I don't think the latest IPSOS MORI VI have been published here
Cons 39 (down 2) since August Lab 36 (up 6) LDs 9 (down 4)
Starmer and Johnson level on best PM, too.
The fieldwork dates are also interesting - 17th to 23rd September.
That's quite a bit after the NI kerfullfle. It reminds me a bit of waves breaking on a beach- you notice each wave rising and receding, but you have to pay attention to see that, over time, each wave lands a little bit higher up the beach.
3 points ahead, 3 years to go is still pretty peachy for a government- what would make the grey trousers of the men in grey suits turn brown?
One way to raise revenues from online would be to ensure that all transactions on platforms like Amazon must be subject to VAT. Currently a plethora of tiny companies can crop up on Amazon and are VAT-exempt which isn't possible inside regular shops.
I believe you can go to Amazon and buy a dress and not have VAT on it, but if you went to Debenhams and bought a dress it must have always had VAT on it.
If someone wishes to open their own website then fair enough to be VAT-exempt until the threshold is met, just as if they'd opened their own physical store, but to suggest Amazon haven't hit the VAT threshold is insane.
That's not a level playing field.
Unless the company is a startup UK company that issue has already been fixed - as part of the new VAT rules that were introduced back in January.
And in the cases that remain, Amazon is just a combination of payment and market stall provider to a very small UK business.
Amazon are not a stall provider, they're a retailer. They should be liable to every bit as much tax for anything they retail every bit as much as any transaction that went through the tills at Debenhams would.
When Debenhams were trading they'd have clothes divided by brand etc in little 'stalls' but none of them would be VAT exempt since Debenhams were retailer for all of them. Just as Amazon are for everything I buy from them.
No Amazon are both a retailer (anything amazon sells direct) and a market stall provider (everything that is not sold by Amazon directly).
The fact you haven't noticed that fact means you haven't paid much attention to how Amazon actually works...
If they’re simply providing a market stall, then there won’t be a direct financial relationship with the consumer, who will pay the stall holder directly for whatever they are selling.
Amazon processes payment in case the business turns out to be fake say by not delivering the goods, Amazon can repay the customer.
One big problem we have as a country is that we've spent the last 30 years trying to Jury rig new business models into our existing tax (and other such as employment) laws.
And we really need to go back and fix these things properly but no one wishes to do so for fixing them will highlight problems that probably aren't fixable.
Well precisely because Amazon are the ultimate retailer to the consumer, not whatever name on the hat is supply Amazon.
Amazon should be taxed as the supplier and they ought to be able to reclaim VAT from their suppliers. Which should be everyone who registers to sell on Amazon.
See my comment below this one for a better explanation.
The issue is that when you look at Amazon you see a single firm called Amazon.
But because I understand how Amazon is built nowadays I see a number of different firms
Amazon Advertising (a $5bn turnover company from what I've seen) Amazon Payments (which is not subject to VAT as it's financial transactions) Amazon Warehouse Amazon Logistics (which will collect from your warehouse at 10pm for next day delivery).
The cavalier decision making by various governments in the field of energy supply is just astonishing. Here are some examples: our own abandonment of gas storage in 2017, our prospective decommissioning of gas for domestic heating by 2030, the German abandonment of nuclear energy and reliance on gas from Russia while continuing to burn lignite (brown coal) until the mid-2030s.
I think the proposition that we are going to completely replace tens of millions of gas boilers in houses, shops and offices in 10 years and replace them with heat pumps or something else is nothing short of fantastical. It is simply not going to happen. It may be that by the mid 2030s we might be able to stop burning gas just to produce electricity in power stations but changing our domestic source of energy is going to be impossibly difficult.
If the roll out of smart meters is any indication then you are correct. It will be 2060 before gas boilers are replaced!
I've got solar panels and currently get deemed export. The situation as to whether I'd HAVE to go to metered export, and whether that'd be better for me is clear as mud. I might be better off, I have no idea but if I move over I won't be able to move back.
I've asked both the electric and the FIT company, noone seems to know or care...
May not help, however..
Briefly, you need to compare the Feed in Tariff rate (if you get FITs) vs the proffered payment per unit for your alternative electric contract. Then consider the value of the 20 year index linked guaranteed payment on the FIT scheme, and how much of your deemed exported electricity you actually use (if you use say 75% of it - very unusual - any measurement will be below the deemed 50%).
(If you want to use all of your export you install a divert device such as an "Immersun" which diverts all exported electricity to a load such as a house-battery or a water tank or your slab heating. You still get the "deemed" 50%).
FIT rates were heavily reduced on Feb 9 2016 (from about 11p to about 4p), and for pv installs before that date sticking with the FIT is a no-brainer imo. Mine got in just before that.
For PVs after that date, you need to consider as above, and consider 2 way meters and tariffs.
If your date is after the FIT scheme closed then you have to look around anyway.
At the moment the export tariffs have aiui a floor level set by the Govt Smart Export Guarantee level.
eg Bulb Energy have an export tariff of 5.57p/kWh if you are with them for electric, or 3p if you are with somebody else.
There are special tariffs around, such as the Tesla Energy Plan from Octopus, which charges you ~11p for elec, and pays you ~11p for exports. With a fairly high usage cap. You have to have a Tesla Powerwall and PV panels installed. That is worth a look. Alternatively you can just feed your PV energy into Powerwall with a divert device.
I get about 13p per export unit index linked, so I am sticking with FIT unless something changed.
Does that help?
Oh I'm not giving up the FIT, it's just a SMETS2 meter might switch you from deemed export to metered. That was all.
No panic buying, just buying through the year as we have always done. You pay more if you buy at Christmas.
Eg my eldest daughter's main present we are giving her this year is going to be the Lego Harry Potter Great Hall. Normally £90, but a couple of months ago Amazon had it for £45 as a 24 hour flash sale. Why not buy it then?
She's really into both Lego and Harry Potter. I can't imagine that changing in the next three months.
Blimey, I hope she doesn't read PB.
You wouldn’t want her to learn that her Dad isn’t willing to pay full price for her…
Neutral bots probe political bias on social media https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25738-6 Social media platforms attempting to curb abuse and misinformation have been accused of political bias. We deploy neutral social bots who start following different news sources on Twitter, and track them to probe distinct biases emerging from platform mechanisms versus user interactions. We find no strong or consistent evidence of political bias in the news feed. Despite this, the news and information to which U.S. Twitter users are exposed depend strongly on the political leaning of their early connections. The interactions of conservative accounts are skewed toward the right, whereas liberal accounts are exposed to moderate content shifting their experience toward the political center. Partisan accounts, especially conservative ones, tend to receive more followers and follow more automated accounts. Conservative accounts also find themselves in denser communities and are exposed to more low-credibility content.
A few thoughts regarding the reduction of the point at which students repay their loan:
1) This is a graduate tax in all but name, which means changing the terms after the fact can only be described as a tax increase.
2) The interest rate on student loans (those from 2012 onwards) is usurious. You’d pay less as a high yield company - there is no justification for government not charging interest at its own rate of borrowing (let’s use BoE base rate for simplicity), as it’s not as if higher education is something we want to discourage. Linking it to 3% + RPI (a form of inflation so discredited than the ONS will effectively discontinue its use in 2030) only makes matters worse.
3) Combined with the NI increase, it shows the Tories really do seem to have a disdain for young people.
Now I’m fortunate enough to have gone to university shortly before 2012, so this no longer affects me, but if true it’s another telltale sign the government is only interested in its older core vote.
Or they are desperate for cash and having seen the complaints about the last rise as turning over all the cushions to find non obvious sources
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
No we need to make NI more distinctive and ensure it is ring fenced to only fund the state pension, healthcare and JSA
I've not read a convincing reason why? If it's about keeping track of the number of years of contributions, you can do that with income tax.
More complicated though to identify given income tax would also have to still fund defence, education, culture, local government, the police and legal aid, non contributory welfare etc
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
So apprentices can cope with the snobbery given their higher bank balances and the fact many can buy a property in their 20s or early 30s (certainly outside London and the South East) unlike most students
Indeed. So why drive kids down the uni route when it won't gain them much? Why 50%? why not 40%? 30%? 20%?
It's a random figure plucked out of Blair's backside because it sounds good. Yet even if it was based on evidence, then there should have been another policy about further education opportunities for those who did not go.
My nephew got the grades to go into uni, but chose to get a job. He's worked hard, and is on a salary much greater than his friends who went. He's probably worked harder than them, and has no student debts. Yet if he was in certain industries, there would be a barrier - a paper ceiling - through which he could not burst. Sometimes that ceiling may be necessary - science, for instance. In most it is not.
Fortunately he's chosen an industry where that is less likely.
Much of the public sector, including local government, seems to require degrees that are unnecessary for the job.
Another of Corbyns 2019 policies goes live today. Free Broadband
PB Tories called it Communism but today Tory Govt introduces it.
UK jobseekers are offered six months of free broadband Joint TalkTalk and government scheme to tackle digital exclusion gives no-contract uncapped usage
Six months is not free broadband Corbyn was offering
It's about all it would have been, before the economy crashed under his stewardship and he had to claw all the goodies back.....
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
OK, so where is the £15bn as it won't be coming from Amazon and co as Labour hasn't yet devised a means of collecting £15bn in tax from them.
I'm sure you and others will be listening to Rachel Reeves shortly. At this stage of the electoral cycle, it wouldn't be sensible to say precisely where the money's coming from, because things change. It will be in the manifesto in time for the next GE campaign.
I listened to Rachel a couple of times this weekend and her interview with Nick Robinson is worth watching on catch up
At school she won a British under 14 girls chess championship and her cv dwarfs the shadow cabinet with time at the Bank of England, British Embassy in Washington and HBOS
Labour should be falling over backwards to promote her to leader, she may even attract me to her policies but labour have to divest themselves of a lot of nonsense first
I haven't listened, but will - thank you.
Did she spend a lot of time going on about how awful the Tories are or did she set out the problems facing the country and broad ideas on how to address them and/or a vision for where to get to? If it's worth listening to, then I suspect the latter.
She's incredibly boring and lacks revolutionary zeal. She's exactly the type of person a never-labour voter would think would make a good leader of the Labour Party.
