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Leicester East – a possible by-election? – politicalbetting.com

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  • The Times are reporting that

    Webbe, who will be sentenced on November 4

    and

    She has vowed to remain an MP while she appeals against the conviction.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/claudia-webbe-mp-faces-jail-for-threats-to-throw-acid-on-love-rival-hc0b8zbtg

    If the sentencing means the recall petition is triggered then does a recall petition need to wait until a possible appeal is heard?
    Yes, Fiona Onasanya is the precedent for that principle.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,631
    ydoethur said:

    The Times are reporting that

    Webbe, who will be sentenced on November 4

    and

    She has vowed to remain an MP while she appeals against the conviction.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/claudia-webbe-mp-faces-jail-for-threats-to-throw-acid-on-love-rival-hc0b8zbtg

    Will she have to apply for leave to appeal, or is the right automatic in criminal cases?

    Edit - have to say if even 50% of what was reported was accurate, she has no chance on appeal anyway. How can ‘I’ll send those naked pictures of you to your daughters’ be anything other than a crime under the law as it stands? And it’s not as though it was her word against another person’s word. There was a recording.

    She genuinely seems to be both incredibly arrogant and deeply disturbed.
    One way to cut down waiting times for courts would be to reduce appeals thereby freeing up court time. There needs to be a fault of process or new evidence, not just a dislike of the verdict.
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,747
    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,582
    moonshine said:

    Good morning, everyone.

    Daft comments by Prince William regarding space exploration.

    Prince William needs to learn about the Overview Effect, something many politicians might benefit from:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

    Also, the amount that space hardware et al has been used to monitor and raise awareness of the climate, and climate change. As an example, solid evidence for the Antarctic ozone hole came from the Nimbus 7 satellite in the mid 1980s. (But only when they started looking for it after being alerted by scientists at the British Antarctic Survey; when they looked back at the Nimbus data, the hole was visible from 1976...)
    Is there a difference between scientific space flights and tourism space flights?

    Space exploration is good and should be encouraged.

    Space tourism is worth allowing to grow, but if it becomes big should be very highly taxed imo.
    Musk last week called for a carbon tax, noting it would also impact SpaceX. Space tourism will help bring down the cost of space flight to the general benefit of science and exploration.
    I’m sure he’s happy to tack a few bucks onto the cost of SpaceX launches, if it means his competitors in the much larger car business have their costs raised by a few billion bucks.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,631
    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 60,216
    In case you missed it, Labour’s shadow minister for women,
    @TaiwoOwatemi, just came out in support of the attacks on Professor Kathleen Stock.


    https://twitter.com/PaulEmbery/status/1448418546275471361?s=20
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,563

    Good morning, everyone.

    Daft comments by Prince William regarding space exploration.

    Prince William needs to learn about the Overview Effect, something many politicians might benefit from:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

    Also, the amount that space hardware et al has been used to monitor and raise awareness of the climate, and climate change. As an example, solid evidence for the Antarctic ozone hole came from the Nimbus 7 satellite in the mid 1980s. (But only when they started looking for it after being alerted by scientists at the British Antarctic Survey; when they looked back at the Nimbus data, the hole was visible from 1976...)
    Has it healed up?
    It's getting there:
    "Ozone on track to heal completely in our lifetime, UN environment agency declares on World Day."
    https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/09/1046452

    There have been some minor setbacks in the past few years, believed caused by CFC production in China (boo, hiss!) - but it looks like these reverses have recently been reversed.

    The Montreal Protocol really is an amazing story of global cooperation: first firm proof of the hole discovered in the mid-1980s, worldwide legislation banning CFCs and similar chemicals came with the Montreal Protocol in 1987. Amazing speed for international legislation.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 15,769

    HYUFD said:

    rpjs said:

    HYUFD said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    New York? When Biden has a tax and spend agenda bigger than any US president since LBJ.

    Income tax has not risen, inheritance tax has not risen, the only thing that has risen in the UK is NI to fund the extra resources the NHS needed post Covid and the costs of furlough.

    Rich people have always and will always move to Switzerland and Singapore because they have lower taxes and less public spending. However since 2019 more Tory voters are working class RedWall voters, not wealthy financiers
    My gross salary here in New York is about twice what I would make in my role in London, maybe more, and my overall federal/state tax take, including NI equiv, is about 40%, which I’d be paying in income tax alone in the UK.

    If Biden does roll back the Trump tax reforms, if it includes a repeal of the SALT cap (a limit on how much state and local tax payments can be deducted from federal taxable income, and which would be very popular in high-tax blue states like New York), then we’d actually be better off!
    Biden is still raising income tax and CGT, Boris is not.

    The US will also have a higher corporation tax rate than the UK once the Biden tax rises go through the Democratic Congress and will do so even after Sunak raises corporation tax to 25% as Biden will raise corporation tax to 28%
    For anyone working Boris did raise income tax by 2.5%

    Calling it NI instead of income tax is pure sophistry. A tax by any other name is still a tax.

    If Boris introduced a 25% tax on inheritances, with an extremely lower threshold, calling it "insurance" and sending it to the NHS then I doubt you'd be as quick to play this "its not a tax" bullshit game.
    Tory tax rises are pretty much perfectly calibrated to fall least on pensioners and the kind of extremely wealthy people who bankroll the Tory party.
  • Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
  • felixfelix Posts: 15,164
    isam said:

    The Times are reporting that

    Webbe, who will be sentenced on November 4

    and

    She has vowed to remain an MP while she appeals against the conviction.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/claudia-webbe-mp-faces-jail-for-threats-to-throw-acid-on-love-rival-hc0b8zbtg

    She sounds absolutely crackers from the courtroom quotes. Love this one

    “I am not mad, I am a member of parliament.”
    Love it - best non-sequitor of the Millenium!
  • HYUFD said:

    rpjs said:

    HYUFD said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    New York? When Biden has a tax and spend agenda bigger than any US president since LBJ.

    Income tax has not risen, inheritance tax has not risen, the only thing that has risen in the UK is NI to fund the extra resources the NHS needed post Covid and the costs of furlough.

    Rich people have always and will always move to Switzerland and Singapore because they have lower taxes and less public spending. However since 2019 more Tory voters are working class RedWall voters, not wealthy financiers
    My gross salary here in New York is about twice what I would make in my role in London, maybe more, and my overall federal/state tax take, including NI equiv, is about 40%, which I’d be paying in income tax alone in the UK.

    If Biden does roll back the Trump tax reforms, if it includes a repeal of the SALT cap (a limit on how much state and local tax payments can be deducted from federal taxable income, and which would be very popular in high-tax blue states like New York), then we’d actually be better off!
    Biden is still raising income tax and CGT, Boris is not.

    The US will also have a higher corporation tax rate than the UK once the Biden tax rises go through the Democratic Congress and will do so even after Sunak raises corporation tax to 25% as Biden will raise corporation tax to 28%
    For anyone working Boris did raise income tax by 2.5%

    Calling it NI instead of income tax is pure sophistry. A tax by any other name is still a tax.

    If Boris introduced a 25% tax on inheritances, with an extremely lower threshold, calling it "insurance" and sending it to the NHS then I doubt you'd be as quick to play this "its not a tax" bullshit game.
    Tory tax rises are pretty much perfectly calibrated to fall least on pensioners and the kind of extremely wealthy people who bankroll the Tory party.
    Of course other features of NI are:

    NI threshold of £9568 vs Income Tax £12570
    NI drops by 10%! when earnings hit £50270

    It really is a protect the rich, punish the poor, punish workers tax.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,631

    In case you missed it, Labour’s shadow minister for women,
    @TaiwoOwatemi, just came out in support of the attacks on Professor Kathleen Stock.


    https://twitter.com/PaulEmbery/status/1448418546275471361?s=20

    Where does that letter support attacks?

    It just seems to point out that her role in the LGBT Alliance conflicts with the policy of her University, and also the position of the Union and Labour Party.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,563

    Good morning, everyone.

    Daft comments by Prince William regarding space exploration.

    Prince William needs to learn about the Overview Effect, something many politicians might benefit from:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

    Also, the amount that space hardware et al has been used to monitor and raise awareness of the climate, and climate change. As an example, solid evidence for the Antarctic ozone hole came from the Nimbus 7 satellite in the mid 1980s. (But only when they started looking for it after being alerted by scientists at the British Antarctic Survey; when they looked back at the Nimbus data, the hole was visible from 1976...)
    Is there a difference between scientific space flights and tourism space flights?

    Space exploration is good and should be encouraged.

    Space tourism is worth allowing to grow, but if it becomes big should be very highly taxed imo.
    As well as being a tourist vehicle, Blue Origin's New Shepard can be used for science.

    They have already performed several suborbital scientific flights, with a payload of varied experiments.
    https://www.sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/gsr-2021-0005
    https://news.satnews.com/2021/08/18/blue-origins-next-new-shepard-flight-set-with-18-commercial-payloads-nasa-lunar-landing-tech-demo/

    Suborbital gives you several advantages over orbital experiments: cheaper, quicker to organise, and you can get the payload back much quicker. Sounding rockets are occasionally used for this, but in New Shepard you can fly experiments with researchers.

    Virgin Galactic's SS3 can also be used for research - if anyone is brave enough to fly in it ...
  • Good morning, everyone.

    Daft comments by Prince William regarding space exploration.

    Prince William needs to learn about the Overview Effect, something many politicians might benefit from:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

    Also, the amount that space hardware et al has been used to monitor and raise awareness of the climate, and climate change. As an example, solid evidence for the Antarctic ozone hole came from the Nimbus 7 satellite in the mid 1980s. (But only when they started looking for it after being alerted by scientists at the British Antarctic Survey; when they looked back at the Nimbus data, the hole was visible from 1976...)
    Is there a difference between scientific space flights and tourism space flights?

    Space exploration is good and should be encouraged.

    Space tourism is worth allowing to grow, but if it becomes big should be very highly taxed imo.
    As well as being a tourist vehicle, Blue Origin's New Shepard can be used for science.

    They have already performed several suborbital scientific flights, with a payload of varied experiments.
    https://www.sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/gsr-2021-0005
    https://news.satnews.com/2021/08/18/blue-origins-next-new-shepard-flight-set-with-18-commercial-payloads-nasa-lunar-landing-tech-demo/

    Suborbital gives you several advantages over orbital experiments: cheaper, quicker to organise, and you can get the payload back much quicker. Sounding rockets are occasionally used for this, but in New Shepard you can fly experiments with researchers.

    Virgin Galactic's SS3 can also be used for research - if anyone is brave enough to fly in it ...
    Yes, currently that is true, and I think it should be encouraged to grow.

