid and most would have died within a year anyway’ rabbit hole on R4 atm. How long before he’s pasting anti mask stickers on underground trains with Piers?
Tbf he seems to be largely on the same page as our PM if what Dom says is correct.
Over-80s would have died anyway. Lord Sumption, Boris and Harold Shipman. What an unholy trio.
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
Removing the lunatics the revolutionaries and the racists removes one of the barriers that stops people voting for the party.
Oh, he’s off again.
I'm responding to the debate about whether or not "Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did"
I think he does because I'd like a functioning opposition. You think he dioesn't because you wouldn't like a functioning opposition.
"Some people look down on manual workers. But if you car breaks down at night in the middle of nowhere, the man from the AA is the most important person in your universe."
Likewise, when our washing machine and oven broke down at the same time, we greeted the appliance repair man with more deference than we would the Queen.
The Queen trained as a mechanic in the war. If she turned up to fix your car after aforesaid breakdown does that make her more important than the most important person in the universe?
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
Yes, NHS Superannuation is already not what it was. The caps on lifetime allowance and penal taxation of annual allowances have done for that, and the other terms of the schemes are significantly worse.
The real need is for all to have access to decent pension schemes, but the problem here is the very low interest rates that make annuities very poor value. If private schemes had the annuity rates that were normal 20 years ago, they would be much more viable.
The biggest killer of private savings has been low interest rates. It means that those saving have to find a better form of investment, and for many that has been real estate, thereby pushing up house prices via speculation.
I also think it wrong that the lifetime allowance is imposed fully on an individual and not a joint basis, especially when pension savings are the only asset I can think of that cannot be transferred at will between spouses.
The cuts to the lifetime allowance and low annuity rates are a strong disincentive not just to pension savings but also impact risk allocation. What’s the point in running risk within a SIPP if the taxman will take so much of the reward?
The Tories have turned SIPPs into an unattractive home for retirement savings, with such continual tinkering. Another piece of long term vandalism committed by successive I’m Alright Jack Chancellors.
The fundamental problem of saving in a pension pot is that it creates a large pool of money for greedy Chancellors to target. One that the owner cannot spend until retirement, but that the government wishes to do so.
There needs to be a system that encourages savings over consumption in order to have a more sustainable economy, from both environmental and balance of payments perspectives. We have instead a series of governments that punish thrift.
Isn't a better solution to just add a social care levy to the income tax of people over retirement age, whatever percentage is necessary to plug the gap? would hit the wealthy but not affect those on low incomes.
F right off. I've paid my taxes all.my life.. why burden me with limited pension in retirement. Put 1 pc on vat the poorest will be affected the least.
We don’t have enough workers coming in to fund your pension so you’re going to have to start paying for it yourself. The idea that 1% on VAT will effect the poorest the least is insane,
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
It's not. It averages the risk of you living to 100 with a sufficiently large pool of those who won't so that you have a guaranteed income for your remaining life, however long that proves to be. Defined contribution schemes mean that your beneficiaries may well get a lump sum of "unspent" pension money (provided you haven't bought an annuity with the capital) but also runs the risk that you run out of money before you die.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
Isnt this pooling of risk ultimately what the state pension is, though? It has risen to the point where it provides a decent basic income every month in retirement.
From my point of view it just didn't seem like a particularly good deal, paying hundreds of pounds every month in to a scheme which may never pay anything out if I die prematurely.
Above all, I had a sneaking suspicion that the money will never materialise because of political interference.
Not really because the State Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Those who delude themselves into thinking that they paid for it by paying NI conveniently ignore the fact that they elected governments who spent their contributions rather than saving them. They spent those contributions in part paying the previous generation's pensions for which no provision had been paid either. The State Pension is paid by the current workforce, not the previous one.
I was involved in a case a few years ago now with a fund manager who was accused of mis selling pensions to people encouraged to come out of a final salary scheme. Several things became apparent. For high net worth individuals pensions are largely an Inheritance tax dodge. There is no real intention of spending the pension fund, it is simply a tax free way of transferring large lump sums to the next generation.
Secondly, those who have the benefit of final salary indexed linked pensions have something genuinely platinum plated which requires exceptional performance to achieve in your own fund. Public sector employees who have the benefit of such schemes seriously underestimate what those rights are worth when comparing their package with a private sector fixed contribution equivalent. The current generation of pensioners are likely to be the richest ever. The rights they have been given simply cannot be funded in a normal working life.