Sounds much like Starmer!
I must admit I can't remember ever having heard her, although I suspect I must have done.
Edit: And BigG has in fact voted Labour in the past, hasn't he? Or doesn't Blair count?
Like Starmer she has an unfortunate droney voice. Not sure if the great British/English voting public is in the mood for sensible centrism delivered in the tones of a bumble bee trapped in a jar.
Yeah just saw her small businesses twitter clip.
Seems pretty stilted and, to use a HYUFD-ism, appears to be SKS in a skirt.
Thinking about the discussion of political orphans, being one myself, and who we would or wouldn't vote for, would have difficulty voting for a party which made it so viscerally clear they didn't like me in terms of my career, my status, my wealth (LOL such as it is).
I know it will be a blow to them to hear that but at some point they will need to reach out to PLM to make a pitch.
On the German election, I believe there was an advisory referendum in Berlin on requisitioning apartments owned by mega landlords to turn in to social housing, won pretty conclusively by the requisitioners. Any of the German experts know if any action will result from this?
Looking at the wiki page for the Berlin state election pretty amazing to see that die Linke were leading the polls a year ago.
I can't see any Berlin state polls with die Linke ahead more recent than April 2019 when they were in a 3-way tie on 19%. To end up on 14% 2+ years later doesn't seem that amazing, but maybe I'm missing something.
Ah, sorry, I confused the Linke and CDU lines! Yes, the last time they were ahead was summer 2018.
Jessica Elgot @jessicaelgot · 14m Labour's had a hammering from activists who say it's not bold enough on climate. It's now pledging it would spend £224bn on tackling the crisis over the next 8 years.
From what tax revenues?! £28bn per year extra is 3p on the basic rate and 3p on the higher rate!
Labour just haven't got a fucking clue. Does no one actually fucking think about this stuff before they mindlessly announce spending of more taxpayer money on pie in the sky bullshit. At least with the Tories they announced a huge tax rise with their idiotic spending increases. It's shit but at least part way believable. With Labour nothing is grounded in reality.
Steamer should feel very uncomfortable listening to Rachel Reeves speech as she is far ahead of any of them
You are bizarre, Big G. Why on earth would Starmer be very uncomfortable if his Shadow Chancellor has made a good speech (I haven't listened to it yet)? He'll be delighted, over the moon. Would Boris be very uncomfortable if Rishi made a good speech? I rather doubt it.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
I agree with you that its a good idea, except they've got no clue it seems as to how they would do so. So they're saying it will be done but we're to take it on faith that they'll have a way to do it.
As it happens I agree that its the beginnings of a good policy, they're at least on the right path! That's something at least and I'll give them credit for that, first time in many years as either in Shadow or in office that Labour's Chancellor spokesperson seems to understand something about the issues in economy.
But I'll wait before saying its a good policy until the policy is actually formulated and not just "this sounds good" but without details. To be fair though years before the election "this sounds good" but without details is an OK starting point and better than what Labour have had for many years!
Thanks. As you're broadly sympathetic to the aims, I expect the Tories (yes, I know you're not one) to nick it any time soon.
I seem to remember when I was drafting a possible policy agenda for SKS that this was one of my suggestions. I think that there is quite a compelling case to try and rebalance the tax demands between bricks and clicks. Shops are not only a good source of employment, they keep our city centres vibrant and are more accessible to the elderly etc.
But you cannot simply abolish £15bn of tax revenues without having an alternative when we already have an unsustainable deficit. That is just lazy.
This is the issue here - you need to understand what you plan to tax, why you plan to do so and how you plan to do so.
You also when talking about retail need to understand why people purchase stuff online and it's usually for reasons where the high street could never compete.
Only after that can you start talking about how you will give people tax breaks as otherwise it's a question of where are you going to get that £xbn from.
And there are serious amount of structural issues within our tax system but there isn't any easy solutions as all changes will impact people's behaviour and that might have unintended consequences.
But the first part of the policy ought to make it easier to repurpose high street properties large numbers of which are just sitting vacant.
That's already been partly done with PDR rights to convert shops to other uses. In place for several years.
"Don't mention the Sturgeon war! Tory ministers 'are ordered not to talk about Scottish independence' amid fears it just fuels separatist drive Ministers told not to engage with SNP or even make a positive case for the union They admit it would be 'very hard' for unionists to win new referendum currently They want to focus on Sturgeon and SNP's record amid NHS and drug crises"
Steamer should feel very uncomfortable listening to Rachel Reeves speech as she is far ahead of any of them
You are bizarre, Big G. Why on earth would Starmer be very uncomfortable if his Shadow Chancellor has made a good speech (I haven't listened to it yet)? He'll be delighted, over the moon. Would Boris be very uncomfortable if Rishi made a good speech? I rather doubt it.
On the latter, absolutely he would. Boris is petty and paranoid man. He floated the idea of demoting Rishi to foreign office from chancellor because he was becoming too popular as the face of the treasury response to the virus.
Good morning everybody. I wonder what the PB brains trust would advise. Mrs C and I are on holiday some 350 miles from home. We have, thanks to topping up when we arrived last Thursday, more than enough fuel to get home. However, part of the plans for the holiday include a week-long visit to N Wales, starting on Thursday, adding a further 275 or so miles to our trip.
I am beginning to wonder; should we call off the N Wales leg?
No. I think motorway service stations will always have fuel, though you'll obviously pay a bit more for it.
No, you will be ripped off. All motorway fuel.is a rip.off
Motorway fuel is indeed a rip-off, but at least they'll have fuel and there's unlikely to be queues. That may be worth paying extra to OKC.
They aren’t a rip off.
In addition to the price of the fuel you are paying for time and convenience.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
No we need to make NI more distinctive and ensure it is ring fenced to only fund the state pension, healthcare and JSA
I've not read a convincing reason why? If it's about keeping track of the number of years of contributions, you can do that with income tax.
More complicated though to identify given income tax would also have to still fund defence, education, culture, local government, the police, non contributory welfare etc
Public finance lore is against hypothecation (ring-fencing) of taxes. It implies a lower marginal value of spending in such protected areas, and is therefore inefficient in welfare terms.
No panic buying, just buying through the year as we have always done. You pay more if you buy at Christmas.
Eg my eldest daughter's main present we are giving her this year is going to be the Lego Harry Potter Great Hall. Normally £90, but a couple of months ago Amazon had it for £45 as a 24 hour flash sale. Why not buy it then?
She's really into both Lego and Harry Potter. I can't imagine that changing in the next three months.
Blimey, I hope she doesn't read PB.
You wouldn’t want her to learn that her Dad isn’t willing to pay full price for her…
My youngest is extremely proud about getting bargains. I think she would regard a reduction like that as evidence that extra effort was put into the present!
I try and buy Christmas stuff early as well. A lot of retailers put the prices up, then claim that they are discounting (still above regular prices) etc etc.
Interesting reading the comments upthread on the Labour Conference. FWIW in my view it has been pretty successful so far. The big decisions have gone the right way. The noise we have seen is relatively light compared to what bubbles largely unseen under the surface.
There is time yet for it all to go seriously pear-shaped mind.
You didn't listen to 5 live this morning highlighting the bickering , infighting, vaginas and "scum" speak Rayner. They don't look like a party ready to govern and that's because they aren't.
A few thoughts regarding the reduction of the point at which students repay their loan:
1) This is a graduate tax in all but name, which means changing the terms after the fact can only be described as a tax increase.
2) The interest rate on student loans (those from 2012 onwards) is usurious. You’d pay less as a high yield company - there is no justification for government not charging interest at its own rate of borrowing (let’s use BoE base rate for simplicity), as it’s not as if higher education is something we want to discourage. Linking it to 3% + RPI (a form of inflation so discredited than the ONS will effectively discontinue its use in 2030) only makes matters worse.
3) Combined with the NI increase, it shows the Tories really do seem to have a disdain for young people.
Now I’m fortunate enough to have gone to university shortly before 2012, so this no longer affects me, but if true it’s another telltale sign the government is only interested in its older core vote.
Or they are desperate for cash and having seen the complaints about the last rise as turning over all the cushions to find non obvious sources
I don't think this is about tax revenue.
I think it's because they've just done a review of repayment rates and discovered that under the current plans the expected loan repayment rate (think it was 45% or so) won't be met - so the Government has a problem with Higher Education as it would now be cheaper to go back to the pre loan approach.
Steamer should feel very uncomfortable listening to Rachel Reeves speech as she is far ahead of any of them
You are bizarre, Big G. Why on earth would Starmer be very uncomfortable if his Shadow Chancellor has made a good speech (I haven't listened to it yet)? He'll be delighted, over the moon. Would Boris be very uncomfortable if Rishi made a good speech? I rather doubt it.
Maybe, but she is impressive and Starmer is quite the opposite
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
One way to raise revenues from online would be to ensure that all transactions on platforms like Amazon must be subject to VAT. Currently a plethora of tiny companies can crop up on Amazon and are VAT-exempt which isn't possible inside regular shops.
I believe you can go to Amazon and buy a dress and not have VAT on it, but if you went to Debenhams and bought a dress it must have always had VAT on it.
If someone wishes to open their own website then fair enough to be VAT-exempt until the threshold is met, just as if they'd opened their own physical store, but to suggest Amazon haven't hit the VAT threshold is insane.
That's not a level playing field.
Unless the company is a startup UK company that issue has already been fixed - as part of the new VAT rules that were introduced back in January.
And in the cases that remain, Amazon is just a combination of payment and market stall provider to a very small UK business.
Amazon are not a stall provider, they're a retailer. They should be liable to every bit as much tax for anything they retail every bit as much as any transaction that went through the tills at Debenhams would.
When Debenhams were trading they'd have clothes divided by brand etc in little 'stalls' but none of them would be VAT exempt since Debenhams were retailer for all of them. Just as Amazon are for everything I buy from them.
No Amazon are both a retailer (anything amazon sells direct) and a market stall provider (everything that is not sold by Amazon directly).
The fact you haven't noticed that fact means you haven't paid much attention to how Amazon actually works...