    If and when they get to the stage when they are doing hundreds or more flights a week though then the marginal scientific advancement per flight will be negligible, and it is at that sort of point where I would start to tax it heavily.
  • TazTaz Posts: 14,372

    In case you missed it, Labour’s shadow minister for women,
    @TaiwoOwatemi, just came out in support of the attacks on Professor Kathleen Stock.


    https://twitter.com/PaulEmbery/status/1448418546275471361?s=20

    "Women"

    I thought she was one of the saner members of the new intake as well.
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118
    edited October 2021
    Foxy said:

    In case you missed it, Labour’s shadow minister for women,
    @TaiwoOwatemi, just came out in support of the attacks on Professor Kathleen Stock.


    https://twitter.com/PaulEmbery/status/1448418546275471361?s=20

    Where does that letter support attacks?

    It just seems to point out that her role in the LGBT Alliance conflicts with the policy of her University, and also the position of the Union and Labour Party.
    I think you’ve added a letter there that is key to the whole furore
  • Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    Migration from Australia to the UK may have become easier, but I'm not aware of Australia having relaxed their rules for UK immigration post Brexit. Is that correct?
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,132
    Sandpit said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rpjs said:

    HYUFD said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    New York? When Biden has a tax and spend agenda bigger than any US president since LBJ.

    Income tax has not risen, inheritance tax has not risen, the only thing that has risen in the UK is NI to fund the extra resources the NHS needed post Covid and the costs of furlough.

    Rich people have always and will always move to Switzerland and Singapore because they have lower taxes and less public spending. However since 2019 more Tory voters are working class RedWall voters, not wealthy financiers
    My gross salary here in New York is about twice what I would make in my role in London, maybe more, and my overall federal/state tax take, including NI equiv, is about 40%, which I’d be paying in income tax alone in the UK.

    If Biden does roll back the Trump tax reforms, if it includes a repeal of the SALT cap (a limit on how much state and local tax payments can be deducted from federal taxable income, and which would be very popular in high-tax blue states like New York), then we’d actually be better off!
    My property taxes in LA are $77,000/year. If Biden repeals the SALT cap it will save me a lot of money.
    $77,000 a year in property taxes, yet California is still bankrupt, but the recall of the govenor failed?

    Not sure I really understand the USA sometimes.
    That's interesting - Ca says a little under one percent of "assessed value", with a hard limit increase of 2% per year.

    Yet here we do not yet have a consensus on a proportional to value approach, and we are told that continuous updating of value is impractical.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,631

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    Considering that Australia has been closed for 18 months, I don't find that credible.

    We used to be free to move anywhere in the continent with no red tape, but now we cannot. By all means argue that FOM caused a lot of inward migration here, but undoubtedly losing it has diminished our freedom.

    I am rich enough to be able to retire to the Med if I choose, but money always makes things easier. Still there is always Skegness for the lower income retirees now.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,132
    edited October 2021
    ydoethur said:

    The Times are reporting that

    Webbe, who will be sentenced on November 4

    and

    She has vowed to remain an MP while she appeals against the conviction.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/claudia-webbe-mp-faces-jail-for-threats-to-throw-acid-on-love-rival-hc0b8zbtg

    Will she have to apply for leave to appeal, or is the right automatic in criminal cases?

    Edit - have to say if even 50% of what was reported was accurate, she has no chance on appeal anyway. How can ‘I’ll send those naked pictures of you to your daughters’ be anything other than a crime under the law as it stands? And it’s not as though it was her word against another person’s word. There was a recording.

    She genuinely seems to be both incredibly arrogant and deeply disturbed.
    What are the financial factors? 84k a year whilst it continues, and a payoff if losing in an election (does it apply to a lost recall election?), plus pension contributions for as long as the process takes vs the cost of an Appeal.
  • JonathanJonathan Posts: 21,643

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,747

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    The ability to migrate is about determination and skills, not financial means.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,631
    isam said:

    Foxy said:

    In case you missed it, Labour’s shadow minister for women,
    @TaiwoOwatemi, just came out in support of the attacks on Professor Kathleen Stock.


    https://twitter.com/PaulEmbery/status/1448418546275471361?s=20

    Where does that letter support attacks?

    It just seems to point out that her role in the LGBT Alliance conflicts with the policy of her University, and also the position of the Union and Labour Party.
    I think you’ve added a letter there that is key to the whole furore
    Yes, autocorrect....

    The question is whether her role in an organisation opposing Trans rights and access is compatible with her universities policy.
  • Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    Migration from Australia to the UK may have become easier, but I'm not aware of Australia having relaxed their rules for UK immigration post Brexit. Is that correct?
    The quid pro quo for this agricultural offer is that Britons will get immigration rights in Australia that go beyond anything any country in the world save for New Zealand has achieved.

    At present, Britons under 30 can only get a two-year visa in Australia if they commit to doing agricultural work for a few months - a controversial system.

    In future, any Briton under 35 will be able to apply for a three-year visa without that agricultural stipulation.

    Moreover an economic interest test Australian firms previously had to apply is to be removed, meaning those firms don't have to prioritise hiring Australian nationals.

    This is no small achievement, given Australia has always tended to be extremely reluctant to loosen its visa rules.


    https://news.sky.com/story/why-the-uk-australia-trade-deal-could-have-startling-wider-implications-12333408
  • eekeek Posts: 28,366

    HYUFD said:

    rpjs said:

    HYUFD said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    New York? When Biden has a tax and spend agenda bigger than any US president since LBJ.

    Income tax has not risen, inheritance tax has not risen, the only thing that has risen in the UK is NI to fund the extra resources the NHS needed post Covid and the costs of furlough.

    Rich people have always and will always move to Switzerland and Singapore because they have lower taxes and less public spending. However since 2019 more Tory voters are working class RedWall voters, not wealthy financiers
    My gross salary here in New York is about twice what I would make in my role in London, maybe more, and my overall federal/state tax take, including NI equiv, is about 40%, which I’d be paying in income tax alone in the UK.

    If Biden does roll back the Trump tax reforms, if it includes a repeal of the SALT cap (a limit on how much state and local tax payments can be deducted from federal taxable income, and which would be very popular in high-tax blue states like New York), then we’d actually be better off!
    Biden is still raising income tax and CGT, Boris is not.

    The US will also have a higher corporation tax rate than the UK once the Biden tax rises go through the Democratic Congress and will do so even after Sunak raises corporation tax to 25% as Biden will raise corporation tax to 28%
    For anyone working Boris did raise income tax by 2.5%

    Calling it NI instead of income tax is pure sophistry. A tax by any other name is still a tax.

    If Boris introduced a 25% tax on inheritances, with an extremely lower threshold, calling it "insurance" and sending it to the NHS then I doubt you'd be as quick to play this "its not a tax" bullshit game.
    Tory tax rises are pretty much perfectly calibrated to fall least on pensioners and the kind of extremely wealthy people who bankroll the Tory party.
    IHT tax really doesn't raise that much.

    As I've pointed out here so many times before literally the only thing left to tax is wealth via a separate property tax as it's hard to avoid.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited October 2021
    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Why are you excluding the world to just Europe? Is Europe the only place in the world to you?

    If you migrate to Europe its a bit harder. If you migrate to Australia its a bit easier. Given more people chose to migrate to Australia than Europe even when we had free movement with Europe, overall that seems like a plus to me.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,563

    Good morning, everyone.

    Daft comments by Prince William regarding space exploration.

    Prince William needs to learn about the Overview Effect, something many politicians might benefit from:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

    Also, the amount that space hardware et al has been used to monitor and raise awareness of the climate, and climate change. As an example, solid evidence for the Antarctic ozone hole came from the Nimbus 7 satellite in the mid 1980s. (But only when they started looking for it after being alerted by scientists at the British Antarctic Survey; when they looked back at the Nimbus data, the hole was visible from 1976...)
    Is there a difference between scientific space flights and tourism space flights?

    Space exploration is good and should be encouraged.

    Space tourism is worth allowing to grow, but if it becomes big should be very highly taxed imo.
    As well as being a tourist vehicle, Blue Origin's New Shepard can be used for science.

    They have already performed several suborbital scientific flights, with a payload of varied experiments.
    https://www.sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/gsr-2021-0005
    https://news.satnews.com/2021/08/18/blue-origins-next-new-shepard-flight-set-with-18-commercial-payloads-nasa-lunar-landing-tech-demo/

    Suborbital gives you several advantages over orbital experiments: cheaper, quicker to organise, and you can get the payload back much quicker. Sounding rockets are occasionally used for this, but in New Shepard you can fly experiments with researchers.

    Virgin Galactic's SS3 can also be used for research - if anyone is brave enough to fly in it ...
    Yes, currently that is true, and I think it should be encouraged to grow.

    If and when they get to the stage when they are doing hundreds or more flights a week though then the marginal scientific advancement per flight will be negligible, and it is at that sort of point where I would start to tax it heavily.
    I doubt it'll get to that sort of cadence.

    However, there are many activities of the rich that might need looking at, if you're into taxing for the environment. Private planes don't do much good, and there are thousands in the US. Playboy yachts that pollute the oceans. Fast sports cars, etc, etc.

    And excuses can be made for each, and all, of these.

    (On yachts, an interesting example was the late Paul Allen's Octopus, one of the largest yachts in the world, Yet it as built not just to be a pleasure palace, but also do undersea research and locate shipwrecks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_(yacht) )
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,800
    Foxy said:

    isam said:

    Foxy said:

    In case you missed it, Labour’s shadow minister for women,
    @TaiwoOwatemi, just came out in support of the attacks on Professor Kathleen Stock.


    https://twitter.com/PaulEmbery/status/1448418546275471361?s=20

    Where does that letter support attacks?

    It just seems to point out that her role in the LGBT Alliance conflicts with the policy of her University, and also the position of the Union and Labour Party.
    I think you’ve added a letter there that is key to the whole furore
    Yes, autocorrect....

    The question is whether her role in an organisation opposing Trans rights and access is compatible with her universities policy.
    Whilst I would need to think more about whether I agree completely with the content I must say that is a pretty excellent letter from Taiwo Owatemi. Clear, evidence based, punchy. I like her style. One to watch?
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 15,769
    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Indeed. Important rights and freedoms that people were born with were snatched away from them. And anyone who objected got called a traitor. But apparently we have to move on now.
  • JonathanJonathan Posts: 21,643
    edited October 2021

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Why are you excluding the world to just Europe? Is Europe the only place in the world to you?

    If you migrate to Europe its a bit harder. If you migrate to Australia its a bit easier. Given more people chose to migrate to Australia than Europe even when we had free movement with Europe, overall that seems like a plus to me.
    A bit harder? Come off it. A lot harder. We had the right to settle any across the continent. We could live wherever. Australia was always restricted by its famous points system.

    Quite fancy living abroad when kids finally naff off, it don’t want to disappear to the arse end of nowhere and never see them.

    I’ve lost freedoms that I valued. Why do Brexit folk like to pretend it hasn’t happened..

  • boulayboulay Posts: 5,486
    MattW said:

    ydoethur said:

    The Times are reporting that

    Webbe, who will be sentenced on November 4

    and

    She has vowed to remain an MP while she appeals against the conviction.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/claudia-webbe-mp-faces-jail-for-threats-to-throw-acid-on-love-rival-hc0b8zbtg

    Will she have to apply for leave to appeal, or is the right automatic in criminal cases?