Which leads me back to my original point - tax DB pension income at rates of 30% and 50%. It would be impossible to avoid and would raise significant money for social care primarily from the people who will need it.
It's morally justifiable. It's economically justifiable. It's political suicide and will never happen.
Nah, it's the same as the WASPI women. The general public will shrug their shoulders and dream of being in a defined benefit scheme even with higher tax rates on the other side. The people affected will shout and scream but once they stop the tax rates will have gone up and they'll simply have to deal with it. They'll still have significant retirement income well above most in a DC scheme or reliant on the state pension.
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
Yes, rule number one of politics is that people do not vote for split parties. That was a problem for May in 2017, but not for the purged Johnsonite party of 2019. The odd backbencher opposed is tolerable, but widespread differences over major issues are not.
Starmer has to unify his party around a coherent vision that comprises more than "not the Tories". It was ten years after Kinnock purged Militant before Labour won power.
I think @Cyclefree makes valid points in the header, but none are deal-breakers. There are always core voters who would vote for a donkey in a party rosette, but that is never enough on its own.
Labour needs a clear and coherent vision of what it would look like in government, and a clear communicator of that vision. It has neither of those at the moment. I think SKS is a decent bloke and would probably run a good government, but that is not enough to get elected.
Blair was not just a great communicator (I saw him speak live in 1996 and he had real charisma then) but also had a ruthless back office spin machine that came out with punchy winning slogans and ideas.
Johnsons confused Populism is defeatable, but it does require Labour to get its act together. It just needs to figure out what being centre-left means in the modern world, and assemble that rainbow coalition within the party. I cannot see it happening at the next GE though. Labour are 8 years off regaining power.
This is right. There are different elements to governing and getting elected. The Big Choices (policy), trust and competence are three big ones.
At the moment there are central issues of Big Choices that Labour is unclear about. The UK union, medium and long term Brexit, social care, public finances.
Issues like Covid are less policy and more about general trust and competence, as no-one knows what the big policy should be in terms of divergent choices.
But Labour is not working well at any of the three. Not only do we not know the Brexit policy (which might be anything from 'rejoin' to 'pirate buccaneer UK') we don't really know if the left, the anti-semites, the 'never kissed Tory scum' tendency have been finally put back in their cave. And we don't know if they have a potential cabinet even as good as the present lot.
And, as a Labour majority alliance must involve the SNP, we must know but don't know where they stand on the UK.
To take a little test case: What is Labour's policy on the NI/GB/EU border/single market dilemma? I don't know. Does anyone?
I believe the Labour Party supports aligning to SM standards, which largely resolves the Irish border issue, and helps at Dover too.
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
Hugely true. This is the real tragedy of the "fuck education" policy of this government - instead of trying to transform the failings of the past it is doubling down. School failing? Slash its budget? Kids struggling? Let them starve? Parents not showing interest in education? Tell the the exams are too easy and the teachers are cheating them.
Literally the only way to lift people out of poverty long term is through education. It shouldn't matter that you grew up with nothing because the state will give you a top quality education and all the support you need to stick with it. Except that it doesn't do either. A starter for 10 is the crumbling school buildings in so many inner city schools. There had been a transformation in school facilities under Labour, axed without mercy by the Tories. Its back to the "why spend money on future criminals" mentality.
I don't think crumbling school buildings have that much to do with it. Certainly Blair's governments spent billions on school buildings and I don't think it improved standards at the bottom end that much.
It's parents and parenting - a societal problem. Education has to be central; schools help, but so many homes don't even have books in them. I'd like to see more funding go to adult literacy and numeracy - not middle-class writing courses, but giving adults who missed out the basic skills they need, so they can teach their kids in turn.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
It's not. It averages the risk of you living to 100 with a sufficiently large pool of those who won't so that you have a guaranteed income for your remaining life, however long that proves to be. Defined contribution schemes mean that your beneficiaries may well get a lump sum of "unspent" pension money (provided you haven't bought an annuity with the capital) but also runs the risk that you run out of money before you die.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
Isnt this pooling of risk ultimately what the state pension is, though? It has risen to the point where it provides a decent basic income every month in retirement.
From my point of view it just didn't seem like a particularly good deal, paying hundreds of pounds every month in to a scheme which may never pay anything out if I die prematurely.
Above all, I had a sneaking suspicion that the money will never materialise because of political interference.