If they’re simply providing a market stall, then there won’t be a direct financial relationship with the consumer, who will pay the stall holder directly for whatever they are selling.
And if they're merely providing a market stall then that market stall should have its own search engine etc and not be a part of the retailers own search engine.
Search engines and marketing arrangements are all fine, what’s important is to follow the money.
You pay a small business = no VAT. You pay a $2trn business = full VAT.
Good morning everybody. I wonder what the PB brains trust would advise. Mrs C and I are on holiday some 350 miles from home. We have, thanks to topping up when we arrived last Thursday, more than enough fuel to get home. However, part of the plans for the holiday include a week-long visit to N Wales, starting on Thursday, adding a further 275 or so miles to our trip.
I am beginning to wonder; should we call off the N Wales leg?
No. I think motorway service stations will always have fuel, though you'll obviously pay a bit more for it.
No, you will be ripped off. All motorway fuel.is a rip.off
Motorway fuel is indeed a rip-off, but at least they'll have fuel and there's unlikely to be queues. That may be worth paying extra to OKC.
They aren’t a rip off.
In addition to the price of the fuel you are paying for time and convenience.
I never buy there as I plan not to
IIRC a number of service stations have pipeline connections to bulk storage sites.....
Interesting reading the comments upthread on the Labour Conference. FWIW in my view it has been pretty successful so far. The big decisions have gone the right way. The noise we have seen is relatively light compared to what bubbles largely unseen under the surface.
There is time yet for it all to go seriously pear-shaped mind.
Yesterday could have been so much worse. A minor victory grasped from the jaws of a potentially giant defeat.
"Don't mention the Sturgeon war! Tory ministers 'are ordered not to talk about Scottish independence' amid fears it just fuels separatist drive Ministers told not to engage with SNP or even make a positive case for the union They admit it would be 'very hard' for unionists to win new referendum currently They want to focus on Sturgeon and SNP's record amid NHS and drug crises"
They've certainly maintained an iron discipline on the not making a positive case for the union thing.
2014 was a once in a generation referendum, they don't need to until a generation has elapsed since then.
Union matters are reserved to Westminster so as long as this Tory government is in power it can refuse indyref2 and nothing Sturgeon can do about it
So why do Scottish Tories talk about nothing else? If they don’t need to talk about independence, they could talk about their policies. Oh, wait!
As opposing indyref 2 and independence has got the Scottish Tories to their highest voteshare since 1979, the independence and Union question is as much a vote winner for them as the SNP, even if a disaster for Scottish Labour as they get squeezed
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
No we need to make NI more distinctive and ensure it is ring fenced to only fund the state pension, healthcare and JSA
I've not read a convincing reason why? If it's about keeping track of the number of years of contributions, you can do that with income tax.
More complicated though to identify given income tax would also have to still fund defence, education, culture, local government, the police and legal aid, non contributory welfare etc
What has identification got to do with it? As for the amount raised, if NI is abolished, income tax would certainly go up.
Steamer should feel very uncomfortable listening to Rachel Reeves speech as she is far ahead of any of them
You are bizarre, Big G. Why on earth would Starmer be very uncomfortable if his Shadow Chancellor has made a good speech (I haven't listened to it yet)? He'll be delighted, over the moon. Would Boris be very uncomfortable if Rishi made a good speech? I rather doubt it.
On the latter, absolutely he would. Boris is petty and paranoid man. He floated the idea of demoting Rishi to foreign office from chancellor because he was becoming too popular as the face of the treasury response to the virus.
Fair point on Boris. I suspect Starmer is a bit more secure and comfortable in his own skin not to feel threatened by a good speech from one of his shadow cabinet.
We had a much worse fuel crisis twenty years ago when we were in the EU, and before that in 1973 when we had just joined the Common Market. So by your own measure, we're better off out.
More significantly, the Rejoiners haven’t come up with a new idea in 40 years…
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
No we need to make NI more distinctive and ensure it is ring fenced to only fund the state pension, healthcare and JSA
I've not read a convincing reason why? If it's about keeping track of the number of years of contributions, you can do that with income tax.
More complicated though to identify given income tax would also have to still fund defence, education, culture, local government, the police and legal aid, non contributory welfare etc
What has identification got to do with it? As for the amount raised, if NI is abolished, income tax would certainly go up.
Everything, as the state pension and JSA would still be contributory based on NI contributions and NI could also be directed as well to health and social care funding as the government is starting to do.
I agree too increasing NI in those areas avoids income tax having to rise to fund them instead
The cavalier decision making by various governments in the field of energy supply is just astonishing. Here are some examples: our own abandonment of gas storage in 2017, our prospective decommissioning of gas for domestic heating by 2030, the German abandonment of nuclear energy and reliance on gas from Russia while continuing to burn lignite (brown coal) until the mid-2030s.
I think the proposition that we are going to completely replace tens of millions of gas boilers in houses, shops and offices in 10 years and replace them with heat pumps or something else is nothing short of fantastical. It is simply not going to happen. It may be that by the mid 2030s we might be able to stop burning gas just to produce electricity in power stations but changing our domestic source of energy is going to be impossibly difficult.
If the roll out of smart meters is any indication then you are correct. It will be 2060 before gas boilers are replaced!
I've got solar panels and currently get deemed export. The situation as to whether I'd HAVE to go to metered export, and whether that'd be better for me is clear as mud. I might be better off, I have no idea but if I move over I won't be able to move back.
I've asked both the electric and the FIT company, noone seems to know or care...
May not help, however..
Briefly, you need to compare the Feed in Tariff rate (if you get FITs) vs the proffered payment per unit for your alternative electric contract. Then consider the value of the 20 year index linked guaranteed payment on the FIT scheme, and how much of your deemed exported electricity you actually use (if you use say 75% of it - very unusual - any measurement will be below the deemed 50%).
(If you want to use all of your export you install a divert device such as an "Immersun" which diverts all exported electricity to a load such as a house-battery or a water tank or your slab heating. You still get the "deemed" 50%).
FIT rates were heavily reduced on Feb 9 2016 (from about 11p to about 4p), and for pv installs before that date sticking with the FIT is a no-brainer imo. Mine got in just before that.
For PVs after that date, you need to consider as above, and consider 2 way meters and tariffs.
If your date is after the FIT scheme closed then you have to look around anyway.
At the moment the export tariffs have aiui a floor level set by the Govt Smart Export Guarantee level.
eg Bulb Energy have an export tariff of 5.57p/kWh if you are with them for electric, or 3p if you are with somebody else.
There are special tariffs around, such as the Tesla Energy Plan from Octopus, which charges you ~11p for elec, and pays you ~11p for exports. With a fairly high usage cap. You have to have a Tesla Powerwall and PV panels installed. That is worth a look. Alternatively you can just feed your PV energy into Powerwall with a divert device.
I get about 13p per export unit index linked, so I am sticking with FIT unless something changed.
Does that help?
Oh I'm not giving up the FIT, it's just a SMETS2 meter might switch you from deemed export to metered. That was all.
Wouldn't they have legal problems with that, since it would break your contract with the company taking your generated electricity?
F1: to win in Turkey: Bottas 17 Norris 21 Perez 21
Highlights what an outstanding season Norris is having.
If McLaren can deliver the car, then Norris and Ricciardo are a formidable lineup. Similar for Leclerc and Sainz, actually.
If Riccardo can start to bring it on Saturdays as well as he has done on Sundays the last two races McLaren have got the best driver line up on the grid IMO. A race winning car next season would completely shake up the sport, for the better as Mercedes vs RBR has become dull.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
Steamer should feel very uncomfortable listening to Rachel Reeves speech as she is far ahead of any of them
You are bizarre, Big G. Why on earth would Starmer be very uncomfortable if his Shadow Chancellor has made a good speech (I haven't listened to it yet)? He'll be delighted, over the moon. Would Boris be very uncomfortable if Rishi made a good speech? I rather doubt it.
On the latter, absolutely he would. Boris is petty and paranoid man. He floated the idea of demoting Rishi to foreign office from chancellor because he was becoming too popular as the face of the treasury response to the virus.
Wasn't it health sec, which really would have been demotion. CofE to FS is fairly standard. It gets a rival out of the way, but probably strengthens their CV for when the time is ripe.
And as for Starmer, one of the reasonable concerns people have is that even if he's OK, his team are nutters. From that point of view, Reeves's raised profile is good news.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Good morning everybody. I wonder what the PB brains trust would advise. Mrs C and I are on holiday some 350 miles from home. We have, thanks to topping up when we arrived last Thursday, more than enough fuel to get home. However, part of the plans for the holiday include a week-long visit to N Wales, starting on Thursday, adding a further 275 or so miles to our trip.
I am beginning to wonder; should we call off the N Wales leg?
No. I think motorway service stations will always have fuel, though you'll obviously pay a bit more for it.
No, you will be ripped off. All motorway fuel.is a rip.off
Motorway fuel is indeed a rip-off, but at least they'll have fuel and there's unlikely to be queues. That may be worth paying extra to OKC.
They aren’t a rip off.
In addition to the price of the fuel you are paying for time and convenience.
I never buy there as I plan not to
No motorway fuel on the A1 yday so the point is moot. And actually some of the cheapest fuel can be found on the motorway. Or at least the A1.
One way to raise revenues from online would be to ensure that all transactions on platforms like Amazon must be subject to VAT. Currently a plethora of tiny companies can crop up on Amazon and are VAT-exempt which isn't possible inside regular shops.
I believe you can go to Amazon and buy a dress and not have VAT on it, but if you went to Debenhams and bought a dress it must have always had VAT on it.
If someone wishes to open their own website then fair enough to be VAT-exempt until the threshold is met, just as if they'd opened their own physical store, but to suggest Amazon haven't hit the VAT threshold is insane.
That's not a level playing field.
Unless the company is a startup UK company that issue has already been fixed - as part of the new VAT rules that were introduced back in January.
And in the cases that remain, Amazon is just a combination of payment and market stall provider to a very small UK business.
Amazon are not a stall provider, they're a retailer. They should be liable to every bit as much tax for anything they retail every bit as much as any transaction that went through the tills at Debenhams would.