    Edit - have to say if even 50% of what was reported was accurate, she has no chance on appeal anyway. How can ‘I’ll send those naked pictures of you to your daughters’ be anything other than a crime under the law as it stands? And it’s not as though it was her word against another person’s word. There was a recording.

    She genuinely seems to be both incredibly arrogant and deeply disturbed.
    What are the financial factors? 84k a year whilst it continues, and a payoff if losing in an election (does it apply to a lost recall election?), plus pension contributions for as long as the process takes vs the cost of an Appeal.
    Can they not tweak the rules so that on conviction an MP’s salary etc are frozen and held in trust until after any appeal?

    If the appeal is successful then the MP gets paid what has been held - I’m sure if their lawyers believe in the validity and success of the appeal they would be happy to extend a loan to cover this shortfall…..!!

    If the MP knows really that they will lose the appeal then it might make them step down and not appeal saving legal fees etc and allowing them to get on with their future without hanging on for the carrot of salary and expenses etc.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,132
    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    rpjs said:

    HYUFD said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    New York? When Biden has a tax and spend agenda bigger than any US president since LBJ.

    Income tax has not risen, inheritance tax has not risen, the only thing that has risen in the UK is NI to fund the extra resources the NHS needed post Covid and the costs of furlough.

    Rich people have always and will always move to Switzerland and Singapore because they have lower taxes and less public spending. However since 2019 more Tory voters are working class RedWall voters, not wealthy financiers
    My gross salary here in New York is about twice what I would make in my role in London, maybe more, and my overall federal/state tax take, including NI equiv, is about 40%, which I’d be paying in income tax alone in the UK.

    If Biden does roll back the Trump tax reforms, if it includes a repeal of the SALT cap (a limit on how much state and local tax payments can be deducted from federal taxable income, and which would be very popular in high-tax blue states like New York), then we’d actually be better off!
    Biden is still raising income tax and CGT, Boris is not.

    The US will also have a higher corporation tax rate than the UK once the Biden tax rises go through the Democratic Congress and will do so even after Sunak raises corporation tax to 25% as Biden will raise corporation tax to 28%
    For anyone working Boris did raise income tax by 2.5%

    Calling it NI instead of income tax is pure sophistry. A tax by any other name is still a tax.

    If Boris introduced a 25% tax on inheritances, with an extremely lower threshold, calling it "insurance" and sending it to the NHS then I doubt you'd be as quick to play this "its not a tax" bullshit game.
    Tory tax rises are pretty much perfectly calibrated to fall least on pensioners and the kind of extremely wealthy people who bankroll the Tory party.
    IHT tax really doesn't raise that much.

    As I've pointed out here so many times before literally the only thing left to tax is wealth via a separate property tax as it's hard to avoid.
    Having just had probate on my mum approved, I don't agree with this statement :smile: . It seems to raise rather a large amount !
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118
    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    There’s no point pretending; it was a trade off - in order to stop the mass immigration of cheap labour from Eastern Europe, we had to sacrifice the ability to be able to live and work/retire to the EU with no questions asked. If you wanted to paint a dismal picture you could say it was losing a freedom - that’s self explanatory really as we have stopped freedom of movement - but people ultimately valued control of their everyday lives over what was only hypothetical freedom to do things they were never going to
  • CharlesCharles Posts: 35,758
    rpjs said:

    HYUFD said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    New York? When Biden has a tax and spend agenda bigger than any US president since LBJ.

    Income tax has not risen, inheritance tax has not risen, the only thing that has risen in the UK is NI to fund the extra resources the NHS needed post Covid and the costs of furlough.

    Rich people have always and will always move to Switzerland and Singapore because they have lower taxes and less public spending. However since 2019 more Tory voters are working class RedWall voters, not wealthy financiers
    My gross salary here in New York is about twice what I would make in my role in London, maybe more, and my overall federal/state tax take, including NI equiv, is about 40%, which I’d be paying in income tax alone in the UK.

    If Biden does roll back the Trump tax reforms, if it includes a repeal of the SALT cap (a limit on how much state and local tax payments can be deducted from federal taxable income, and which would be very popular in high-tax blue states like New York), then we’d actually be better off!
    Including property tax?
  • kjhkjh Posts: 11,782

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Why are you excluding the world to just Europe? Is Europe the only place in the world to you?

    If you migrate to Europe its a bit harder. If you migrate to Australia its a bit easier. Given more people chose to migrate to Australia than Europe even when we had free movement with Europe, overall that seems like a plus to me.
    A bit harder? A bit of an understatement. And how about just travelling for more than just a holiday. Completely wrecking peoples lives who have motorhomes and overseas homes and youngsters who want to travel and work abroad.
  • Jonathan said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Why are you excluding the world to just Europe? Is Europe the only place in the world to you?

    If you migrate to Europe its a bit harder. If you migrate to Australia its a bit easier. Given more people chose to migrate to Australia than Europe even when we had free movement with Europe, overall that seems like a plus to me.
    A bit harder? Come off it. A lot harder. We had the right to settle any across the continent. We could live wherever. Australia was always restricted by its famous points system.

    Quite fancy living abroad when kids finally naff off, it don’t want to disappear to the arse end of nowhere and never see them.

    I’ve lost freedoms that I valued. Why do Brexit folk like to pretend it hasn’t happened..

    The likelihood of anyone with the means to retire to another European country not being able to is more than unlikely.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 15,769
    isam said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    There’s no point pretending; it was a trade off - in order to stop the mass immigration of cheap labour from Eastern Europe, we had to sacrifice the ability to be able to live and work/retire to the EU with no questions asked. If you wanted to paint a dismal picture you could say it was losing a freedom - that’s self explanatory really as we have stopped freedom of movement - but people ultimately valued control of their everyday lives over what was only hypothetical freedom to do things they were never going to
    52% did, 48% didn't. The 52% got their way, that's democracy, but don't expect the 48% to stop fighting to restore their rights or insult us when we do.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 60,216
    Foxy said:

    isam said:

    Foxy said:

    In case you missed it, Labour’s shadow minister for women,
    @TaiwoOwatemi, just came out in support of the attacks on Professor Kathleen Stock.


    https://twitter.com/PaulEmbery/status/1448418546275471361?s=20

    Where does that letter support attacks?

    It just seems to point out that her role in the LGBT Alliance conflicts with the policy of her University, and also the position of the Union and Labour Party.
    I think you’ve added a letter there that is key to the whole furore
    Yes, autocorrect....

    The question is whether her role in an organisation opposing Trans rights and access is compatible with her universities policy.
    The debate is whether LGB are opposed to trans rights or are in favour LGB rights - for example "the cotton ceiling" and whether lesbians should be expected to have sex with trans-women, with penises, and those who demure are "trans-phobic".

    Also Stock's position on gender recognition is mis-represented by her critics:

    This lie was repeated on a BBC programme, and I hope to get a correction. If this student had actually read what I write, they'd know I support the RETENTION of the Gender Recognition Act as is.

    https://twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1448531076398428160?s=20
  • Jonathan said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Why are you excluding the world to just Europe? Is Europe the only place in the world to you?

    If you migrate to Europe its a bit harder. If you migrate to Australia its a bit easier. Given more people chose to migrate to Australia than Europe even when we had free movement with Europe, overall that seems like a plus to me.
    A bit harder? Come off it. A lot harder. We had the right to settle any across the continent. We could live wherever. Australia was always restricted by its famous points system.

    Quite fancy living abroad when kids finally naff off, it don’t want to disappear to the arse end of nowhere and never see them.

    I’ve lost freedoms that I valued. Why do Brexit folk like to pretend it hasn’t happened..

    Yes we had the right to settle anywhere across the continent. Australia had a points system.

    And yet (exc Ireland since we still have free movement with them) more people chose to settle in Australia despite the points system than the entire continent with free movement put together.

    If the freedoms were 'so valued' why weren't they exercised?

    I don't deny that its been lost, but nor do I care either. Nor does most of the British public. Relaxing migration with the country people actually want to move to more than the entire EU combined seems better than having free movement with a continent people don't want to move to and a drawbridge with the rest of the world.

    Its about balance. Something you don't have any of it seems in your single-minded worship of Europe and screw the rest of the world.
  • JonathanJonathan Posts: 21,643
    isam said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    There’s no point pretending; it was a trade off - in order to stop the mass immigration of cheap labour from Eastern Europe, we had to sacrifice the ability to be able to live and work/retire to the EU with no questions asked. If you wanted to paint a dismal picture you could say it was losing a freedom - that’s self explanatory really as we have stopped freedom of movement - but people ultimately valued control of their everyday lives over what was only hypothetical freedom to do things they were never going to
    So you agree that Phillips point “Except it didn’t really. Not in practice “ is clearly bullshit. We lost freedoms.
  • felixfelix Posts: 15,164
    DavidL said:

    Foxy said:

    isam said:

    Foxy said:

    In case you missed it, Labour’s shadow minister for women,
    @TaiwoOwatemi, just came out in support of the attacks on Professor Kathleen Stock.


    https://twitter.com/PaulEmbery/status/1448418546275471361?s=20

    Where does that letter support attacks?

    It just seems to point out that her role in the LGBT Alliance conflicts with the policy of her University, and also the position of the Union and Labour Party.
    I think you’ve added a letter there that is key to the whole furore
    Yes, autocorrect....

    The question is whether her role in an organisation opposing Trans rights and access is compatible with her universities policy.
    Whilst I would need to think more about whether I agree completely with the content I must say that is a pretty excellent letter from Taiwo Owatemi. Clear, evidence based, punchy. I like her style. One to watch?
    Cannot say how pleased I am that the Labour party is taking such a strong stance on this matter. Let's hope they get lots and lots of publicity on it..
  • kjh said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Why are you excluding the world to just Europe? Is Europe the only place in the world to you?

    If you migrate to Europe its a bit harder. If you migrate to Australia its a bit easier. Given more people chose to migrate to Australia than Europe even when we had free movement with Europe, overall that seems like a plus to me.
    A bit harder? A bit of an understatement. And how about just travelling for more than just a holiday. Completely wrecking peoples lives who have motorhomes and overseas homes and youngsters who want to travel and work abroad.
    Youngsters who want to travel abroad can now get a three year visa to the country that more want to emigrate to than the entire EU put together. How is that anything other than a win for them?

    A win that was not possible pre-Brexit.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,800
    felix said:

    DavidL said:

    Foxy said:

    isam said:

    Foxy said:

    In case you missed it, Labour’s shadow minister for women,
    @TaiwoOwatemi, just came out in support of the attacks on Professor Kathleen Stock.


    https://twitter.com/PaulEmbery/status/1448418546275471361?s=20

    Where does that letter support attacks?

    It just seems to point out that her role in the LGBT Alliance conflicts with the policy of her University, and also the position of the Union and Labour Party.
    I think you’ve added a letter there that is key to the whole furore
    Yes, autocorrect....