Not really because the State Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Those who delude themselves into thinking that they paid for it by paying NI conveniently ignore the fact that they elected governments who spent their contributions rather than saving them. They spent those contributions in part paying the previous generation's pensions for which no provision had been paid either. The State Pension is paid by the current workforce, not the previous one.
I was involved in a case a few years ago now with a fund manager who was accused of mis selling pensions to people encouraged to come out of a final salary scheme. Several things became apparent. For high net worth individuals pensions are largely an Inheritance tax dodge. There is no real intention of spending the pension fund, it is simply a tax free way of transferring large lump sums to the next generation.
Secondly, those who have the benefit of final salary indexed linked pensions have something genuinely platinum plated which requires exceptional performance to achieve in your own fund. Public sector employees who have the benefit of such schemes seriously underestimate what those rights are worth when comparing their package with a private sector fixed contribution equivalent. The current generation of pensioners are likely to be the richest ever. The rights they have been given simply cannot be funded in a normal working life.
I will have to accept what you are saying; I built up enough contributing years to make the DB element of my pension to be significant, I will wait and see how much of it materialises and how useful it is in my retirement, which is still many years away.
I do think however that this all amounts to a decent argument to tax the well off elderly population - rather than just recipients of certain pension schemes.
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
Hugely true. This is the real tragedy of the "fuck education" policy of this government - instead of trying to transform the failings of the past it is doubling down. School failing? Slash its budget? Kids struggling? Let them starve? Parents not showing interest in education? Tell the the exams are too easy and the teachers are cheating them.
Literally the only way to lift people out of poverty long term is through education. It shouldn't matter that you grew up with nothing because the state will give you a top quality education and all the support you need to stick with it. Except that it doesn't do either. A starter for 10 is the crumbling school buildings in so many inner city schools. There had been a transformation in school facilities under Labour, axed without mercy by the Tories. Its back to the "why spend money on future criminals" mentality.
I don't think crumbling school buildings have that much to do with it. Certainly Blair's governments spent billions on school buildings and I don't think it improved standards at the bottom end that much.
It's parents and parenting - a societal problem. Education has to be central; schools help, but so many homes don't even have books in them. I'd like to see more funding go to adult literacy and numeracy - not middle-class writing courses, but giving adults who missed out the basic skills they need, so they can teach their kids in turn.
Realistically the state can't close the gap between those kids with parents who read with them at home and those that don't. It can try, but the gap is immense.
Quite clear already from this thread that taxes that hit the individual poster hardest are unfair, and taxes that dont hit that poster are fair. Good luck to the government!
Old naval wisdom-
If you can't stand a joke, you shouldn't have joined.
More generally, people have voted for maximum spending on them now and any taxes that fall on others... Forever, basically. Including under the Blessed Margaret.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
It's not. It averages the risk of you living to 100 with a sufficiently large pool of those who won't so that you have a guaranteed income for your remaining life, however long that proves to be. Defined contribution schemes mean that your beneficiaries may well get a lump sum of "unspent" pension money (provided you haven't bought an annuity with the capital) but also runs the risk that you run out of money before you die.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
Isnt this pooling of risk ultimately what the state pension is, though? It has risen to the point where it provides a decent basic income every month in retirement.
From my point of view it just didn't seem like a particularly good deal, paying hundreds of pounds every month in to a scheme which may never pay anything out if I die prematurely.
Above all, I had a sneaking suspicion that the money will never materialise because of political interference.
Not really because the State Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Those who delude themselves into thinking that they paid for it by paying NI conveniently ignore the fact that they elected governments who spent their contributions rather than saving them. They spent those contributions in part paying the previous generation's pensions for which no provision had been paid either. The State Pension is paid by the current workforce, not the previous one.
I was involved in a case a few years ago now with a fund manager who was accused of mis selling pensions to people encouraged to come out of a final salary scheme. Several things became apparent. For high net worth individuals pensions are largely an Inheritance tax dodge. There is no real intention of spending the pension fund, it is simply a tax free way of transferring large lump sums to the next generation.
Secondly, those who have the benefit of final salary indexed linked pensions have something genuinely platinum plated which requires exceptional performance to achieve in your own fund. Public sector employees who have the benefit of such schemes seriously underestimate what those rights are worth when comparing their package with a private sector fixed contribution equivalent. The current generation of pensioners are likely to be the richest ever. The rights they have been given simply cannot be funded in a normal working life.