When Debenhams were trading they'd have clothes divided by brand etc in little 'stalls' but none of them would be VAT exempt since Debenhams were retailer for all of them. Just as Amazon are for everything I buy from them.
No Amazon are both a retailer (anything amazon sells direct) and a market stall provider (everything that is not sold by Amazon directly).
The fact you haven't noticed that fact means you haven't paid much attention to how Amazon actually works...
If they’re simply providing a market stall, then there won’t be a direct financial relationship with the consumer, who will pay the stall holder directly for whatever they are selling.
And if they're merely providing a market stall then that market stall should have its own search engine etc and not be a part of the retailers own search engine.
Search engines and marketing arrangements are all fine, what’s important is to follow the money.
You pay a small business = no VAT. You pay a $2trn business = full VAT.
but you are buying a good off a small business - who currently receive 90% or so of the amount I pay Amazon Payments for the good.
If you add 20% VAT to that, that small business is now receiving 71% of the money I paid, because I bought from Amazon rather than their own website which I would never have found to purchase from.
Bit sweary on R4 this am, they also had a Polish HGV driver based in Glasgow on a news bulletin saying immigrants can't be turned on and off like a tap just because 'the UK has buggered things up'.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
No we need to make NI more distinctive and ensure it is ring fenced to only fund the state pension, healthcare and JSA
I've not read a convincing reason why? If it's about keeping track of the number of years of contributions, you can do that with income tax.
More complicated though to identify given income tax would also have to still fund defence, education, culture, local government, the police and legal aid, non contributory welfare etc
What has identification got to do with it? As for the amount raised, if NI is abolished, income tax would certainly go up.
Everything, as the state pension and JSA would still be contributory based on NI contributions and NI could also be directed as well to health and social care funding.
I agree too increasing NI in those areas avoids income tax having to rise to fund them instead
There's no reason the state pension and JSA can't be contributory based on Income Tax thresholds.
Why should health be funded by a tax not paid by everyone? Avoiding income tax being raised by raising income tax on a minority of people which is all NI is, is not an improvement. It means higher income tax for those who pay it.
Real income tax would be lower for workers if it was fairly and evenly applied.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
90% of over 65s did not go to university, so it was affordable to pay taxes to subsidise the courses of the top 10% of the population who did.
Now over 40% of 18 year olds go to university, funding them all is unaffordable, hence tuition fees
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
Low earning?
27k is not very far below the median salary.
27k isn't far below the median salary, the new proposed starting point of £20k or so is well below the median salary.
Steamer should feel very uncomfortable listening to Rachel Reeves speech as she is far ahead of any of them
You are bizarre, Big G. Why on earth would Starmer be very uncomfortable if his Shadow Chancellor has made a good speech (I haven't listened to it yet)? He'll be delighted, over the moon. Would Boris be very uncomfortable if Rishi made a good speech? I rather doubt it.
On the latter, absolutely he would. Boris is petty and paranoid man. He floated the idea of demoting Rishi to foreign office from chancellor because he was becoming too popular as the face of the treasury response to the virus.
Wasn't it health sec, which really would have been demotion. CofE to FS is fairly standard. It gets a rival out of the way, but probably strengthens their CV for when the time is ripe.
And as for Starmer, one of the reasonable concerns people have is that even if he's OK, his team are nutters. From that point of view, Reeves's raised profile is good news.
Aiui, the health secretary stuff wasn't a serious consideration, especially since The Saj had only just been installed. He wanted Truss in as Chancellor and Rishi to move aside to FS. My understanding is that Team Rishi told the PM to get fucked and said they'd have to sack him so they backed down.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
90% of over 65s did not go to university, so it was affordable to pay taxes to subsidise the courses of the top 10% of the population who did.
Now over 40% of 18 year olds go to university, funding them all is unaffordable, hence tuition fees
Yet it seems the loans aren't being repaid so the current university scheme is just as unaffordable.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
No we need to make NI more distinctive and ensure it is ring fenced to only fund the state pension, healthcare and JSA
I've not read a convincing reason why? If it's about keeping track of the number of years of contributions, you can do that with income tax.
More complicated though to identify given income tax would also have to still fund defence, education, culture, local government, the police and legal aid, non contributory welfare etc
What has identification got to do with it? As for the amount raised, if NI is abolished, income tax would certainly go up.
Everything, as the state pension and JSA would still be contributory based on NI contributions and NI could also be directed as well to health and social care funding.
I agree too increasing NI in those areas avoids income tax having to rise to fund them instead
There's no reason the state pension and JSA can't be contributory based on Income Tax thresholds.
Why should health be funded by a tax not paid by everyone? Avoiding income tax being raised by raising income tax on a minority of people which is all NI is, is not an improvement. It means higher income tax for those who pay it.
Real income tax would be lower for workers if it was fairly and evenly applied.
State pension is contributary - you only get the full amount after 30/35 years of NI payments.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
Low earning?
27k is not very far below the median salary.
27k isn't far below the median salary, the new proposed starting point of £20k or so is well below the median salary.
That threshold has already been dismissed as too low.
The Augar review of post-18 education in 2019 recommended the threshold be lowered to £23,000, median non-graduate earnings at the time, and the Higher Education Policy Institute think-tank this year modelled a cut to less than £20,000.
No final decisions on the new level have been taken, but one minister said a £20,000 threshold was considered to be “a bit low”.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
Low earning?
27k is not very far below the median salary.
Its still below the median salary, let alone the proposal of £20k or similar that's being discussed!
Why should young adults who aren't even at the Higher Rate threshold be on a higher real rate of tax than middle aged or retired graduates who are on higher rate of tax but who happen to be older?
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
90% of over 65s did not go to university, so it was affordable to pay taxes to subsidise the courses of the top 10% of the population who did.
Now over 40% of 18 year olds go to university, funding them all is unaffordable, hence tuition fees
Yet it seems the loans aren't being repaid so the current university scheme is just as unaffordable.
Isn't that why the interest rates are non-zero, so those that can pay subsidise those that can't?
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
No we need to make NI more distinctive and ensure it is ring fenced to only fund the state pension, healthcare and JSA
I've not read a convincing reason why? If it's about keeping track of the number of years of contributions, you can do that with income tax.
More complicated though to identify given income tax would also have to still fund defence, education, culture, local government, the police and legal aid, non contributory welfare etc
What has identification got to do with it? As for the amount raised, if NI is abolished, income tax would certainly go up.
Everything, as the state pension and JSA would still be contributory based on NI contributions and NI could also be directed as well to health and social care funding.
I agree too increasing NI in those areas avoids income tax having to rise to fund them instead
There's no reason the state pension and JSA can't be contributory based on Income Tax thresholds.
Why should health be funded by a tax not paid by everyone? Avoiding income tax being raised by raising income tax on a minority of people which is all NI is, is not an improvement. It means higher income tax for those who pay it.
Real income tax would be lower for workers if it was fairly and evenly applied.
State pension is contributary - you only get the full amount after 30/35 years of NI payments.
And that can just as easily be switched to Income Tax payments.
"NI payment" is defined by meeting a threshold, there's no reason that threshold can't be met using income tax instead.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
So apprentices can cope with the snobbery given their higher bank balances and the fact many can buy a property in their 20s or early 30s (certainly outside London and the South East) unlike most students
Indeed. So why drive kids down the uni route when it won't gain them much? Why 50%? why not 40%? 30%? 20%?
It's a random figure plucked out of Blair's backside because it sounds good. Yet even if it was based on evidence, then there should have been another policy about further education opportunities for those who did not go.
My nephew got the grades to go into uni, but chose to get a job. He's worked hard, and is on a salary much greater than his friends who went. He's probably worked harder than them, and has no student debts. Yet if he was in certain industries, there would be a barrier - a paper ceiling - through which he could not burst. Sometimes that ceiling may be necessary - science, for instance. In most it is not.
Fortunately he's chosen an industry where that is less likely.
Much of the public sector, including local government, seems to require degrees that are unnecessary for the job.
What happened with degrees - from the perspective of a graduate and hirer of staff.
When Blair talked of expanding degree jobs, he was thinking of the type of jobs that Russell Group (and up) are the feeders for.
The massive expansion with the polys was not done in concert with increasing standards. This created a large number of second class (ha) degrees.
Employers did indeed find that they needed more people with high quality degrees - So the Russell Group grew and large numbers of graduates were recruited from overseas.
In the high end jobs, a 2.1 or above from a Russell Group (or overseas equivalent) became mandated by HR. So if you are hiring, you don't get to see other CVs
So, given the volume of graduates, lower skilled jobs, began demanding degrees. Since they could get them. So, people, who in the past wouldn't have had to have a degree had to get one to get the same quality of job they would have got anyway....
So we now have a situation where there are two glass ceilings
Russell Group Degree ________
Former Poly Degree ________
No degree
The irony was, that back in the day when degrees were much rarer, there was at least some possibility of making it to the top without a degree. Now, it is explicitly forbidden.
In one job, we were doing work for a bank. The bank (well their HR) tried to stop one of the team coming in, since their background checks showed no degree....
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
Low earning?
27k is not very far below the median salary.
27k isn't far below the median salary, the new proposed starting point of £20k or so is well below the median salary.
That threshold has already been dismissed as too low.
The Augar review of post-18 education in 2019 recommended the threshold be lowered to £23,000, median non-graduate earnings at the time, and the Higher Education Policy Institute think-tank this year modelled a cut to less than £20,000.
No final decisions on the new level have been taken, but one minister said a £20,000 threshold was considered to be “a bit low”.
I don't know whether the writer has any affiliation with the Labour Party, but the idea that a party should reject PR for its own self interest is deeply offensive. If a party can only command 30-something% of the vote and is incapable of working with other parties, why should they ever get near the levers of power?
"Don't mention the Sturgeon war! Tory ministers 'are ordered not to talk about Scottish independence' amid fears it just fuels separatist drive Ministers told not to engage with SNP or even make a positive case for the union They admit it would be 'very hard' for unionists to win new referendum currently They want to focus on Sturgeon and SNP's record amid NHS and drug crises"
They've certainly maintained an iron discipline on the not making a positive case for the union thing.
2014 was a once in a generation referendum, they don't need to until a generation has elapsed since then.