    The question is whether her role in an organisation opposing Trans rights and access is compatible with her universities policy.
    Whilst I would need to think more about whether I agree completely with the content I must say that is a pretty excellent letter from Taiwo Owatemi. Clear, evidence based, punchy. I like her style. One to watch?
    Cannot say how pleased I am that the Labour party is taking such a strong stance on this matter. Let's hope they get lots and lots of publicity on it..
    LOL. You are all ❤
  • Jonathan said:

    isam said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    There’s no point pretending; it was a trade off - in order to stop the mass immigration of cheap labour from Eastern Europe, we had to sacrifice the ability to be able to live and work/retire to the EU with no questions asked. If you wanted to paint a dismal picture you could say it was losing a freedom - that’s self explanatory really as we have stopped freedom of movement - but people ultimately valued control of their everyday lives over what was only hypothetical freedom to do things they were never going to
    So you agree that Phillips point “Except it didn’t really. Not in practice “ is clearly bullshit. We lost freedoms.
    In practice we've gained more than we lost.

    Making it easier to migrate to the place more people want to migrate to than the entire EU combined, is worth more than migration with just the EU.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,563
    boulay said:

    MattW said:

    ydoethur said:

    The Times are reporting that

    Webbe, who will be sentenced on November 4

    and

    She has vowed to remain an MP while she appeals against the conviction.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/claudia-webbe-mp-faces-jail-for-threats-to-throw-acid-on-love-rival-hc0b8zbtg

    Will she have to apply for leave to appeal, or is the right automatic in criminal cases?

    Edit - have to say if even 50% of what was reported was accurate, she has no chance on appeal anyway. How can ‘I’ll send those naked pictures of you to your daughters’ be anything other than a crime under the law as it stands? And it’s not as though it was her word against another person’s word. There was a recording.

    She genuinely seems to be both incredibly arrogant and deeply disturbed.
    What are the financial factors? 84k a year whilst it continues, and a payoff if losing in an election (does it apply to a lost recall election?), plus pension contributions for as long as the process takes vs the cost of an Appeal.
    Can they not tweak the rules so that on conviction an MP’s salary etc are frozen and held in trust until after any appeal?

    If the appeal is successful then the MP gets paid what has been held - I’m sure if their lawyers believe in the validity and success of the appeal they would be happy to extend a loan to cover this shortfall…..!!

    If the MP knows really that they will lose the appeal then it might make them step down and not appeal saving legal fees etc and allowing them to get on with their future without hanging on for the carrot of salary and expenses etc.
    I don't like that idea: if they're doing the work of an MP, even whilst appealing a sentence, then they should get paid for it. If they're not doing that work, that's up to their constituents.

    Then you get MPs like Jared O'Mara, who should have been encouraged to stand down, for his own sake as much as for this constituents or the public purse. But I'm unsure that should be done by withholding salary ...

    (As an aside, what happens in other areas, e.g. teaching? I *assume* that once convicted, you are out of your job, regardless of appeal status?)
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,563
    edited October 2021
    Edit: dup.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 15,769

    Jonathan said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Why are you excluding the world to just Europe? Is Europe the only place in the world to you?

    If you migrate to Europe its a bit harder. If you migrate to Australia its a bit easier. Given more people chose to migrate to Australia than Europe even when we had free movement with Europe, overall that seems like a plus to me.
    A bit harder? Come off it. A lot harder. We had the right to settle any across the continent. We could live wherever. Australia was always restricted by its famous points system.

    Quite fancy living abroad when kids finally naff off, it don’t want to disappear to the arse end of nowhere and never see them.

    I’ve lost freedoms that I valued. Why do Brexit folk like to pretend it hasn’t happened..

    Yes we had the right to settle anywhere across the continent. Australia had a points system.

    And yet (exc Ireland since we still have free movement with them) more people chose to settle in Australia despite the points system than the entire continent with free movement put together.

    If the freedoms were 'so valued' why weren't they exercised?

    I don't deny that its been lost, but nor do I care either. Nor does most of the British public. Relaxing migration with the country people actually want to move to more than the entire EU combined seems better than having free movement with a continent people don't want to move to and a drawbridge with the rest of the world.

    Its about balance. Something you don't have any of it seems in your single-minded worship of Europe and screw the rest of the world.
    Australia =/= the rest of the world. And the freedoms gained to move or travel there are so incremental compared to the huge loss of freedom of movement in the EU that to pretend that the two balance is patently absurd.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited October 2021

    Jonathan said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Why are you excluding the world to just Europe? Is Europe the only place in the world to you?

    If you migrate to Europe its a bit harder. If you migrate to Australia its a bit easier. Given more people chose to migrate to Australia than Europe even when we had free movement with Europe, overall that seems like a plus to me.
    A bit harder? Come off it. A lot harder. We had the right to settle any across the continent. We could live wherever. Australia was always restricted by its famous points system.

    Quite fancy living abroad when kids finally naff off, it don’t want to disappear to the arse end of nowhere and never see them.

    I’ve lost freedoms that I valued. Why do Brexit folk like to pretend it hasn’t happened..

    Yes we had the right to settle anywhere across the continent. Australia had a points system.

    And yet (exc Ireland since we still have free movement with them) more people chose to settle in Australia despite the points system than the entire continent with free movement put together.

    If the freedoms were 'so valued' why weren't they exercised?

    I don't deny that its been lost, but nor do I care either. Nor does most of the British public. Relaxing migration with the country people actually want to move to more than the entire EU combined seems better than having free movement with a continent people don't want to move to and a drawbridge with the rest of the world.

    Its about balance. Something you don't have any of it seems in your single-minded worship of Europe and screw the rest of the world.
    Australia =/= the rest of the world. And the freedoms gained to move or travel there are so incremental compared to the huge loss of freedom of movement in the EU that to pretend that the two balance is patently absurd.
    No what's absurd is pretending that EU migration, which all 26 nations put together was less valued than Aus migration alone, is the be all and end all.

    Considering that even with the points based system more Britons migrated to that one nation than the entire 26 put together, an "incremental" gain there is tremendous.

    Can you give a serious answer if "the right to migrate across the continent" was so valued by Britons, why did fewer Britons migrate to the 26 continental countries than to Australia?
  • Last Friday’s jobs report from the US Department of Labor elicited a barrage of gloomy headlines. The New York Times emphasized “weak” jobs growth and fretted that “hiring challenges that have bedeviled employers all year won’t be quickly resolved,” and “rising wages could add to concerns about inflation.” For CNN, it was “another disappointment”. For Bloomberg the “September jobs report misses big for a second straight month”.

    The media failed to report the big story, which is actually a very good one: American workers are now flexing their muscles for the first time in decades.

    You might say workers have declared a national general strike until they get better pay and improved working conditions.

    No one calls it a general strike. But in its own disorganized way it’s related to the organized strikes breaking out across the land – Hollywood TV and film crews, John Deere workers, Alabama coal miners, Nabisco workers, Kellogg workers, nurses in California, healthcare workers in Buffalo.

    Disorganized or organized, American workers now have bargaining leverage to do better. After a year and a half of the pandemic, consumers have pent-up demand for all sorts of goods and services.

    But employers are finding it hard to fill positions.


    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/13/american-workers-general-strike-robert-reich

    Quite a contrast between how Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary thinks rising wages for the working class is a good thing but Keir Starmer thinks its a bad thing.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,897

    HYUFD said:

    rpjs said:

    HYUFD said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    New York? When Biden has a tax and spend agenda bigger than any US president since LBJ.

    Income tax has not risen, inheritance tax has not risen, the only thing that has risen in the UK is NI to fund the extra resources the NHS needed post Covid and the costs of furlough.

    Rich people have always and will always move to Switzerland and Singapore because they have lower taxes and less public spending. However since 2019 more Tory voters are working class RedWall voters, not wealthy financiers
    My gross salary here in New York is about twice what I would make in my role in London, maybe more, and my overall federal/state tax take, including NI equiv, is about 40%, which I’d be paying in income tax alone in the UK.

    If Biden does roll back the Trump tax reforms, if it includes a repeal of the SALT cap (a limit on how much state and local tax payments can be deducted from federal taxable income, and which would be very popular in high-tax blue states like New York), then we’d actually be better off!
    Biden is still raising income tax and CGT, Boris is not.

    The US will also have a higher corporation tax rate than the UK once the Biden tax rises go through the Democratic Congress and will do so even after Sunak raises corporation tax to 25% as Biden will raise corporation tax to 28%
    For anyone working Boris did raise income tax by 2.5%

    Calling it NI instead of income tax is pure sophistry. A tax by any other name is still a tax.

    If Boris introduced a 25% tax on inheritances, with an extremely lower threshold, calling it "insurance" and sending it to the NHS then I doubt you'd be as quick to play this "its not a tax" bullshit game.
    Nope, insurance is by definition paid for via insurance premiums out of income.

    National insurance is paid into via your earned income and includes entitlement to contributory JSA and the state pension which you can only get via NI credits and contributions you have made. Plus it also funds healthcare as it was originally set up to do.

    Inheritance tax could obviously never be an insurance as you do not pay it out of your earned income, you receive an inheritance from a relative
  • JonathanJonathan Posts: 21,643

    Jonathan said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Why are you excluding the world to just Europe? Is Europe the only place in the world to you?

    If you migrate to Europe its a bit harder. If you migrate to Australia its a bit easier. Given more people chose to migrate to Australia than Europe even when we had free movement with Europe, overall that seems like a plus to me.
    A bit harder? Come off it. A lot harder. We had the right to settle any across the continent. We could live wherever. Australia was always restricted by its famous points system.

    Quite fancy living abroad when kids finally naff off, it don’t want to disappear to the arse end of nowhere and never see them.

    I’ve lost freedoms that I valued. Why do Brexit folk like to pretend it hasn’t happened..

    Yes we had the right to settle anywhere across the continent. Australia had a points system.

    And yet (exc Ireland since we still have free movement with them) more people chose to settle in Australia despite the points system than the entire continent with free movement put together.

    If the freedoms were 'so valued' why weren't they exercised?

    I don't deny that its been lost, but nor do I care either. Nor does most of the British public. Relaxing migration with the country people actually want to move to more than the entire EU combined seems better than having free movement with a continent people don't want to move to and a drawbridge with the rest of the world.

    Its about balance. Something you don't have any of it seems in your single-minded worship of Europe and screw the rest of the world.
    Calm down old chap. I am not sure appreciating the freedom to travel or settle in our nearest neighbours counts as ‘single minded worship’. Many exercised those freedoms and now have to join the long queue at airports.

    What’s clear is that you don’t care, but it would be somewhat more intelligent if you noticed that it does matter to others. Denying the change is real doesn’t really help your case.

    No doubt there are, in your view, huge benefits of Brexit. Whilst I am yet to experience one yet personally, I do not deny that others see them or that there haven’t been changes.

  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,563
    BTW, Leicester East has had a torrid time with MPs, hasn't it? The nasty Keith Vaz followed by the nasty Claudia Webbe.