The current generation of pensioners also includes the poor. The full state pension is less than the minimum wage, and it is misleading to look at it simply as pin money for those with generous pensions. There might be a case for means-testing it above a certain high level, though in practice it would probably be too easy to game the system.
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
Hugely true. This is the real tragedy of the "fuck education" policy of this government - instead of trying to transform the failings of the past it is doubling down. School failing? Slash its budget? Kids struggling? Let them starve? Parents not showing interest in education? Tell the the exams are too easy and the teachers are cheating them.
Literally the only way to lift people out of poverty long term is through education. It shouldn't matter that you grew up with nothing because the state will give you a top quality education and all the support you need to stick with it. Except that it doesn't do either. A starter for 10 is the crumbling school buildings in so many inner city schools. There had been a transformation in school facilities under Labour, axed without mercy by the Tories. Its back to the "why spend money on future criminals" mentality.
I don't think crumbling school buildings have that much to do with it. Certainly Blair's governments spent billions on school buildings and I don't think it improved standards at the bottom end that much.
It's parents and parenting - a societal problem. Education has to be central; schools help, but so many homes don't even have books in them. I'd like to see more funding go to adult literacy and numeracy - not middle-class writing courses, but giving adults who missed out the basic skills they need, so they can teach their kids in turn.
Realistically the state can't close the gap between those kids with parents who read with them at home and those that don't. It can try, but the gap is immense.
Get some sleep Phillip. I'll take over from you for a while
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
Yes, rule number one of politics is that people do not vote for split parties. That was a problem for May in 2017, but not for the purged Johnsonite party of 2019. The odd backbencher opposed is tolerable, but widespread differences over major issues are not.
Starmer has to unify his party around a coherent vision that comprises more than "not the Tories". It was ten years after Kinnock purged Militant before Labour won power.
I think @Cyclefree makes valid points in the header, but none are deal-breakers. There are always core voters who would vote for a donkey in a party rosette, but that is never enough on its own.
Labour needs a clear and coherent vision of what it would look like in government, and a clear communicator of that vision. It has neither of those at the moment. I think SKS is a decent bloke and would probably run a good government, but that is not enough to get elected.
Blair was not just a great communicator (I saw him speak live in 1996 and he had real charisma then) but also had a ruthless back office spin machine that came out with punchy winning slogans and ideas.
Johnsons confused Populism is defeatable, but it does require Labour to get its act together. It just needs to figure out what being centre-left means in the modern world, and assemble that rainbow coalition within the party. I cannot see it happening at the next GE though. Labour are 8 years off regaining power.
This is right. There are different elements to governing and getting elected. The Big Choices (policy), trust and competence are three big ones.
At the moment there are central issues of Big Choices that Labour is unclear about. The UK union, medium and long term Brexit, social care, public finances.
Issues like Covid are less policy and more about general trust and competence, as no-one knows what the big policy should be in terms of divergent choices.
But Labour is not working well at any of the three. Not only do we not know the Brexit policy (which might be anything from 'rejoin' to 'pirate buccaneer UK') we don't really know if the left, the anti-semites, the 'never kissed Tory scum' tendency have been finally put back in their cave. And we don't know if they have a potential cabinet even as good as the present lot.
And, as a Labour majority alliance must involve the SNP, we must know but don't know where they stand on the UK.
To take a little test case: What is Labour's policy on the NI/GB/EU border/single market dilemma? I don't know. Does anyone?
In fairness, we do know where Labour stand on the UK: they are Unionists. Anas, Baillie, Murray et al have been quite clear on that point.
What is less clear is where SLab’s voters stand on the issue of the Union. It still looks like approx 40% of them are pro-independence, about 40% are hardline Unionists, and about 20% don’t care.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
Yes, NHS Superannuation is already not what it was. The caps on lifetime allowance and penal taxation of annual allowances have done for that, and the other terms of the schemes are significantly worse.
The real need is for all to have access to decent pension schemes, but the problem here is the very low interest rates that make annuities very poor value. If private schemes had the annuity rates that were normal 20 years ago, they would be much more viable.
The biggest killer of private savings has been low interest rates. It means that those saving have to find a better form of investment, and for many that has been real estate, thereby pushing up house prices via speculation.
I also think it wrong that the lifetime allowance is imposed fully on an individual and not a joint basis, especially when pension savings are the only asset I can think of that cannot be transferred at will between spouses.