Union matters are reserved to Westminster so as long as this Tory government is in power it can refuse indyref2 and nothing Sturgeon can do about it
So why do Scottish Tories talk about nothing else? If they don’t need to talk about independence, they could talk about their policies. Oh, wait!
As opposing indyref 2 and independence has got the Scottish Tories to their highest voteshare since 1979, the independence and Union question is as much a vote winner for them as the SNP, even if a disaster for Scottish Labour as they get squeezed
Oh, so 50% or so is the same as 25% or so?
But I see it's time to change the topic of discussion to Deltic diesels or toy buying for Christmas.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
No we need to make NI more distinctive and ensure it is ring fenced to only fund the state pension, healthcare and JSA
I've not read a convincing reason why? If it's about keeping track of the number of years of contributions, you can do that with income tax.
More complicated though to identify given income tax would also have to still fund defence, education, culture, local government, the police and legal aid, non contributory welfare etc
What has identification got to do with it? As for the amount raised, if NI is abolished, income tax would certainly go up.
Everything, as the state pension and JSA would still be contributory based on NI contributions and NI could also be directed as well to health and social care funding.
I agree too increasing NI in those areas avoids income tax having to rise to fund them instead
There's no reason the state pension and JSA can't be contributory based on Income Tax thresholds.
Why should health be funded by a tax not paid by everyone? Avoiding income tax being raised by raising income tax on a minority of people which is all NI is, is not an improvement. It means higher income tax for those who pay it.
Real income tax would be lower for workers if it was fairly and evenly applied.
You're missing the point here. He wants taxes on workers to go up and taxes on the retired to go down. That's his goal. He gives no fucks about people earning £20-40k struggling as long as 60+ people keep turning out to vote Tory.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
No we need to make NI more distinctive and ensure it is ring fenced to only fund the state pension, healthcare and JSA
I've not read a convincing reason why? If it's about keeping track of the number of years of contributions, you can do that with income tax.
More complicated though to identify given income tax would also have to still fund defence, education, culture, local government, the police and legal aid, non contributory welfare etc
What has identification got to do with it? As for the amount raised, if NI is abolished, income tax would certainly go up.
Everything, as the state pension and JSA would still be contributory based on NI contributions and NI could also be directed as well to health and social care funding.
I agree too increasing NI in those areas avoids income tax having to rise to fund them instead
There's no reason the state pension and JSA can't be contributory based on Income Tax thresholds.
Why should health be funded by a tax not paid by everyone? Avoiding income tax being raised by raising income tax on a minority of people which is all NI is, is not an improvement. It means higher income tax for those who pay it.
Real income tax would be lower for workers if it was fairly and evenly applied.
It would cost more to administer however rather than a hypothecated NI.
NI was set up originally to fund healthcare in part and paying into it to fund only state pensions, JSA and healthcare returns it to more of the insurance model it was set up for. We could also go down the continental model. In France for example you pay doctor's or dentists fees up front and the state refunds 70% of the costs or 100% for long term ailments funded via compulsory state insurance. Thus patients pay more of the costs for standard medical treatment while the state still covers most of it and all of it for longer term ailments, reducing the cost to the state. You can also buy additional private insurance too.
Good morning everybody. I wonder what the PB brains trust would advise. Mrs C and I are on holiday some 350 miles from home. We have, thanks to topping up when we arrived last Thursday, more than enough fuel to get home. However, part of the plans for the holiday include a week-long visit to N Wales, starting on Thursday, adding a further 275 or so miles to our trip.
I am beginning to wonder; should we call off the N Wales leg?
No. I think motorway service stations will always have fuel, though you'll obviously pay a bit more for it.
No, you will be ripped off. All motorway fuel.is a rip.off
Motorway fuel is indeed a rip-off, but at least they'll have fuel and there's unlikely to be queues. That may be worth paying extra to OKC.
They aren’t a rip off.
In addition to the price of the fuel you are paying for time and convenience.
I never buy there as I plan not to
No motorway fuel on the A1 yday so the point is moot. And actually some of the cheapest fuel can be found on the motorway. Or at least the A1.
Cheapest fuel I found on my travels was consistently in Hartlepool.....
I suspect Roger is on his way there now to top up his gas-guzzler (assuming it doesn't run on Red Champagne!)
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
Low earning?
27k is not very far below the median salary.
27k isn't far below the median salary, the new proposed starting point of £20k or so is well below the median salary.
That threshold has already been dismissed as too low.
The Augar review of post-18 education in 2019 recommended the threshold be lowered to £23,000, median non-graduate earnings at the time, and the Higher Education Policy Institute think-tank this year modelled a cut to less than £20,000.
No final decisions on the new level have been taken, but one minister said a £20,000 threshold was considered to be “a bit low”.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
90% of over 65s did not go to university, so it was affordable to pay taxes to subsidise the courses of the top 10% of the population who did.
Now over 40% of 18 year olds go to university, funding them all is unaffordable, hence tuition fees
It'd be more affordable if we didn't exempt certain people from paying tax on income received.
Make every pound of income received, whether earned or unearned, subject to the same tax rate and what's unaffordable today might suddenly actually be affordable. That'd include pensions, rent, inheritances etc without any thresholds other than pre-existing income thresholds which presumably for most people are already met.
One way to raise revenues from online would be to ensure that all transactions on platforms like Amazon must be subject to VAT. Currently a plethora of tiny companies can crop up on Amazon and are VAT-exempt which isn't possible inside regular shops.
I believe you can go to Amazon and buy a dress and not have VAT on it, but if you went to Debenhams and bought a dress it must have always had VAT on it.
If someone wishes to open their own website then fair enough to be VAT-exempt until the threshold is met, just as if they'd opened their own physical store, but to suggest Amazon haven't hit the VAT threshold is insane.
That's not a level playing field.
Unless the company is a startup UK company that issue has already been fixed - as part of the new VAT rules that were introduced back in January.
And in the cases that remain, Amazon is just a combination of payment and market stall provider to a very small UK business.
Amazon are not a stall provider, they're a retailer. They should be liable to every bit as much tax for anything they retail every bit as much as any transaction that went through the tills at Debenhams would.
When Debenhams were trading they'd have clothes divided by brand etc in little 'stalls' but none of them would be VAT exempt since Debenhams were retailer for all of them. Just as Amazon are for everything I buy from them.
No Amazon are both a retailer (anything amazon sells direct) and a market stall provider (everything that is not sold by Amazon directly).
The fact you haven't noticed that fact means you haven't paid much attention to how Amazon actually works...
If they’re simply providing a market stall, then there won’t be a direct financial relationship with the consumer, who will pay the stall holder directly for whatever they are selling.
And if they're merely providing a market stall then that market stall should have its own search engine etc and not be a part of the retailers own search engine.
Search engines and marketing arrangements are all fine, what’s important is to follow the money.
You pay a small business = no VAT. You pay a $2trn business = full VAT.
but you are buying a good off a small business - who currently receive 90% or so of the amount I pay Amazon Payments for the good.
If you add 20% VAT to that, that small business is now receiving 71% of the money I paid, because I bought from Amazon rather than their own website which I would never have found to purchase from.
No, you’re buying the good from a massive multinational, who is buying it from a small business. Many of which only exist as tax dodges in the first place.
The whole point is to level the playing field between online sales and physical store sales, and between people setting up their own small stores and using someone else’s large store.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
So apprentices can cope with the snobbery given their higher bank balances and the fact many can buy a property in their 20s or early 30s (certainly outside London and the South East) unlike most students
Indeed. So why drive kids down the uni route when it won't gain them much? Why 50%? why not 40%? 30%? 20%?
It's a random figure plucked out of Blair's backside because it sounds good. Yet even if it was based on evidence, then there should have been another policy about further education opportunities for those who did not go.
My nephew got the grades to go into uni, but chose to get a job. He's worked hard, and is on a salary much greater than his friends who went. He's probably worked harder than them, and has no student debts. Yet if he was in certain industries, there would be a barrier - a paper ceiling - through which he could not burst. Sometimes that ceiling may be necessary - science, for instance. In most it is not.
Fortunately he's chosen an industry where that is less likely.
Much of the public sector, including local government, seems to require degrees that are unnecessary for the job.
What happened with degrees - from the perspective of a graduate and hirer of staff.
When Blair talked of expanding degree jobs, he was thinking of the type of jobs that Russell Group (and up) are the feeders for.
The massive expansion with the polys was not done in concert with increasing standards. This created a large number of second class (ha) degrees.
Employers did indeed find that they needed more people with high quality degrees - So the Russell Group grew and large numbers of graduates were recruited from overseas.
In the high end jobs, a 2.1 or above from a Russell Group (or overseas equivalent) became mandated by HR. So if you are hiring, you don't get to see other CVs
So, given the volume of graduates, lower skilled jobs, began demanding degrees. Since they could get them. So, people, who in the past wouldn't have had to have a degree had to get one to get the same quality of job they would have got anyway....
So we now have a situation where there are two glass ceilings
Russell Group Degree ________
Former Poly Degree ________
No degree
The irony was, that back in the day when degrees were much rarer, there was at least some possibility of making it to the top without a degree. Now, it is explicitly forbidden.
In one job, we were doing work for a bank. The bank (well their HR) tried to stop one of the team coming in, since their background checks showed no degree....
We have created an absolute caste system.
We haven't, HR has been allowed to create one because they want an easy life.
I look at CVs based on what work they've done, it makes zero sense for me to restrict them to those who went to Uni when what matters is do they know how this software that has changed completely over the past 2 years currently works.
I don't know whether the writer has any affiliation with the Labour Party, but the idea that a party should reject PR for its own self interest is deeply offensive. If a party can only command 30-something% of the vote and is incapable of working with other parties, why should they ever get near the levers of power?
What I find more concerning in that piece is this:
PR would make one party very powerful indeed: the Liberal Democrats. In fact, if MPs were allocated proportionately, the Lib Dems (and the SDP and Liberals before them) would have decided nearly every single British government in postwar history.
I reckon FPTP is the only thing keeping the Lib Dems alive.