    Hopefully Labour will choose wisely the next time ...
  • TazTaz Posts: 14,372

    Foxy said:

    isam said:

    Foxy said:

    In case you missed it, Labour’s shadow minister for women,
    @TaiwoOwatemi, just came out in support of the attacks on Professor Kathleen Stock.


    https://twitter.com/PaulEmbery/status/1448418546275471361?s=20

    Where does that letter support attacks?

    It just seems to point out that her role in the LGBT Alliance conflicts with the policy of her University, and also the position of the Union and Labour Party.
    I think you’ve added a letter there that is key to the whole furore
    Yes, autocorrect....

    The question is whether her role in an organisation opposing Trans rights and access is compatible with her universities policy.
    The debate is whether LGB are opposed to trans rights or are in favour LGB rights - for example "the cotton ceiling" and whether lesbians should be expected to have sex with trans-women, with penises, and those who demure are "trans-phobic".

    Also Stock's position on gender recognition is mis-represented by her critics:

    This lie was repeated on a BBC programme, and I hope to get a correction. If this student had actually read what I write, they'd know I support the RETENTION of the Gender Recognition Act as is.

    https://twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1448531076398428160?s=20
    www.terfisaslur.com is a useful reference point to the debate and the side labour are unswervingly on
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118
    Jonathan said:

    isam said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    There’s no point pretending; it was a trade off - in order to stop the mass immigration of cheap labour from Eastern Europe, we had to sacrifice the ability to be able to live and work/retire to the EU with no questions asked. If you wanted to paint a dismal picture you could say it was losing a freedom - that’s self explanatory really as we have stopped freedom of movement - but people ultimately valued control of their everyday lives over what was only hypothetical freedom to do things they were never going to
    So you agree that Phillips point “Except it didn’t really. Not in practice “ is clearly bullshit. We lost freedoms.
    Well I agree with Philip on the whole about it. We lost a freedom but it was a hypothetical freedom really, because as @another_richard says, people rich enough to retire to the EU still can, and those poor enough to be affected by Eastern European migrant Labour were never going to anyway. The whole thing was lopsided once the A8 accession happened.

    The deal was poor British people having to compete for work with a huge source of cheap Labour to enable rich British people easy access to employees and travel. It was unfair and thankfully it’s now over
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,897
    edited October 2021

    Good morning, everyone.

    Daft comments by Prince William regarding space exploration.

    I expect not unpopular though.

    'One third (35%) think the UK Space Agency’s £371m budget should be reduced or cut entirely, compared to the 29% who think it should stay the same and the 19% who want to see it increased."

    https://yougov.co.uk/topics/science/articles-reports/2019/07/20/half-britons-wouldnt-want-go-moon-even-if-their-sa
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 26,174

    Good morning, everyone.

    Daft comments by Prince William regarding space exploration.

    Prince William needs to learn about the Overview Effect, something many politicians might benefit from:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

    Also, the amount that space hardware et al has been used to monitor and raise awareness of the climate, and climate change. As an example, solid evidence for the Antarctic ozone hole came from the Nimbus 7 satellite in the mid 1980s. (But only when they started looking for it after being alerted by scientists at the British Antarctic Survey; when they looked back at the Nimbus data, the hole was visible from 1976...)
    Shatner was talking about the Overview Effect before he went up...

    Prince William is spot on. What Bezos has done is create another way in which rich celebs can be thoroughly hypocritical on the subject of the environment.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 18,355

    Quite a contrast between how Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary thinks rising wages for the working class is a good thing but Keir Starmer thinks its a bad thing.

    I'm sure that if Starmer was in government that he would be lauding the increases in wages, and the Tory leader of the Opposition would be warning of the perils of inflation.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,800

    Quite a contrast between how Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary thinks rising wages for the working class is a good thing but Keir Starmer thinks its a bad thing.

    I'm sure that if Starmer was in government that he would be lauding the increases in wages, and the Tory leader of the Opposition would be warning of the perils of inflation.
    A hit, a hit, a palpable hit.
  • kjh said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Why are you excluding the world to just Europe? Is Europe the only place in the world to you?

    If you migrate to Europe its a bit harder. If you migrate to Australia its a bit easier. Given more people chose to migrate to Australia than Europe even when we had free movement with Europe, overall that seems like a plus to me.
    A bit harder? A bit of an understatement. And how about just travelling for more than just a holiday. Completely wrecking peoples lives who have motorhomes and overseas homes and youngsters who want to travel and work abroad.
    Youngsters who want to travel abroad can now get a three year visa to the country that more want to emigrate to than the entire EU put together. How is that anything other than a win for them?

    A win that was not possible pre-Brexit.
    I generally agree with you but on this I do have sympathy with those who regret the loss of freedom of movement within the EU and just hope that in time a compromise can be agreed with the EU
  • Jonathan said:

    Jonathan said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Why are you excluding the world to just Europe? Is Europe the only place in the world to you?

    If you migrate to Europe its a bit harder. If you migrate to Australia its a bit easier. Given more people chose to migrate to Australia than Europe even when we had free movement with Europe, overall that seems like a plus to me.
    A bit harder? Come off it. A lot harder. We had the right to settle any across the continent. We could live wherever. Australia was always restricted by its famous points system.

    Quite fancy living abroad when kids finally naff off, it don’t want to disappear to the arse end of nowhere and never see them.

    I’ve lost freedoms that I valued. Why do Brexit folk like to pretend it hasn’t happened..

    Yes we had the right to settle anywhere across the continent. Australia had a points system.

    And yet (exc Ireland since we still have free movement with them) more people chose to settle in Australia despite the points system than the entire continent with free movement put together.

    If the freedoms were 'so valued' why weren't they exercised?

    I don't deny that its been lost, but nor do I care either. Nor does most of the British public. Relaxing migration with the country people actually want to move to more than the entire EU combined seems better than having free movement with a continent people don't want to move to and a drawbridge with the rest of the world.

    Its about balance. Something you don't have any of it seems in your single-minded worship of Europe and screw the rest of the world.
    Calm down old chap. I am not sure appreciating the freedom to travel or settle in our nearest neighbours counts as ‘single minded worship’. Many exercised those freedoms and now have to join the long queue at airports.

    What’s clear is that you don’t care, but it would be somewhat more intelligent if you noticed that it does matter to others. Denying the change is real doesn’t really help your case.

    No doubt there are, in your view, huge benefits of Brexit. Whilst I am yet to experience one yet personally, I do not deny that others see them or that there haven’t been changes.

    There's no need for long queues at airports. We're still granting EU visitors the right to use the fast lanes at our airports, and most tourist nations are doing the same in return for British visitors. If a few countries like the Netherlands choose to be stroppy then hopefully they lose some tourist income until they get over their strop and come to their senses.

    I accept that there's been a loss of the right to emigrate to the continent, I don't deny that for one second. I just think that since people were not exercising that right and more people chose to emigrate to points-based Australia than the entire continent combined . . . that the 'right' wasn't that important.

    Its swing and roundabouts and balance. I recognise the one, but if you can't recognise the other that balances it out then that's not reasoned.

    Do you think young people being able to now get a 3 year visa [that can be a pathway to permanent visa and citizenship] for the country more people want to emigrate to than any other without needing to become an agriculture worker . . . which wasn't possible to do without Brexit . . . is a good thing?
  • kjhkjh Posts: 11,782

    kjh said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Why are you excluding the world to just Europe? Is Europe the only place in the world to you?

    If you migrate to Europe its a bit harder. If you migrate to Australia its a bit easier. Given more people chose to migrate to Australia than Europe even when we had free movement with Europe, overall that seems like a plus to me.
    A bit harder? A bit of an understatement. And how about just travelling for more than just a holiday. Completely wrecking peoples lives who have motorhomes and overseas homes and youngsters who want to travel and work abroad.
    Youngsters who want to travel abroad can now get a three year visa to the country that more want to emigrate to than the entire EU put together. How is that anything other than a win for them?

    A win that was not possible pre-Brexit.
    You have just conflated travel with emigrating.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 12,496
    ydoethur said:

    The Times are reporting that

    Webbe, who will be sentenced on November 4

    and

    She has vowed to remain an MP while she appeals against the conviction.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/claudia-webbe-mp-faces-jail-for-threats-to-throw-acid-on-love-rival-hc0b8zbtg

    Will she have to apply for leave to appeal, or is the right automatic in criminal cases?

    Edit - have to say if even 50% of what was reported was accurate, she has no chance on appeal anyway. How can ‘I’ll send those naked pictures of you to your daughters’ be anything other than a crime under the law as it stands? And it’s not as though it was her word against another person’s word. There was a recording.

    She genuinely seems to be both incredibly arrogant and deeply disturbed.
    You can appeal from magistrates to the crown court as of right.

  • kjh said:

    kjh said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Why are you excluding the world to just Europe? Is Europe the only place in the world to you?

    If you migrate to Europe its a bit harder. If you migrate to Australia its a bit easier. Given more people chose to migrate to Australia than Europe even when we had free movement with Europe, overall that seems like a plus to me.
    A bit harder? A bit of an understatement. And how about just travelling for more than just a holiday. Completely wrecking peoples lives who have motorhomes and overseas homes and youngsters who want to travel and work abroad.
    Youngsters who want to travel abroad can now get a three year visa to the country that more want to emigrate to than the entire EU put together. How is that anything other than a win for them?

    A win that was not possible pre-Brexit.
    You have just conflated travel with emigrating.
    Because free travel has been unaffected. Is any nation demanding a tourist visa be applied for before you get your tickets that wasn't before?

    Its emigrating that is affected.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,582

    Quite a contrast between how Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary thinks rising wages for the working class is a good thing but Keir Starmer thinks its a bad thing.

    I'm sure that if Starmer was in government that he would be lauding the increases in wages, and the Tory leader of the Opposition would be warning of the perils of inflation.
    It’s still quite astonishing that the Labour Party appears not to be wholeheartedly supporting wage inflation happening specifically to the lower deciles on the income scale. Levelling up, they might want to call it.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,897
    edited October 2021
    Aslan said:

    HYUFD said:

    rpjs said:

    HYUFD said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    New York? When Biden has a tax and spend agenda bigger than any US president since LBJ.

    Income tax has not risen, inheritance tax has not risen, the only thing that has risen in the UK is NI to fund the extra resources the NHS needed post Covid and the costs of furlough.

    Rich people have always and will always move to Switzerland and Singapore because they have lower taxes and less public spending. However since 2019 more Tory voters are working class RedWall voters, not wealthy financiers
    My gross salary here in New York is about twice what I would make in my role in London, maybe more, and my overall federal/state tax take, including NI equiv, is about 40%, which I’d be paying in income tax alone in the UK.

    If Biden does roll back the Trump tax reforms, if it includes a repeal of the SALT cap (a limit on how much state and local tax payments can be deducted from federal taxable income, and which would be very popular in high-tax blue states like New York), then we’d actually be better off!
    Biden is still raising income tax and CGT, Boris is not.