The cuts to the lifetime allowance and low annuity rates are a strong disincentive not just to pension savings but also impact risk allocation. What’s the point in running risk within a SIPP if the taxman will take so much of the reward?
The Tories have turned SIPPs into an unattractive home for retirement savings, with such continual tinkering. Another piece of long term vandalism committed by successive I’m Alright Jack Chancellors.
The fundamental problem of saving in a pension pot is that it creates a large pool of money for greedy Chancellors to target. One that the owner cannot spend until retirement, but that the government wishes to do so.
There needs to be a system that encourages savings over consumption in order to have a more sustainable economy, from both environmental and balance of payments perspectives. We have instead a series of governments that punish thrift.
One thing that really gets my back up is how many wealthy people I know who legally avoid income tax by getting paid for their services into a ltd company. They then move overseas for 5 years (Portugal is the latest wheeze) so they can wind it up without paying tax. Then move back again.
The only reason I can think of why this is allowed to continue is because so many politicians in both houses are planning on troughing it in the same way. Or will be otherwise “rewarded” after their career in politics by people that benefit from it.
That, and the ease with which foreigners use the uk residential property market as a home for either low tax foreign income or ill gotten income. I meet such people all the time. Surely people high up at the Treasury do too?
Comments
Barnard Castle did for Cummings. The public is in no mood to pay attention to such a man whom they would not trust with their shopping.
Boris on the other hand..different kettle of fish altogether. He got Brexit done as he promised and those who support him are still very grateful.
I hate “nobody is interested in this”. I hate “the public doesn’t care”. I hate it because of what it coyly admits, which is “we, the government don’t care, because we don’t have to”. According to Johnson, he and Sunak “did look briefly at the idea” of dodging quarantine, before concluding that it wasn’t the right thing to do. Only that’s just brazen rubbish, isn’t it? They were going to do it because they could, and they changed their minds because they belatedly realised that the ubiquitous defence of “the public doesn’t care” suddenly wouldn’t work, because the public did.
A year and a half of “trusting the science” makes it too easy to forget that this is a government forged in populist fires. Loath as I am to rake over old wounds, it is worth remembering that before there was Covid, and lockdown, and data, and graphs, there was instead an unconcealed disdain for parliament, courts, expertise, conventions, expectations, watchdogs, regulators, the rule of law and basically anything else that stood in the way of the crassest possible interpretation of majority will. This is Johnsonism. It is doing whatever you want, whenever you can get away with it. And it will get ugly. Wait and see.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/voters-wont-forget-this-disdain-for-the-rules-qd6ktpmrz
The Brexit he "got done" isn't done, and is a million miles away from what he "promised" it would look like.
Nobody voted Conservative primarily because they promised not to raise income tax or NI
The line “I don’t buy this overwhelming the NHS argument” or a trade off between the economic and health costs of a lock down are *exactly* the debates a government should be having without someone leaking the sausage making process
Mr. JohnL, jein. Labour broke manifesto pledges on both tax rises and tuition fees. Clegg's problem was a combination of his own tuition fees approach, forced upon him by the party, was way beyond a standard manifesto pledge and many of his supporters were outraged anyway that he had the temerity to actually seek power through office by a coalition with the eeeevil Tories. It wasn't helped by the Lib Dems odd inability to try and gain credit for the actions of the Coalition.
She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself.
What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families.
No-one seems to care about them.
Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system?
More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
It didn't last. After he started to school, he became Crocodile Dundee.
Ms Cyclefree, I agree with your header. It annoys the more-left wing, they can't understand it. It's so unfair!
Ok let's be fair. There of course can be some Corbynistas; there were still a few if not plenty of horrible Cons MPs when I voted for them. But they cannot be in any way relevant to the front bench or policy making.
- £350mn per week for the NHS
- Control over our money
- Control over our laws
- Control over our borders
- Free trade with Europe
- Leaving the ECJ
- Leaving the Single Market
- Leaving the Customs Union
- Ability to sign our own trade deals
The Brexit he delivered, for England:I don't know Adam Smith broadly enough to comment on the content. But I did check the quotes.
Concatenating one sentence with half of another sentence, then not being transparent about what has been done, is a far more basic failing - it is a lack of respect for integrity of process, and if you don't have that that you have nothing.