The cavalier decision making by various governments in the field of energy supply is just astonishing. Here are some examples: our own abandonment of gas storage in 2017, our prospective decommissioning of gas for domestic heating by 2030, the German abandonment of nuclear energy and reliance on gas from Russia while continuing to burn lignite (brown coal) until the mid-2030s.
I think the proposition that we are going to completely replace tens of millions of gas boilers in houses, shops and offices in 10 years and replace them with heat pumps or something else is nothing short of fantastical. It is simply not going to happen. It may be that by the mid 2030s we might be able to stop burning gas just to produce electricity in power stations but changing our domestic source of energy is going to be impossibly difficult.
It's possible to do it by 2025 or so for new builds as you just up the insulation required to ensure it's not required but a lot of old homes are going to be hopelessly difficult to retrofit with enough insulation to make removing a gas boiler practical.
Can you clarify on that "hard to retrofit"? How many do you think there are?
And how much insulation is necessary to make a removing a gas boiler practical?
(My answers are less than 10% of the stock, and probably anything over an EPC C grade).
That's not usually very expensive, so relatively minor imo.
Recently I had a complete set of radiators replaced in a house because it was roughly the same as a fee for a Powerflush of the old ones.
Plus anybody sensible may well have put larger ones in anyway, as modern boilers run at lower temperatures (mine = down to 35C) and lower temperature is better efficiency-wise as a matter of course.
F1: to win in Turkey: Bottas 17 Norris 21 Perez 21
Highlights what an outstanding season Norris is having.
If McLaren can deliver the car, then Norris and Ricciardo are a formidable lineup. Similar for Leclerc and Sainz, actually.
If Riccardo can start to bring it on Saturdays as well as he has done on Sundays the last two races McLaren have got the best driver line up on the grid IMO. A race winning car next season would completely shake up the sport, for the better as Mercedes vs RBR has become dull.
Norris is remarkably consistent. So why do the Sky F1 team make so much more fuss over the gobby shunter Russell? 🤔
Steamer should feel very uncomfortable listening to Rachel Reeves speech as she is far ahead of any of them
You are bizarre, Big G. Why on earth would Starmer be very uncomfortable if his Shadow Chancellor has made a good speech (I haven't listened to it yet)? He'll be delighted, over the moon. Would Boris be very uncomfortable if Rishi made a good speech? I rather doubt it.
On the latter, absolutely he would. Boris is petty and paranoid man. He floated the idea of demoting Rishi to foreign office from chancellor because he was becoming too popular as the face of the treasury response to the virus.
Wasn't it health sec, which really would have been demotion. CofE to FS is fairly standard. It gets a rival out of the way, but probably strengthens their CV for when the time is ripe.
And as for Starmer, one of the reasonable concerns people have is that even if he's OK, his team are nutters. From that point of view, Reeves's raised profile is good news.
Aiui, the health secretary stuff wasn't a serious consideration, especially since The Saj had only just been installed. He wanted Truss in as Chancellor and Rishi to move aside to FS. My understanding is that Team Rishi told the PM to get fucked and said they'd have to sack him so they backed down.
Gosh. That I didn't know. Two quick thoughts;
1 A PM who genuinely wants a major move but can't have it is a PM in a weak position.
2 Rishi is a bit dimmer than I thought. The next few years are going to be fiscally grim. The best thing for Rishi's ambitions is to leave No 11 while he is still popular, and let someone like Truss scoop up all the poop.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
I don't know whether the writer has any affiliation with the Labour Party, but the idea that a party should reject PR for its own self interest is deeply offensive. If a party can only command 30-something% of the vote and is incapable of working with other parties, why should they ever get near the levers of power?
What I find more concerning in that piece is this:
PR would make one party very powerful indeed: the Liberal Democrats. In fact, if MPs were allocated proportionately, the Lib Dems (and the SDP and Liberals before them) would have decided nearly every single British government in postwar history.
I reckon FPTP is the only thing keeping the Lib Dems alive.
Isn't that based on the rather naive assumption that voting behaviour wouldn't change in response to a new voting system?
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
I agree with you that its a good idea, except they've got no clue it seems as to how they would do so. So they're saying it will be done but we're to take it on faith that they'll have a way to do it.
As it happens I agree that its the beginnings of a good policy, they're at least on the right path! That's something at least and I'll give them credit for that, first time in many years as either in Shadow or in office that Labour's Chancellor spokesperson seems to understand something about the issues in economy.
But I'll wait before saying its a good policy until the policy is actually formulated and not just "this sounds good" but without details. To be fair though years before the election "this sounds good" but without details is an OK starting point and better than what Labour have had for many years!
Thanks. As you're broadly sympathetic to the aims, I expect the Tories (yes, I know you're not one) to nick it any time soon.
I seem to remember when I was drafting a possible policy agenda for SKS that this was one of my suggestions. I think that there is quite a compelling case to try and rebalance the tax demands between bricks and clicks. Shops are not only a good source of employment, they keep our city centres vibrant and are more accessible to the elderly etc.
But you cannot simply abolish £15bn of tax revenues without having an alternative when we already have an unsustainable deficit. That is just lazy.
This is the issue here - you need to understand what you plan to tax, why you plan to do so and how you plan to do so.
You also when talking about retail need to understand why people purchase stuff online and it's usually for reasons where the high street could never compete.
Only after that can you start talking about how you will give people tax breaks as otherwise it's a question of where are you going to get that £xbn from.
And there are serious amount of structural issues within our tax system but there isn't any easy solutions as all changes will impact people's behaviour and that might have unintended consequences.
But the first part of the policy ought to make it easier to repurpose high street properties large numbers of which are just sitting vacant.
The easiest shift would be to add 2.5% to VAT (raising £16.5m based on 19/20 total VAT receipts of £130bn)
Spend £15bn of that to reduce business rates. In theory that should keep the ultimate payer (the retail customer) the same while giving the high street store more flexibility to cut their prices if they want
The cavalier decision making by various governments in the field of energy supply is just astonishing. Here are some examples: our own abandonment of gas storage in 2017, our prospective decommissioning of gas for domestic heating by 2030, the German abandonment of nuclear energy and reliance on gas from Russia while continuing to burn lignite (brown coal) until the mid-2030s.
I think the proposition that we are going to completely replace tens of millions of gas boilers in houses, shops and offices in 10 years and replace them with heat pumps or something else is nothing short of fantastical. It is simply not going to happen. It may be that by the mid 2030s we might be able to stop burning gas just to produce electricity in power stations but changing our domestic source of energy is going to be impossibly difficult.
If the roll out of smart meters is any indication then you are correct. It will be 2060 before gas boilers are replaced!
I've got solar panels and currently get deemed export. The situation as to whether I'd HAVE to go to metered export, and whether that'd be better for me is clear as mud. I might be better off, I have no idea but if I move over I won't be able to move back.
I've asked both the electric and the FIT company, noone seems to know or care...
May not help, however..
Briefly, you need to compare the Feed in Tariff rate (if you get FITs) vs the proffered payment per unit for your alternative electric contract. Then consider the value of the 20 year index linked guaranteed payment on the FIT scheme, and how much of your deemed exported electricity you actually use (if you use say 75% of it - very unusual - any measurement will be below the deemed 50%).
(If you want to use all of your export you install a divert device such as an "Immersun" which diverts all exported electricity to a load such as a house-battery or a water tank or your slab heating. You still get the "deemed" 50%).
FIT rates were heavily reduced on Feb 9 2016 (from about 11p to about 4p), and for pv installs before that date sticking with the FIT is a no-brainer imo. Mine got in just before that.
For PVs after that date, you need to consider as above, and consider 2 way meters and tariffs.
If your date is after the FIT scheme closed then you have to look around anyway.
At the moment the export tariffs have aiui a floor level set by the Govt Smart Export Guarantee level.
eg Bulb Energy have an export tariff of 5.57p/kWh if you are with them for electric, or 3p if you are with somebody else.
There are special tariffs around, such as the Tesla Energy Plan from Octopus, which charges you ~11p for elec, and pays you ~11p for exports. With a fairly high usage cap. You have to have a Tesla Powerwall and PV panels installed. That is worth a look. Alternatively you can just feed your PV energy into Powerwall with a divert device.
I get about 13p per export unit index linked, so I am sticking with FIT unless something changed.
I think once you leave FIT, you can't go back.
Watch out for misleading marketing which describes an export meter setup as a "Feed in Tariff".
Does that help?
Get a battery. That way you store energy in the day for when you need it, so export less. And stay deemed so you get paid for the energy you use yourself.
Also, in the winter when solar cells provide nothing, fill the battery overnight at really cheap rates and then use it when rates are higher.
Though the Union has clearly still won West Germany on that map, Merkel departing has lost them East Germany however and the SPD made enough gains in the North West of Germany and on the list to win most seats overall
No, the SPD got more (party) votes than the CDU/CSU in every state East and West except Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
"Don't mention the Sturgeon war! Tory ministers 'are ordered not to talk about Scottish independence' amid fears it just fuels separatist drive Ministers told not to engage with SNP or even make a positive case for the union They admit it would be 'very hard' for unionists to win new referendum currently They want to focus on Sturgeon and SNP's record amid NHS and drug crises"
They've certainly maintained an iron discipline on the not making a positive case for the union thing.
2014 was a once in a generation referendum, they don't need to until a generation has elapsed since then.
Union matters are reserved to Westminster so as long as this Tory government is in power it can refuse indyref2 and nothing Sturgeon can do about it
So why do Scottish Tories talk about nothing else? If they don’t need to talk about independence, they could talk about their policies. Oh, wait!
As opposing indyref 2 and independence has got the Scottish Tories to their highest voteshare since 1979, the independence and Union question is as much a vote winner for them as the SNP, even if a disaster for Scottish Labour as they get squeezed
Oh, so 50% or so is the same as 25% or so?
But I see it's time to change the topic of discussion to Deltic diesels or toy buying for Christmas.
In terms of the Union the UK government gets the final say so who is the UK government is all that matters.
I am just saying it boosted the vote for the Scottish Tories both at Westminster and the subsidiary Holyrood parliament
No panic buying, just buying through the year as we have always done. You pay more if you buy at Christmas.