    The US will also have a higher corporation tax rate than the UK once the Biden tax rises go through the Democratic Congress and will do so even after Sunak raises corporation tax to 25% as Biden will raise corporation tax to 28%
    I also left the UK for the US. My gross pay is 60% higher for the same role, my employer covers 99% of my healthcare costs and I will pay substantially less tax. Despite being near the top of the US income distribution, I won't be caught by the Biden tax increase as I don't meet the $500k a year threshold. And my property costs are about a third of what I would pay for the equivalent in London, but with better weather.
    You also have no NHS but have to pay for private insurance if you are an average earner or small businessman and there are no non contributory unemployment benefits in the US either just foodstamps for a short period.

    If you are a high earner it may generally be better to work in the US than the UK, if you are an average earner or below that is not necessarily the case and if you are out of work you have a far better safety net in the UK than US too.

    Though that still does not change the fact Biden is increasing tax in the US more than Boris is in the UK and if you are a high earner Singapore or Switzerland offer you even lower taxes than the US does. Biden is also raising corporation tax to more than in the UK
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118
    Sandpit said:

    Quite a contrast between how Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary thinks rising wages for the working class is a good thing but Keir Starmer thinks its a bad thing.

    I'm sure that if Starmer was in government that he would be lauding the increases in wages, and the Tory leader of the Opposition would be warning of the perils of inflation.
    It’s still quite astonishing that the Labour Party appears not to be wholeheartedly supporting wage inflation happening specifically to the lower deciles on the income scale. Levelling up, they might want to call it.
    It is incredible. Workers are becoming more powerful and Labour are trying to stop it
  • kjhkjh Posts: 11,782
    isam said:

    Jonathan said:

    isam said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    There’s no point pretending; it was a trade off - in order to stop the mass immigration of cheap labour from Eastern Europe, we had to sacrifice the ability to be able to live and work/retire to the EU with no questions asked. If you wanted to paint a dismal picture you could say it was losing a freedom - that’s self explanatory really as we have stopped freedom of movement - but people ultimately valued control of their everyday lives over what was only hypothetical freedom to do things they were never going to
    So you agree that Phillips point “Except it didn’t really. Not in practice “ is clearly bullshit. We lost freedoms.
    Well I agree with Philip on the whole about it. We lost a freedom but it was a hypothetical freedom really, because as @another_richard says, people rich enough to retire to the EU still can, and those poor enough to be affected by Eastern European migrant Labour were never going to anyway. The whole thing was lopsided once the A8 accession happened.

    The deal was poor British people having to compete for work with a huge source of cheap Labour to enable rich British people easy access to employees and travel. It was unfair and thankfully it’s now over
    Rich enough? A lot of people moving to Spain and France aren't rich. In fact much of the attraction is the lower house prices. It isn't just moving it's also traveling for more than just a holiday something youngsters and retired people do.
  • TazTaz Posts: 14,372
    isam said:

    Sandpit said:

    Quite a contrast between how Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary thinks rising wages for the working class is a good thing but Keir Starmer thinks its a bad thing.

    I'm sure that if Starmer was in government that he would be lauding the increases in wages, and the Tory leader of the Opposition would be warning of the perils of inflation.
    It’s still quite astonishing that the Labour Party appears not to be wholeheartedly supporting wage inflation happening specifically to the lower deciles on the income scale. Levelling up, they might want to call it.
    It is incredible. Workers are becoming more powerful and Labour are trying to stop it
    Labour long since ceased being the party of the working man and woman.

    Why should it be any surprise ?
  • CharlesCharles Posts: 35,758
    MattW said:

    Sandpit said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rpjs said:

    HYUFD said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    New York? When Biden has a tax and spend agenda bigger than any US president since LBJ.

    Income tax has not risen, inheritance tax has not risen, the only thing that has risen in the UK is NI to fund the extra resources the NHS needed post Covid and the costs of furlough.

    Rich people have always and will always move to Switzerland and Singapore because they have lower taxes and less public spending. However since 2019 more Tory voters are working class RedWall voters, not wealthy financiers
    My gross salary here in New York is about twice what I would make in my role in London, maybe more, and my overall federal/state tax take, including NI equiv, is about 40%, which I’d be paying in income tax alone in the UK.

    If Biden does roll back the Trump tax reforms, if it includes a repeal of the SALT cap (a limit on how much state and local tax payments can be deducted from federal taxable income, and which would be very popular in high-tax blue states like New York), then we’d actually be better off!
    My property taxes in LA are $77,000/year. If Biden repeals the SALT cap it will save me a lot of money.
    $77,000 a year in property taxes, yet California is still bankrupt, but the recall of the govenor failed?

    Not sure I really understand the USA sometimes.
    That's interesting - Ca says a little under one percent of "assessed value", with a hard limit increase of 2% per year.

    Yet here we do not yet have a consensus on a proportional to value approach, and we are told that continuous updating of value is impractical.
    In practice last transaction value plus value of any improvements increasing at 2% p.a.

    Plus I pay water fees, sewage fees, police fees, anything they can think of fees to get around the tax cap
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,800
    Taz said:

    Foxy said:

    isam said:

    Foxy said:

    In case you missed it, Labour’s shadow minister for women,
    @TaiwoOwatemi, just came out in support of the attacks on Professor Kathleen Stock.


    https://twitter.com/PaulEmbery/status/1448418546275471361?s=20

    Where does that letter support attacks?

    It just seems to point out that her role in the LGBT Alliance conflicts with the policy of her University, and also the position of the Union and Labour Party.
    I think you’ve added a letter there that is key to the whole furore
    Yes, autocorrect....

    The question is whether her role in an organisation opposing Trans rights and access is compatible with her universities policy.
    The debate is whether LGB are opposed to trans rights or are in favour LGB rights - for example "the cotton ceiling" and whether lesbians should be expected to have sex with trans-women, with penises, and those who demure are "trans-phobic".

    Also Stock's position on gender recognition is mis-represented by her critics:

    This lie was repeated on a BBC programme, and I hope to get a correction. If this student had actually read what I write, they'd know I support the RETENTION of the Gender Recognition Act as is.

    https://twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1448531076398428160?s=20
    Attacking the LGB Alliance by targetting their charitable status, which she seems to support, is rather unpleasant too. The debate is just binary. You either unswervingly support the lobby or you are an enemy. There is no middle ground. LGB Alliance is not anti trans, it is just pro same sex attraction. It is like JK Rowling who suffers horrendous abuse for being pro-women. She is not anti trans. It is a vile debate that demonises women.
    That, together with the idea that only one view is somehow permitted amongst academics, were my reservations about the letter. This is a complicated area and the answers seem to me to be more fact specific than matters of principle but seeking to silence opposing views rather than engaging with them does not seem to me to be the way forward. Still like the clarity of her writing though.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 60,216
    Worth a listen:

    NEW: the ⁦@StephenNolan programme has launched a series of podcasts on @BBCSounds⁩ investigating the influence of ⁦@stonewalluk⁩ on public institutions - including @Ofcom⁩ and the ⁦@BBC

    https://twitter.com/JohnMcM1/status/1448313805327458304?s=20
  • Quite a contrast between how Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary thinks rising wages for the working class is a good thing but Keir Starmer thinks its a bad thing.

    I'm sure that if Starmer was in government that he would be lauding the increases in wages, and the Tory leader of the Opposition would be warning of the perils of inflation.
    Who knows.

    What we do know is that Starmer has shown that he opposes pay increases for the low paid and is also so clueless on the subject that he thought that insufficient visas was the limiting factor for delivery drivers rather than poor pay and conditions.
  • JonathanJonathan Posts: 21,643
    edited October 2021
    If prices are rising faster than wages. No one is getting better off. Least of all poorer workers.
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 22,009
    'The health secretary told Kay Burley on Sky News the GP access package will help GPs to "do what they do best".'

    I didn't expect golf coaching to be part of the package.


    My brother in law was a GP. He retired at 58. There's the cause of the shortage.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,582
    isam said:

    Sandpit said:

    Quite a contrast between how Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary thinks rising wages for the working class is a good thing but Keir Starmer thinks its a bad thing.

    I'm sure that if Starmer was in government that he would be lauding the increases in wages, and the Tory leader of the Opposition would be warning of the perils of inflation.
    It’s still quite astonishing that the Labour Party appears not to be wholeheartedly supporting wage inflation happening specifically to the lower deciles on the income scale. Levelling up, they might want to call it.
    It is incredible. Workers are becoming more powerful and Labour are trying to stop it
    Oh well, more Conservative voters for the next election.
  • SlackbladderSlackbladder Posts: 9,773
    Jonathan said:

    Prices are rising faster than wages. No one is getting better off.

    Thats only true if it's uniform for everyone. I expect 'some' wages are rising strongly, but others not so much. There's always winners and losers.
  • Good morning from London! Whilst I appreciate that I needed to buy a day 2 covid test for public safety so that Rishi can collect the VAT I am curious as to whether anyone at NHS World-Beating test and trace is actually bothering to check tests are carried out or whether the various vulture companies collecting VAT for Rishi have actually bothered.

    I'm not getting out of it, I am having the test (Randox walk-in) as having been to an expo centre the size of a planet and interacted with tens of thousands of people across the globe, it is sensible to get tested. I'm just curious as to with its forthcoming abandonment if the powers that be actually care that I do.
  • HYUFD said:

    Aslan said:

    HYUFD said:

    rpjs said:

    HYUFD said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    New York? When Biden has a tax and spend agenda bigger than any US president since LBJ.

    Income tax has not risen, inheritance tax has not risen, the only thing that has risen in the UK is NI to fund the extra resources the NHS needed post Covid and the costs of furlough.

    Rich people have always and will always move to Switzerland and Singapore because they have lower taxes and less public spending. However since 2019 more Tory voters are working class RedWall voters, not wealthy financiers
    My gross salary here in New York is about twice what I would make in my role in London, maybe more, and my overall federal/state tax take, including NI equiv, is about 40%, which I’d be paying in income tax alone in the UK.

    If Biden does roll back the Trump tax reforms, if it includes a repeal of the SALT cap (a limit on how much state and local tax payments can be deducted from federal taxable income, and which would be very popular in high-tax blue states like New York), then we’d actually be better off!
    Biden is still raising income tax and CGT, Boris is not.

    The US will also have a higher corporation tax rate than the UK once the Biden tax rises go through the Democratic Congress and will do so even after Sunak raises corporation tax to 25% as Biden will raise corporation tax to 28%
    I also left the UK for the US. My gross pay is 60% higher for the same role, my employer covers 99% of my healthcare costs and I will pay substantially less tax. Despite being near the top of the US income distribution, I won't be caught by the Biden tax increase as I don't meet the $500k a year threshold. And my property costs are about a third of what I would pay for the equivalent in London, but with better weather.
    You also have no NHS but have to pay for private insurance if you are an average earner or small businessman and there are no non contributory unemployment benefits in the US either just foodstamps for a short period.