If it is a true representation of what Adam Smith said, then why deceive? Someone making a claim needs to be able to make a coherent checkableargument ie an intellectual audit trail.
https://techwireasia.com/2021/04/this-self-driving-car-drove-safely-all-over-south-korea-in-1993/
https://youtu.be/JTnBiTIvGqY
Starmer has to unify his party around a coherent vision that comprises more than "not the Tories". It was ten years after Kinnock purged Militant before Labour won power.
I think @Cyclefree makes valid points in the header, but none are deal-breakers. There are always core voters who would vote for a donkey in a party rosette, but that is never enough on its own.
Labour needs a clear and coherent vision of what it would look like in government, and a clear communicator of that vision. It has neither of those at the moment. I think SKS is a decent bloke and would probably run a good government, but that is not enough to get elected.
Blair was not just a great communicator (I saw him speak live in 1996 and he had real charisma then) but also had a ruthless back office spin machine that came out with punchy winning slogans and ideas.
Johnsons confused Populism is defeatable, but it does require Labour to get its act together. It just needs to figure out what being centre-left means in the modern world, and assemble that rainbow coalition within the party. I cannot see it happening at the next GE though. Labour are 8 years off regaining power.
Tbf he seems to be largely on the same page as our PM if what Dom says is correct.
If your issue is that the government has cravenly failed to reform senior public sector pensions you are correct. But why should private sector people with legacy DB schemes be penalised simply because of the savings mechanism that the company chose to use for my father’s pension?
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
But one of his less publicised failings was not being able to handle basic data well. He often mis-categorised or exaggerated things in order to justify assaults on whoever he wanted to assault that day, and was careless with easily checkable facts.
It is the same problems underlying Twitter panics today. I have been looking at one this morning where data is presented about alleged danger to ICU capacity in the NHS, but the analysis is based on comparing Wave 1 with a conflation of Waves 2 and 3. So firstly the impact of vaccination is mainly ignored, and so is the capacity of ICUs which has significantly increased.
Perhaps if someone at the Indy had pulled Hari up in 2005 or 2006 on something that seemed 'small' he could have been retrained as a decent journalist, and a lot of people would not have been bullied by him.
Dodgy foundations create unstable buildings.
It also gets rid of the tax on jobs
The real need is for all to have access to decent pension schemes, but the problem here is the very low interest rates that make annuities very poor value. If private schemes had the annuity rates that were normal 20 years ago, they would be much more viable.
The biggest killer of private savings has been low interest rates. It means that those saving have to find a better form of investment, and for many that has been real estate, thereby pushing up house prices via speculation.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
But I’m glad that you pay such attention to detail
A situation where earned income is taxed more heavily than investment income is just wrong. It always has been and always will be. The major attraction of combining NI and IT is that this anomaly is corrected.
National insurance of course is 2p on income tax for anyone salaried not dodging taxes.
The cuts to the lifetime allowance and low annuity rates are a strong disincentive not just to pension savings but also impact risk allocation. What’s the point in running risk within a SIPP if the taxman will take so much of the reward?
The Tories have turned SIPPs into an unattractive home for retirement savings, with such continual tinkering. Another piece of long term vandalism committed by successive I’m Alright Jack Chancellors.
If anything NI is worse for those on low to middling salaries as at a marginal rate they get whacked for the full amount of all 3 of Employers NI, Employees NI and Income Tax.
Anyone who doesn't include Employers NI as Income Tax every bit as much as the others is either misleading or a complete and utter idiot.
From my point of view it just didn't seem like a particularly good deal, paying hundreds of pounds every month in to a scheme which may never pay anything out if I die prematurely.
Above all, I had a sneaking suspicion that the money will never materialise because of political interference.
The other issue is that a fair society is not one based on a pseudo-Darwinian meritocracy, but one that offers a decent life for all, even those lacking in attributes and skills. Dustbin men and cleaners should be equal citizens, not an invisible underclass.
Thus the only option is more tax. This is what you voted for. Deal with it.
People always want more tax for vital services, where taxes are not ones the individual pays and the services are ones the individual uses.
Bringing in people without a visa so they can live on minimum wage and claim housing benefits and universal credit etc to supplement their income while needing to spend to provide infrastructure etc to them and in turn eventually a pension for them too is not cost-effective.
Bringing in people who can earn high salaries, where they can pay high taxes, is cost effective - and they can get a visa.