Eg my eldest daughter's main present we are giving her this year is going to be the Lego Harry Potter Great Hall. Normally £90, but a couple of months ago Amazon had it for £45 as a 24 hour flash sale. Why not buy it then?
She's really into both Lego and Harry Potter. I can't imagine that changing in the next three months.
Blimey, I hope she doesn't read PB.
You wouldn’t want her to learn that her Dad isn’t willing to pay full price for her…
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
Low earning?
27k is not very far below the median salary.
27k isn't far below the median salary, the new proposed starting point of £20k or so is well below the median salary.
That threshold has already been dismissed as too low.
The Augar review of post-18 education in 2019 recommended the threshold be lowered to £23,000, median non-graduate earnings at the time, and the Higher Education Policy Institute think-tank this year modelled a cut to less than £20,000.
No final decisions on the new level have been taken, but one minister said a £20,000 threshold was considered to be “a bit low”.
Though the Union has clearly still won West Germany on that map, Merkel departing has lost them East Germany however and the SPD made enough gains in the North West of Germany and on the list to win most seats overall
No, the SPD got more (party) votes than the CDU/CSU in every state East and West except Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.
Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg were also part of West Germany, so as I said the Union won most constituencies in the old West Germany overall even if they lost East Germany
F1: to win in Turkey: Bottas 17 Norris 21 Perez 21
Highlights what an outstanding season Norris is having.
If McLaren can deliver the car, then Norris and Ricciardo are a formidable lineup. Similar for Leclerc and Sainz, actually.
If Riccardo can start to bring it on Saturdays as well as he has done on Sundays the last two races McLaren have got the best driver line up on the grid IMO. A race winning car next season would completely shake up the sport, for the better as Mercedes vs RBR has become dull.
Norris is remarkably consistent. So why do the Sky F1 team make so much more fuss over the gobby shunter Russell? 🤔
Russell is going to drive the best car next season and will be in the same team as Hamilton, supposedly on equal racing terms. It could end in tears as we saw with Hamilton vs Alonso in 2007 and Hamilton vs Rosberg in 2016. Norris vs Riccardo has got a lot less combustibility and McLaren aren't, at least not yet, considered a front running team just the best of the rest. Though the last two races a McLaren could/should have won on merit.
NEW: No10 has rejected calls from @SadiqKhan and @unisontheunion to prioritise fuel for key workers - saying if people move back to their "routine behaviours" when filling up that should relieve the current pressures
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
A £30 billion promise, where is it coming from if not business rates
No detail whatsoever on what might replace rates - but they are quite correct in recognising that rates valuations now bear little or no reaction to either the value of properties, or the ability of businesses to pay.
Again clueless > attack relief on income from buy-to-let properties but no mention of the ability to expense interest on buy to let properties held within a limited company.
Yep it's niche but they shouldn't be looking at relief you need to look at a sector / asset and work out how best can we extract tax from it....
Also high street shops can't and won't up sticks and move to France or Ireland but all manufacturing and all invisible firms such as internet firms can.
What you you take tax relief off on rental properties? And how much would it raise?
Do they really want to prevent tax relief on things like improved kitchens, central heating, and double glazed windows and the cost of maintenance? Would cause either increased rents or properties to leave the market.
Even now, you don't get it on eg insulation, rather you have to claim it against CGT when you sell the property in 10-20 years time.
I don't know whether the writer has any affiliation with the Labour Party, but the idea that a party should reject PR for its own self interest is deeply offensive. If a party can only command 30-something% of the vote and is incapable of working with other parties, why should they ever get near the levers of power?
What I find more concerning in that piece is this:
PR would make one party very powerful indeed: the Liberal Democrats. In fact, if MPs were allocated proportionately, the Lib Dems (and the SDP and Liberals before them) would have decided nearly every single British government in postwar history.
I reckon FPTP is the only thing keeping the Lib Dems alive.
Really? I'd have thought they'd probably do better. Certainly in terms of converting those votes into actual MPs. You think that their voter base would fall even further? I don't see it, but I'm listening.
F1: to win in Turkey: Bottas 17 Norris 21 Perez 21
Highlights what an outstanding season Norris is having.
If McLaren can deliver the car, then Norris and Ricciardo are a formidable lineup. Similar for Leclerc and Sainz, actually.
If Riccardo can start to bring it on Saturdays as well as he has done on Sundays the last two races McLaren have got the best driver line up on the grid IMO. A race winning car next season would completely shake up the sport, for the better as Mercedes vs RBR has become dull.
Norris is remarkably consistent. So why do the Sky F1 team make so much more fuss over the gobby shunter Russell? 🤔
Because Russell is potentially a better driver (he won F2, Norris came second).
Either way the next few years should be interesting, we have 4 top notch 21 year old F1 drivers all at different top teams.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Steamer should feel very uncomfortable listening to Rachel Reeves speech as she is far ahead of any of them
You are bizarre, Big G. Why on earth would Starmer be very uncomfortable if his Shadow Chancellor has made a good speech (I haven't listened to it yet)? He'll be delighted, over the moon. Would Boris be very uncomfortable if Rishi made a good speech? I rather doubt it.
On the latter, absolutely he would. Boris is petty and paranoid man. He floated the idea of demoting Rishi to foreign office from chancellor because he was becoming too popular as the face of the treasury response to the virus.
Wasn't it health sec, which really would have been demotion. CofE to FS is fairly standard. It gets a rival out of the way, but probably strengthens their CV for when the time is ripe.
And as for Starmer, one of the reasonable concerns people have is that even if he's OK, his team are nutters. From that point of view, Reeves's raised profile is good news.
Aiui, the health secretary stuff wasn't a serious consideration, especially since The Saj had only just been installed. He wanted Truss in as Chancellor and Rishi to move aside to FS. My understanding is that Team Rishi told the PM to get fucked and said they'd have to sack him so they backed down.
Gosh. That I didn't know. Two quick thoughts;
1 A PM who genuinely wants a major move but can't have it is a PM in a weak position.
2 Rishi is a bit dimmer than I thought. The next few years are going to be fiscally grim. The best thing for Rishi's ambitions is to leave No 11 while he is still popular, and let someone like Truss scoop up all the poop.
Making a move from No. 11 is easier though and given who Rishi needs to win over (people like me) he's much more likely to do it from there than as FS.
I'm very interested to see any party polling since the shortages, but it seems there's still none to contemplate as yet. The Starmer/Johnson leadership poll is interesting, but the fieldwork for it seems to have started almost two weeks ago, and finished just before.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
OK, so where is the £15bn as it won't be coming from Amazon and co as Labour hasn't yet devised a means of collecting £15bn in tax from them.
I'm sure you and others will be listening to Rachel Reeves shortly. At this stage of the electoral cycle, it wouldn't be sensible to say precisely where the money's coming from, because things change. It will be in the manifesto in time for the next GE campaign.
I listened to Rachel a couple of times this weekend and her interview with Nick Robinson is worth watching on catch up
At school she won a British under 14 girls chess championship and her cv dwarfs the shadow cabinet with time at the Bank of England, British Embassy in Washington and HBOS
Labour should be falling over backwards to promote her to leader, she may even attract me to her policies but labour have to divest themselves of a lot of nonsense first
I haven't listened, but will - thank you.
Did she spend a lot of time going on about how awful the Tories are or did she set out the problems facing the country and broad ideas on how to address them and/or a vision for where to get to? If it's worth listening to, then I suspect the latter.
She's incredibly boring and lacks revolutionary zeal. She's exactly the type of person a never-labour voter would think would make a good leader of the Labour Party.
Sounds much like Starmer!
I must admit I can't remember ever having heard her, although I suspect I must have done.
Edit: And BigG has in fact voted Labour in the past, hasn't he? Or doesn't Blair count?
Like Starmer she has an unfortunate droney voice. Not sure if the great British/English voting public is in the mood for sensible centrism delivered in the tones of a bumble bee trapped in a jar.
Yeah just saw her small businesses twitter clip.
Seems pretty stilted and, to use a HYUFD-ism, appears to be SKS in a skirt.
Thinking about the discussion of political orphans, being one myself, and who we would or wouldn't vote for, would have difficulty voting for a party which made it so viscerally clear they didn't like me in terms of my career, my status, my wealth (LOL such as it is).
I know it will be a blow to them to hear that but at some point they will need to reach out to PLM to make a pitch.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
So apprentices can cope with the snobbery given their higher bank balances and the fact many can buy a property in their 20s or early 30s (certainly outside London and the South East) unlike most students
Indeed. So why drive kids down the uni route when it won't gain them much? Why 50%? why not 40%? 30%? 20%?
It's a random figure plucked out of Blair's backside because it sounds good. Yet even if it was based on evidence, then there should have been another policy about further education opportunities for those who did not go.
My nephew got the grades to go into uni, but chose to get a job. He's worked hard, and is on a salary much greater than his friends who went. He's probably worked harder than them, and has no student debts. Yet if he was in certain industries, there would be a barrier - a paper ceiling - through which he could not burst. Sometimes that ceiling may be necessary - science, for instance. In most it is not.
Fortunately he's chosen an industry where that is less likely.
Much of the public sector, including local government, seems to require degrees that are unnecessary for the job.
What happened with degrees - from the perspective of a graduate and hirer of staff.
When Blair talked of expanding degree jobs, he was thinking of the type of jobs that Russell Group (and up) are the feeders for.
The massive expansion with the polys was not done in concert with increasing standards. This created a large number of second class (ha) degrees.
Employers did indeed find that they needed more people with high quality degrees - So the Russell Group grew and large numbers of graduates were recruited from overseas.
In the high end jobs, a 2.1 or above from a Russell Group (or overseas equivalent) became mandated by HR. So if you are hiring, you don't get to see other CVs
So, given the volume of graduates, lower skilled jobs, began demanding degrees. Since they could get them. So, people, who in the past wouldn't have had to have a degree had to get one to get the same quality of job they would have got anyway....
So we now have a situation where there are two glass ceilings
Russell Group Degree ________
Former Poly Degree ________
No degree
The irony was, that back in the day when degrees were much rarer, there was at least some possibility of making it to the top without a degree. Now, it is explicitly forbidden.
In one job, we were doing work for a bank. The bank (well their HR) tried to stop one of the team coming in, since their background checks showed no degree....