    If you are a high earner it may generally be better to work in the US than the UK, if you are an average earner or below that is not necessarily the case and if you are out of work you have a far better safety net in the UK than US too.

    Though that still does not change the fact Biden is increasing tax in the US more than Boris is in the UK and if you are a high earner Singapore or Switzerland offer you even lower taxes than the US does. Biden is also raising corporation tax to more than in the UK
    The NHS and social care is threatening to overwhelm our taxes and is most definitely seeing the loss of investment in schools and other vital services

    With the latest round of tax rises hitting many who simply are struggling even in work, there just has to be a rise in wealth taxes including IHT and CGT and add more bands to council tax

    I consider it immoral that you support one million pounds inheritance tax exemption just so you can inherit money to buy a house in London

  • Sandpit said:

    Quite a contrast between how Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary thinks rising wages for the working class is a good thing but Keir Starmer thinks its a bad thing.

    I'm sure that if Starmer was in government that he would be lauding the increases in wages, and the Tory leader of the Opposition would be warning of the perils of inflation.
    It’s still quite astonishing that the Labour Party appears not to be wholeheartedly supporting wage inflation happening specifically to the lower deciles on the income scale. Levelling up, they might want to call it.
    Rising wages that lifts all boats is a Good Thing. The problem now is rising wages that drives inflation that doesn't solve the labour crisis and price rises sink more boats than the pay rises lift.

    As I have pointed out repeatedly, "just pay more" has not, cannot, and never could, fix the logistics crisis that is now so big that we are failing to land containers off ships due to ports being overrun by the things.
  • isamisam Posts: 41,118
    “ Working out with more intensity than, say, walking 10,000 steps over the course of a day—drastically improves a person’s fitness, compared to milder forms of exercise, researchers report.

    Exercise is healthy. That is common knowledge. But just how rigorous should that exercise be in order to really impact a person’s fitness level? And, if you sit all day at a desk, but still manage to get out and exercise, does that negate your six, seven, or eight hours of sedentary behavior?”

    https://www.futurity.org/intense-workouts-fitness-exercise-2632442-2/
  • SlackbladderSlackbladder Posts: 9,773
    edited October 2021
    tlg86 said:

    Good morning, everyone.

    Daft comments by Prince William regarding space exploration.

    Prince William needs to learn about the Overview Effect, something many politicians might benefit from:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

    Also, the amount that space hardware et al has been used to monitor and raise awareness of the climate, and climate change. As an example, solid evidence for the Antarctic ozone hole came from the Nimbus 7 satellite in the mid 1980s. (But only when they started looking for it after being alerted by scientists at the British Antarctic Survey; when they looked back at the Nimbus data, the hole was visible from 1976...)
    Shatner was talking about the Overview Effect before he went up...

    Prince William is spot on. What Bezos has done is create another way in which rich celebs can be thoroughly hypocritical on the subject of the environment.
    So, he's talking about his brother then?
  • JonathanJonathan Posts: 21,643

    Jonathan said:

    Prices are rising faster than wages. No one is getting better off.

    Thats only true if it's uniform for everyone. I expect 'some' wages are rising strongly, but others not so much. There's always winners and losers.
    Inflation provides the illusion of wealth, but makes you poorer. It’s surprising that Tories have forgotten that.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 11,782

    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Why are you excluding the world to just Europe? Is Europe the only place in the world to you?

    If you migrate to Europe its a bit harder. If you migrate to Australia its a bit easier. Given more people chose to migrate to Australia than Europe even when we had free movement with Europe, overall that seems like a plus to me.
    A bit harder? A bit of an understatement. And how about just travelling for more than just a holiday. Completely wrecking peoples lives who have motorhomes and overseas homes and youngsters who want to travel and work abroad.
    Youngsters who want to travel abroad can now get a three year visa to the country that more want to emigrate to than the entire EU put together. How is that anything other than a win for them?

    A win that was not possible pre-Brexit.
    You have just conflated travel with emigrating.
    Because free travel has been unaffected. Is any nation demanding a tourist visa be applied for before you get your tickets that wasn't before?

    Its emigrating that is affected.
    Well that is where you are wrong because of the time limits which impact youngsters wanting to tour Europe, 2nd home owners and mobile home owners.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,800
    Jonathan said:

    If prices are rising faster than wages. No one is getting better off. Least of all poorer workers.

    That is not true: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/latest
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 15,769

    Jonathan said:

    Jonathan said:

    Jonathan said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    Sandpit said:

    Foxy said:

    moonshine said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    Can’t speak for others but Singapore is not sucking in talent any more, it is spitting it out to such an extent they’ve had a significant population fall. A quite unprecedented change in their demographic that I picked up on anecdotally a while ago and is now confirmed by the stats.

    I hope it works out for you in Switzerland but the grass isn’t always greener and every place has its problems.
    Isn't that population fall mostly to do with Singapore having just about the lowest Fertility rate in the world?
    There’s a lot of expatriate emigration, following changes in government policy to prioritise native Singaporeans for high-skilled jobs. There’s also been very restrictive Covid restrictions there for the past 20 months.

    We see the same local-prioritisation in the Gulf States, where the local population has expanded in recent years and there is a need for private-sector jobs for them to move into.
    Yes indeed. I’m referring to the sudden demographic changes in the last 18 mths, which have been driven by illiberal covid policies that have been targeted more keenly against foreigners than citizens. Interestingly it’s also led to net emigration of citizens too. Lots of mixed nationality marriages probably part of it.

    A mate in Geneva enjoys the tax rate and the lake but says it’s full of smack addicts, one of whom took to defecating outside his door. Hong Kong has its own problems now it’s just China. The Gulf states their own set of highly illiberal laws which occasionally brush against foreigners. The US has gun crime. Canada harsh winters. Etc…

    The UK really is as benign and pleasant a place to live if you have the means to be in the top wealth quartile and have a global mindset.
    Tis a pity that this government so reduced opportunities to migrate, at least for those of modest means. International mobility should only be for the rich...
    Except it didn't really. Not in practice.

    Britain still has free movement with Ireland and as far as I'm aware more people migrated from Britain to Australia than the whole EU combined (exc Ireland). Migration with Australia has post-Brexit been made even easier, so realistically the migration people wanted has been made easier not harder in aggregate.
    No, in practice it really did. We have less freedom than we did before. Today, if you travel to Europe, let alone migrate, you are subject to greater restrictions.

    Let’s not argue that black is white.
    Why are you excluding the world to just Europe? Is Europe the only place in the world to you?

    If you migrate to Europe its a bit harder. If you migrate to Australia its a bit easier. Given more people chose to migrate to Australia than Europe even when we had free movement with Europe, overall that seems like a plus to me.
    A bit harder? Come off it. A lot harder. We had the right to settle any across the continent. We could live wherever. Australia was always restricted by its famous points system.

    Quite fancy living abroad when kids finally naff off, it don’t want to disappear to the arse end of nowhere and never see them.

    I’ve lost freedoms that I valued. Why do Brexit folk like to pretend it hasn’t happened..

    Yes we had the right to settle anywhere across the continent. Australia had a points system.

    And yet (exc Ireland since we still have free movement with them) more people chose to settle in Australia despite the points system than the entire continent with free movement put together.

    If the freedoms were 'so valued' why weren't they exercised?

    I don't deny that its been lost, but nor do I care either. Nor does most of the British public. Relaxing migration with the country people actually want to move to more than the entire EU combined seems better than having free movement with a continent people don't want to move to and a drawbridge with the rest of the world.

    Its about balance. Something you don't have any of it seems in your single-minded worship of Europe and screw the rest of the world.
    Calm down old chap. I am not sure appreciating the freedom to travel or settle in our nearest neighbours counts as ‘single minded worship’. Many exercised those freedoms and now have to join the long queue at airports.

    What’s clear is that you don’t care, but it would be somewhat more intelligent if you noticed that it does matter to others. Denying the change is real doesn’t really help your case.

    No doubt there are, in your view, huge benefits of Brexit. Whilst I am yet to experience one yet personally, I do not deny that others see them or that there haven’t been changes.

    There's no need for long queues at airports. We're still granting EU visitors the right to use the fast lanes at our airports, and most tourist nations are doing the same in return for British visitors. If a few countries like the Netherlands choose to be stroppy then hopefully they lose some tourist income until they get over their strop and come to their senses.

    I accept that there's been a loss of the right to emigrate to the continent, I don't deny that for one second. I just think that since people were not exercising that right and more people chose to emigrate to points-based Australia than the entire continent combined . . . that the 'right' wasn't that important.

    Its swing and roundabouts and balance. I recognise the one, but if you can't recognise the other that balances it out then that's not reasoned.

    Do you think young people being able to now get a 3 year visa [that can be a pathway to permanent visa and citizenship] for the country more people want to emigrate to than any other without needing to become an agriculture worker . . . which wasn't possible to do without Brexit . . . is a good thing?
    You are confusing stocks and flows. Yes, Australia has a higher number of UK citizens, but many of them emigrated decades ago, before the EU even existed. In terms of flows in recent years, ie the freedom to move as exercised by British people currently, more moved to the EU than to Australia. No wonder people are angry that their rights have been taken from them.
  • HeathenerHeathener Posts: 7,084
    edited October 2021
    Good morning campers.

    So I was given a rather rough ride by one or two (right wing old men) when I first joined for fearfully suggesting that daily cases might well reach 100,000 come autumn/winter. Apparently to sign up on here and express concern was 'trolling' (= bizarre). The latest ZOE press release suggests the daily rate is 66,000 and rising.

    https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/covid-cases-in-children-continue-to-climb

    Whilst it's true that death rates have, thankfully, not risen exponentially I remain cautious about the UK situation. Our daily infection rate is one of the highest in the world and I think one thing everyone could agree, from left or right, authoritarian or libertarian, is that there's no room for complacency.



  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 61,783
    Mr. HYUFD, being popular and being right (or intelligent) are not the same things.
  • JonathanJonathan Posts: 21,643
    DavidL said:

    Jonathan said:

    If prices are rising faster than wages. No one is getting better off. Least of all poorer workers.

    That is not true: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/latest
    My wage is static, my costs have gone up hugely.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,071
    HYUFD said:

    Imagine the number of vaccines you could buy if Buck House was sold off for development.....
    It would never be sold off for development, even if we were a republic it would be the residence of the President.

    Prince William's comments that we should focus on problems on this planet before we spend vast sums on space exploration though I would expect to go down well with most voters. Personally I am in favour of space exploration
    The danger of him speaking in criticism of specific areas rather than just woolly words on something popular, is that it might work this time but next time he'll miscalculate what the public will accept, or stop caring if they will.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 35,988
    Border force officials should be allowed to drown migrants, says Priti Patel, providing they do so in "good faith" and have "reasonable grounds" to do so.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/channel-migrants-patel-seeks-immunity-for-border-force-if-new-tactics-cause-deaths-w9n2gtqpm
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,071

    The Times are reporting that

    Webbe, who will be sentenced on November 4

    and

    She has vowed to remain an MP while she appeals against the conviction.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/claudia-webbe-mp-faces-jail-for-threats-to-throw-acid-on-love-rival-hc0b8zbtg

    If the sentencing means the recall petition is triggered then does a recall petition need to wait until a possible appeal is heard?
    Yes, Fiona Onasanya is the precedent for that principle.
    And her appeal was a complete waste of time IIRC, basically 'I did not like the decision'.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,800
    isam said:

    “ Working out with more intensity than, say, walking 10,000 steps over the course of a day—drastically improves a person’s fitness, compared to milder forms of exercise, researchers report.