I was involved in a case a few years ago now with a fund manager who was accused of mis selling pensions to people encouraged to come out of a final salary scheme. Several things became apparent. For high net worth individuals pensions are largely an Inheritance tax dodge. There is no real intention of spending the pension fund, it is simply a tax free way of transferring large lump sums to the next generation.
Secondly, those who have the benefit of final salary indexed linked pensions have something genuinely platinum plated which requires exceptional performance to achieve in your own fund. Public sector employees who have the benefit of such schemes seriously underestimate what those rights are worth when comparing their package with a private sector fixed contribution equivalent. The current generation of pensioners are likely to be the richest ever. The rights they have been given simply cannot be funded in a normal working life.
I went to university to study geological engineering; I came out working in computer software. That could only happen because of a comprehensive education given to me by school and, to a large degree, by my parents and family.
I've got a little mantra about jobs: if it is a job that needs doing, and I wouldn't want to do it myself, then I should respect the person doing the job. Dustbin men is an example; so are nurses (as I am not fond of bodily excretions) or sewerage workers. For this reason, I try to loo favourably on people who do these jobs as there's no f'ing way I'd do them, yet they need doing.
Other jobs, such as bankers, builders, mechanics, etc: if I was qualified to do them, I'd have no problem doing them. I don't disrespect them, but I don't quite hold them in the same regard.
At the moment there are central issues of Big Choices that Labour is unclear about. The UK union, medium and long term Brexit, social care, public finances.
Issues like Covid are less policy and more about general trust and competence, as no-one knows what the big policy should be in terms of divergent choices.
But Labour is not working well at any of the three. Not only do we not know the Brexit policy (which might be anything from 'rejoin' to 'pirate buccaneer UK') we don't really know if the left, the anti-semites, the 'never kissed Tory scum' tendency have been finally put back in their cave. And we don't know if they have a potential cabinet even as good as the present lot.
And, as a Labour majority alliance must involve the SNP, we must know but don't know where they stand on the UK.
To take a little test case: What is Labour's policy on the NI/GB/EU border/single market dilemma? I don't know. Does anyone?
Literally the only way to lift people out of poverty long term is through education. It shouldn't matter that you grew up with nothing because the state will give you a top quality education and all the support you need to stick with it. Except that it doesn't do either. A starter for 10 is the crumbling school buildings in so many inner city schools. There had been a transformation in school facilities under Labour, axed without mercy by the Tories. Its back to the "why spend money on future criminals" mentality.
"Some people look down on manual workers. But if you car breaks down at night in the middle of nowhere, the man from the AA is the most important person in your universe."
Likewise, when our washing machine and oven broke down at the same time, we greeted the appliance repair man with more deference than we would the Queen.
Only a wealth tax could seem fair.
Post pandemic, the wealth of the wealthiest has increased disproportionately. (Billionaires really have done ever so well.) Pre-pandemic, the median income taxpayer had a taxable income of £22,000 p.a.; the top 1% of them at least £160,000 p.a.; the top 0.1%, £650,000.
And not only do the very few have so much more than enough, the pandemic has led many into poverty (austerity already having ensured they were deprived of adequate services).
I think he does because I'd like a functioning opposition.
You think he dioesn't because you wouldn't like a functioning opposition.
There needs to be a system that encourages savings over consumption in order to have a more sustainable economy, from both environmental and balance of payments perspectives. We have instead a series of governments that punish thrift.
It's parents and parenting - a societal problem. Education has to be central; schools help, but so many homes don't even have books in them. I'd like to see more funding go to adult literacy and numeracy - not middle-class writing courses, but giving adults who missed out the basic skills they need, so they can teach their kids in turn.
I do think however that this all amounts to a decent argument to tax the well off elderly population - rather than just recipients of certain pension schemes.
If you can't stand a joke, you shouldn't have joined.
More generally, people have voted for maximum spending on them now and any taxes that fall on others... Forever, basically. Including under the Blessed Margaret.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
I assume those people will no longer be moronic when they vote the way you want them to?
What is less clear is where SLab’s voters stand on the issue of the Union. It still looks like approx 40% of them are pro-independence, about 40% are hardline Unionists, and about 20% don’t care.
The only reason I can think of why this is allowed to continue is because so many politicians in both houses are planning on troughing it in the same way. Or will be otherwise “rewarded” after their career in politics by people that benefit from it.
That, and the ease with which foreigners use the uk residential property market as a home for either low tax foreign income or ill gotten income. I meet such people all the time. Surely people high up at the Treasury do too?