We have created an absolute caste system.
We haven't, HR has been allowed to create one because they want an easy life.
I look at CVs based on what work they've done, it makes zero sense for me to restrict them to those who went to Uni when what matters is do they know how this software that has changed completely over the past 2 years currently works.
As that shows most top law firms, many city firms, restrict to Russell group universities and most doctors went to the Russell Group too.
So what is really happening is top jobs are not being restricted to graduates as a whole, only Russell group university graduates.
As I also showed earlier the average graduate not only earns less than the average Russell group graduate but also earns less than top apprentices on average as well
Comments
3 points ahead, 3 years to go is still pretty peachy for a government- what would make the grey trousers of the men in grey suits turn brown?
The issue is that when you look at Amazon you see a single firm called Amazon.
But because I understand how Amazon is built nowadays I see a number of different firms
Amazon Advertising (a $5bn turnover company from what I've seen)
Amazon Payments (which is not subject to VAT as it's financial transactions)
Amazon Warehouse
Amazon Logistics (which will collect from your warehouse at 10pm for next day delivery).
and somewhere down the line
Amazon the Department store....
So the Conservatives could stay in power but they would need confidence and supply from the DUP again or the UUP and TUV
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=Y&CON=39&LAB=36&LIB=9&Reform=2&Green=3&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=23.6&SCOTLAB=19.2&SCOTLIB=6&SCOTReform=0.3&SCOTGreen=1.5&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=47.5&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2019base
Skyr. Bland - and not to most people's taste.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25738-6
Social media platforms attempting to curb abuse and misinformation have been accused of political bias. We deploy neutral social bots who start following different news sources on Twitter, and track them to probe distinct biases emerging from platform mechanisms versus user interactions. We find no strong or consistent evidence of political bias in the news feed. Despite this, the news and information to which U.S. Twitter users are exposed depend strongly on the political leaning of their early connections. The interactions of conservative accounts are skewed toward the right, whereas liberal accounts are exposed to moderate content shifting their experience toward the political center. Partisan accounts, especially conservative ones, tend to receive more followers and follow more automated accounts. Conservative accounts also find themselves in denser communities and are exposed to more low-credibility content.
Seems pretty stilted and, to use a HYUFD-ism, appears to be SKS in a skirt.
Thinking about the discussion of political orphans, being one myself, and who we would or wouldn't vote for, would have difficulty voting for a party which made it so viscerally clear they didn't like me in terms of my career, my status, my wealth (LOL such as it is).
I know it will be a blow to them to hear that but at some point they will need to reach out to PLM to make a pitch.
Or maybe they won't.
Labour just haven't got a fucking clue. Does no one actually fucking think about this stuff before they mindlessly announce spending of more taxpayer money on pie in the sky bullshit. At least with the Tories they announced a huge tax rise with their idiotic spending increases. It's shit but at least part way believable. With Labour nothing is grounded in reality.
But it is minor compared to so many who have far bigger problems
In addition to the price of the fuel you are paying for time and convenience.
I never buy there as I plan not to
I try and buy Christmas stuff early as well. A lot of retailers put the prices up, then claim that they are discounting (still above regular prices) etc etc.
I think it's because they've just done a review of repayment rates and discovered that under the current plans the expected loan repayment rate (think it was 45% or so) won't be met - so the Government has a problem with Higher Education as it would now be cheaper to go back to the pre loan approach.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
You pay a small business = no VAT.
You pay a $2trn business = full VAT.
Bottas 17
Norris 21
Perez 21
Highlights what an outstanding season Norris is having.
If McLaren can deliver the car, then Norris and Ricciardo are a formidable lineup. Similar for Leclerc and Sainz, actually.
You have my sympathies for the arthritis; it's no fun.
I agree too increasing NI in those areas avoids income tax having to rise to fund them instead
And as for Starmer, one of the reasonable concerns people have is that even if he's OK, his team are nutters. From that point of view, Reeves's raised profile is good news.
27k is not very far below the median salary.
If you add 20% VAT to that, that small business is now receiving 71% of the money I paid, because I bought from Amazon rather than their own website which I would never have found to purchase from.
https://twitter.com/jonoread/status/1442405362099961856?s=20
Why should health be funded by a tax not paid by everyone? Avoiding income tax being raised by raising income tax on a minority of people which is all NI is, is not an improvement. It means higher income tax for those who pay it.
Real income tax would be lower for workers if it was fairly and evenly applied.
Now over 40% of 18 year olds go to university, funding them all is unaffordable, hence tuition fees
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
The Augar review of post-18 education in 2019 recommended the threshold be lowered to £23,000, median non-graduate earnings at the time, and the Higher Education Policy Institute think-tank this year modelled a cut to less than £20,000.
No final decisions on the new level have been taken, but one minister said a £20,000 threshold was considered to be “a bit low”.
https://www.ft.com/content/f77fe7ee-6165-427a-8754-e90d22d5689f
Why should young adults who aren't even at the Higher Rate threshold be on a higher real rate of tax than middle aged or retired graduates who are on higher rate of tax but who happen to be older?
"NI payment" is defined by meeting a threshold, there's no reason that threshold can't be met using income tax instead.
When Blair talked of expanding degree jobs, he was thinking of the type of jobs that Russell Group (and up) are the feeders for.
The massive expansion with the polys was not done in concert with increasing standards. This created a large number of second class (ha) degrees.
Employers did indeed find that they needed more people with high quality degrees - So the Russell Group grew and large numbers of graduates were recruited from overseas.
In the high end jobs, a 2.1 or above from a Russell Group (or overseas equivalent) became mandated by HR. So if you are hiring, you don't get to see other CVs
So, given the volume of graduates, lower skilled jobs, began demanding degrees. Since they could get them. So, people, who in the past wouldn't have had to have a degree had to get one to get the same quality of job they would have got anyway....
So we now have a situation where there are two glass ceilings
Russell Group Degree
________
Former Poly Degree
________
No degree
The irony was, that back in the day when degrees were much rarer, there was at least some possibility of making it to the top without a degree. Now, it is explicitly forbidden.
In one job, we were doing work for a bank. The bank (well their HR) tried to stop one of the team coming in, since their background checks showed no degree....
We have created an absolute caste system.
Hey Philip, I think we've got to the point where there will be an 85% tax rate for graduates who were unlucky after graduation.
I don't know whether the writer has any affiliation with the Labour Party, but the idea that a party should reject PR for its own self interest is deeply offensive. If a party can only command 30-something% of the vote and is incapable of working with other parties, why should they ever get near the levers of power?
But I see it's time to change the topic of discussion to Deltic diesels or toy buying for Christmas.
NI was set up originally to fund healthcare in part and paying into it to fund only state pensions, JSA and healthcare returns it to more of the insurance model it was set up for. We could also go down the continental model. In France for example you pay doctor's or dentists fees up front and the state refunds 70% of the costs or 100% for long term ailments funded via compulsory state insurance. Thus patients pay more of the costs for standard medical treatment while the state still covers most of it and all of it for longer term ailments, reducing the cost to the state. You can also buy additional private insurance too.
I suspect Roger is on his way there now to top up his gas-guzzler (assuming it doesn't run on Red Champagne!)
Make every pound of income received, whether earned or unearned, subject to the same tax rate and what's unaffordable today might suddenly actually be affordable. That'd include pensions, rent, inheritances etc without any thresholds other than pre-existing income thresholds which presumably for most people are already met.
The whole point is to level the playing field between online sales and physical store sales, and between people setting up their own small stores and using someone else’s large store.
I look at CVs based on what work they've done, it makes zero sense for me to restrict them to those who went to Uni when what matters is do they know how this software that has changed completely over the past 2 years currently works.
PR would make one party very powerful indeed: the Liberal Democrats. In fact, if MPs were allocated proportionately, the Lib Dems (and the SDP and Liberals before them) would have decided nearly every single British government in postwar history.
I reckon FPTP is the only thing keeping the Lib Dems alive.
Recently I had a complete set of radiators replaced in a house because it was roughly the same as a fee for a Powerflush of the old ones.
Plus anybody sensible may well have put larger ones in anyway, as modern boilers run at lower temperatures (mine = down to 35C) and lower temperature is better efficiency-wise as a matter of course.
1 A PM who genuinely wants a major move but can't have it is a PM in a weak position.
2 Rishi is a bit dimmer than I thought. The next few years are going to be fiscally grim. The best thing for Rishi's ambitions is to leave No 11 while he is still popular, and let someone like Truss scoop up all the poop.
Spend £15bn of that to reduce business rates. In theory that should keep the ultimate payer (the retail customer) the same while giving the high street store more flexibility to cut their prices if they want
(And it includes a crafty £1bn tax increase)
Hopefully I can fill up on Wednesday or else it's £££ for two train tickets.
The first time a Labour leader hasn't been behind the Tory on "best PM" for 13 years.
https://twitter.com/nicholascecil/status/1442428094074212353
Also, in the winter when solar cells provide nothing, fill the battery overnight at really cheap rates and then use it when rates are higher.
I am just saying it boosted the vote for the Scottish Tories both at Westminster and the subsidiary Holyrood parliament
Insanity. Absolute insanity.
https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/ministers-to-decide-whether-to-deploy-soldiers-as-fuel-crisis-worsens
Do they really want to prevent tax relief on things like improved kitchens, central heating, and double glazed windows and the cost of maintenance? Would cause either increased rents or properties to leave the market.
Even now, you don't get it on eg insulation, rather you have to claim it against CGT when you sell the property in 10-20 years time.
Either way the next few years should be interesting, we have 4 top notch 21 year old F1 drivers all at different top teams.
- the first time the pollster has found the Labour leader is not behind in this key rating in 13 year
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/keir-starmer-boris-johnson-ipsos-mori-poll-b957432.html
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Hamilton and Russell will be interesting, though.
Government coalition 49.9%
Opposition parties 50.1%
So time for the most unlikely coalition in history to take over.
So what is really happening is top jobs are not being restricted to graduates as a whole, only Russell group university graduates.
As I also showed earlier the average graduate not only earns less than the average Russell group graduate but also earns less than top apprentices on average as well