    Exercise is healthy. That is common knowledge. But just how rigorous should that exercise be in order to really impact a person’s fitness level? And, if you sit all day at a desk, but still manage to get out and exercise, does that negate your six, seven, or eight hours of sedentary behavior?”

    https://www.futurity.org/intense-workouts-fitness-exercise-2632442-2/

    I am a fan of my Fitbit but I have to say this exactly mirrors my experience. After the blood clots on the lungs thing I have been steering away from more intense exercise whilst keeping up my 10k steps. The result has been a gradual increase in weight (mainly because I am a greedy bastard). I am speaking to my GP about what I can safely do tomorrow. Thanks for the link.
  • Sandpit said:

    Quite a contrast between how Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary thinks rising wages for the working class is a good thing but Keir Starmer thinks its a bad thing.

    I'm sure that if Starmer was in government that he would be lauding the increases in wages, and the Tory leader of the Opposition would be warning of the perils of inflation.
    It’s still quite astonishing that the Labour Party appears not to be wholeheartedly supporting wage inflation happening specifically to the lower deciles on the income scale. Levelling up, they might want to call it.
    Rising wages that lifts all boats is a Good Thing. The problem now is rising wages that drives inflation that doesn't solve the labour crisis and price rises sink more boats than the pay rises lift.

    As I have pointed out repeatedly, "just pay more" has not, cannot, and never could, fix the logistics crisis that is now so big that we are failing to land containers off ships due to ports being overrun by the things.
    As they are across the world and especially in the US where Joe Biden has just been on the media with his answer, ports are to work 24/7

    I assumed they did that anyway

  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,897

    HYUFD said:

    Aslan said:

    HYUFD said:

    rpjs said:

    HYUFD said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    FPT:

    This truly is a leftie government, Sunak is a pound shop Gordon Brown.

    Pension savers face risk of higher fees as Sunak seeks billions for ‘levelling up’

    Ministers are looking to relax rules shielding tens of millions of UK retirement savers from high charges as they step up efforts to funnel pension fund cash into the government’s “levelling up” agenda.

    Officials are working on proposals to dilute the 0.75 per cent ceiling on annual management fees, which was put in place in 2016 to protect workers auto-enrolled into workplace pensions from having their savings eroded by high charges.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking at ways to tap billions of pounds of pension fund cash to invest in long-term projects, including infrastructure schemes, renewable energy projects and innovative tech firms, to help deliver on UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to spread economic growth across the UK.


    https://www.ft.com/content/a8cad0f1-fd85-40ed-aa19-e71728f10825

    How does diluting (i.e. presumably, increasing or removing) the ceiling on annual management fees increase tax revenues by any worthwhile amount?
    0.75% for the coke snorting broker, 0.5% for the Gov't :p ?
    Ah hem.

    0.75% goes to the fund manager. A sober individual like I used to be.

    The coke snorting broker* gets paid from the commissions that the fund pays when it buys or sells shares. In the old days, that was as much 0.25%, and brokers drove 911s. Now it's more likely to be 0.04 or 0.05%, and brokers bitch about how much better paid fund managers now are.

    * Not *all* brokers snort cocaine. Some of them prefer Adderell.
    The issue here is that the fund manager for millions of people's pensions is the state via NEST. Raising the cap on fees is simply another tax raising measure on working age people.
    And a pretty sneaky one at that, if the aim is to skim money from pension contributions.

    Not quite snaffling coins from the church collection plate, but well on the way in terms of tawdriness. Is this really the level of scrabbling around the government is reduced to?

    I really, really hope I've misunderstood this. Please tell me I've misunderstood.
    You haven't. I work in asset management and it's extremely transparent what the government is aiming to do here, they really are robbing the poorest working age people and destroying any chance of them having a proper private retirement income by making the potential for accruals significantly lower.

    I honestly don't think anyone in the Labour party has the wit or wherewithal to explain this measure that will be sold as a way of taxing profits from extra large pension pots.
    That's the political genius, if I've got it right; a way of getting more money for the government now that nobody will notice for decades. And even then, nobody will notice their poorer pensions or link them to the decisions of long-departed politicians.

    Blooming Sunak, as shabby as the rest of them. And he has such a nice smile; possibly the nicest since John Major (pre-Black Wednesday version).
    It's a copy of what Brown did when he removed dividend tax relief for pension funds. Overnight millions of working age people saw their future income in retirement utterly destroyed. Brown shafted everyone aged between 30 and 50 back then, Sunak is going to do the same now.

    Sometimes I wonder whether moving to Zurich is the right thing to do, then the supposedly low tax party comes up with a genuinely evil policy like this which will destroy pension incomes for the worst off and I know that my wife is right about where the UK is heading.

    Brown was warned about the consequences of his actions too, at the time, by civil servants but still ploughed ahead. Of course many people didn’t realise at the time but the final salary pension in the private sector,pretty much dropped off a cliff after that.

    The man is an idiot.
    And now Sunak is walking the same path, worse he's doing it after seeing the consequences of Brown's awful decision. He's literally making the same mistake again, short term jam today by fucking the retirement incomes of millions of people.

    I saw an article recently about a new brain drain from the UK to Switzerland, New York, Singapore and Australia because working age people really feel put upon. This is going to accelerate that feeling. The Tory party is supposed to be about working hard and getting on in life, this lot are nothing of the sort. They are the party of taxing the workers to give old people all the money in the country. How is anyone on a middle income supposed to get on on life?
    New York? When Biden has a tax and spend agenda bigger than any US president since LBJ.

    Income tax has not risen, inheritance tax has not risen, the only thing that has risen in the UK is NI to fund the extra resources the NHS needed post Covid and the costs of furlough.

    Rich people have always and will always move to Switzerland and Singapore because they have lower taxes and less public spending. However since 2019 more Tory voters are working class RedWall voters, not wealthy financiers
    My gross salary here in New York is about twice what I would make in my role in London, maybe more, and my overall federal/state tax take, including NI equiv, is about 40%, which I’d be paying in income tax alone in the UK.

    If Biden does roll back the Trump tax reforms, if it includes a repeal of the SALT cap (a limit on how much state and local tax payments can be deducted from federal taxable income, and which would be very popular in high-tax blue states like New York), then we’d actually be better off!
    Biden is still raising income tax and CGT, Boris is not.

    The US will also have a higher corporation tax rate than the UK once the Biden tax rises go through the Democratic Congress and will do so even after Sunak raises corporation tax to 25% as Biden will raise corporation tax to 28%
    I also left the UK for the US. My gross pay is 60% higher for the same role, my employer covers 99% of my healthcare costs and I will pay substantially less tax. Despite being near the top of the US income distribution, I won't be caught by the Biden tax increase as I don't meet the $500k a year threshold. And my property costs are about a third of what I would pay for the equivalent in London, but with better weather.
    You also have no NHS but have to pay for private insurance if you are an average earner or small businessman and there are no non contributory unemployment benefits in the US either just foodstamps for a short period.

    If you are a high earner it may generally be better to work in the US than the UK, if you are an average earner or below that is not necessarily the case and if you are out of work you have a far better safety net in the UK than US too.

    Though that still does not change the fact Biden is increasing tax in the US more than Boris is in the UK and if you are a high earner Singapore or Switzerland offer you even lower taxes than the US does. Biden is also raising corporation tax to more than in the UK
    The NHS and social care is threatening to overwhelm our taxes and is most definitely seeing the loss of investment in schools and other vital services

    With the latest round of tax rises hitting many who simply are struggling even in work, there just has to be a rise in wealth taxes including IHT and CGT and add more bands to council tax

    I consider it immoral that you support one million pounds inheritance tax exemption just so you can inherit money to buy a house in London

    National Insurance is doing what it was set up to do ie funding healthcare which would now include social care and particularly too the extra costs of Covid.

    I don't live in London, nor do my parents, we both live in the Home Counties, albeit different ones. In London and the Home Counties even the average house price is over the £325,000 IHT threshold so the Osborne IHT cut which took all properties up to £1 million out of IHT for married couples must stay. It was the most popular Tory policy of this century. It also is the strongest Tory policy to appeal to the Tory Southern Blue Wall seats which the Tories need to keep as well as the Northern and Midlands and North Wales Red Wall seats they won in 2019 to win another majority.

    If Labour and the LDs get in and want to increase wealth taxes that is up to them, Labour would no doubt increase income tax too. The Tories however have always been the party of preserving wealth
  • HeathenerHeathener Posts: 7,084
    edited October 2021
    Meanwhile something else I urge great caution about is this notion seen on here that Donald Trump is a shoo-in for the Republican nomination. This is absolutely NOT the case and the BBC US correspondent Anthony Zurcher has just written about it.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-58904507

    We must remember as punters that we are dealing here with politicians. Power and the love of power is the reason they draw daily breath. Anyone who thinks Trump is in for an easy ride amongst other GOP hopefuls really needs to ditch the recency bias and remember how politics works. We are talking about one of the three glittering prizes of world power (Russia and China being the other two). The whole nomination process unless you are a Presidential incumbent is designed to scrutinise candidates. Trump will come under intense and sustained attack and it will be done as a joint effort pincer movement: defenestration the self-selected heir apparent and then the field is open.

    Do NOT bet on Trump for the nomination unless you are offered very attractive odds.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-58904507
  • Heathener said:

    Good morning campers.

    So I was given a rather rough ride by one or two (right wing old men) when I first joined for fearfully suggesting that daily cases might well reach 100,000 come autumn/winter. Apparently to sign up on here and express concern was 'trolling' (= bizarre). The latest ZOE press release suggests the daily rate is 66,000 and rising.

    https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/covid-cases-in-children-continue-to-climb

    Whilst it's true that death rates have, thankfully, not risen exponentially I remain cautious about the UK situation. Our daily infection rate is one of the highest in the world and I think one thing everyone could agree, from left or right, authoritarian or libertarian, is that there's no room for complacency.



    Those getting infected today will not be getting infected in the upcoming months likewise for those who have been infected during the summer.

    That is why it made sense to allow Delta to seep through the country before winter.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,800
    Scott_xP said:

    Border force officials should be allowed to drown migrants, says Priti Patel, providing they do so in "good faith" and have "reasonable grounds" to do so.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/channel-migrants-patel-seeks-immunity-for-border-force-if-new-tactics-cause-deaths-w9n2gtqpm

    There is a gloss and then there is outright distortion. What's beyond that is hard to describe but this is a good example.
This discussion has been closed.