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.
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 ?
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
"The Tories however have always been the party of preserving wealth" = "The Tories have always looked after the rich."
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.
Is anyone going to run an under/over, on the number of delegates turning up to COP26 on commercial flights?
Why can’t leavers just accept facts instead of trying to spin the loss of FOM as a mere footnote .
Many people that used that to move to other EU countries were not rich . Leavers can’t seem to accept that people don’t like having freedoms they were used to removed .
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.
It all comes back to his current focus on climate change and preserving the environment on this planet first before putting too much focus on outer space.
The monarch and heirs to the throne are rightly not just mute dummys they can on occasion campaign and express things they believe in
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.
You need some remedial "economics" lessons with @Philip_Thompson who will set you straight on the meaning of real wage increases.
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.
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) )
Have you read the James bond story "the Hildebrand Rarity"? Sadly in for your eyes only, not octopussy, but about a rich villain who passes off his yacht as a research ship for tax purposes.
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.
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 have been in favour of wage growth all along. It's the Tories that have delivered essentially no real wage growth and essentially no productivity growth over the past decade.
I still think Brexit is going to mean lower real wages for most people. Guess we'll see in three-five years time.
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.
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 ?
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
"The Tories however have always been the party of preserving wealth" = "The Tories have always looked after the rich."
Yes that is true. The Tories are the party of wealth preservation, the Liberals are the party of taxing wealth more rather than income, Labour are the party of socialism or social democracy and taxing wealth and income more.
Plus of course plenty of people especially in London and the Home Counties who are homeowners may not be rich but they and their children would also be hit by an IHT rise too
As many have pointed out on here before the plural of anecdote is not anecdata. I don't doubt your personal experience but on average wages are currently rising considerably faster than inflation. Some of this (most in fact) is a distortion caused by people coming off furlough where they were receiving 80% of their wages but that is not all of it. Wages are currently rising faster than inflation, especially in those areas where there is particularly high demand, such as HGV drivers.
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.
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 ?
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
You cannot preserve wealth while taxing those without it
HMG will have no choice but to increase wealth taxes
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.
The boyfriend doesn't look great, mind. A cakeist by the look of it.
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.
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 ?
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.
The US is a better place to live for higher paid people, worse for everyone else.
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.
Your link is not working and I am not sure what evidence you have for repeating such a statement which is a serious allegation
What allegation. It is the news. In multiple newspapers. The Home Secretary from your former party thinks that "accidentally" drowning people will both discourage others from trying and will win her votes of similarly cold-hearted psychopaths.
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.
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) )
Have you read the James bond story "the Hildebrand Rarity"? Sadly in for your eyes only, not octopussy, but about a rich villain who passes off his yacht as a research ship for tax purposes.
Nope, never read it. But the Octopus did a heck of a lot of work, particularly in find old shipwrecks. As did another ship he owned, the Petrel (currently stored in Leith): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RV_Petrel
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.
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 ?
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
You cannot preserve wealth while taxing those without it
HMG will have no choice but to increase wealth taxes
This Tory HMG will not and certainly will not lower the IHT threshold for married couples below the current £1 million.
If you disagree you can always vote LD or go back to voting Labour again as you did under Blair
Why can’t leavers just accept facts instead of trying to spin the loss of FOM as a mere footnote .
Many people that used that to move to other EU countries were not rich . Leavers can’t seem to accept that people don’t like having freedoms they were used to removed .
I agree with you and recognise to many their loss of FOM is keenly felt
As I said earlier I hope some day accommodation can be agreed with the EU over this issue
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.
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 ?
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?
Re no queues because countries allow use of same lanes. Well as you know I have been traveling recently and none do. It might be they will but no signs have changed so we all queue up while the odd Irish couple walk through the EU gate.
Philip you post what happens in theory not reality.
So the same people saying that it was evil to criminalise people working in lifeboats for accidental deaths, are now saying that it’s evil to give them an exemption?
As many have pointed out on here before the plural of anecdote is not anecdata. I don't doubt your personal experience but on average wages are currently rising considerably faster than inflation. Some of this (most in fact) is a distortion caused by people coming off furlough where they were receiving 80% of their wages but that is not all of it. Wages are currently rising faster than inflation, especially in those areas where there is particularly high demand, such as HGV drivers.
Ingredient and component supply price inflation is real and in some cases crushing. Logistics costs rises are real and amplified here by Brexit. Import cost rises are real thanks to Brexit. Energy cost rises are real and amplified here by Brexit.
And we are already seeing the start of a price rise surge. Forget arbitrary baskets of items counted for artificial measures of inflation and look at the real world evidence.
Its almost certainly true now that wage growth outstrips inflation. Its almost certainly true that the process of reversing this is underway and the impact for many will be brutal.
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 have been in favour of wage growth all along. It's the Tories that have delivered essentially no real wage growth and essentially no productivity growth over the past decade.
I still think Brexit is going to mean lower real wages for most people. Guess we'll see in three-five years time.
Worth noting that the "real wage growth" train was more a thing of 2020 than 2021. Real wages have been roughly flat this year.
(And I'd happily bet a shiny sixpence that the average covers a lot of variation. Real terms rises for certain jobs that have to be done in a certain place (transport, construction?) and real terms falls elsewhere?)
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.
It all comes back to his current focus on climate change and preserving the environment on this planet first before putting too much focus on outer space.
The monarch and heirs to the throne are rightly not just mute dummys they can on occasion campaign and express things they believe in
I didn't say they couldn't. But they should be wary of how they go about it. Environmental policies are popular, but attacking space exploration is not necessary to talk up environmental policies. It's a short step from that to those whingers who complain if everyone doesnt talk about the environment all the time.
He's not crossed a line yet, but he soon will if he wants to start in effect condemning people for not doing what he would prefer.
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.
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 ?
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
You cannot preserve wealth while taxing those without it
HMG will have no choice but to increase wealth taxes
This Tory HMG will not and certainly will not lower the IHT threshold for married couples below the current £1 million.
If you disagree you can always vote LD or go back to voting Labour again as you did under Blair
Did I say IHT would be touched?
It's going to be a separate tax on property - based on current value..
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.
It all comes back to his current focus on climate change and preserving the environment on this planet first before putting too much focus on outer space.
The monarch and heirs to the throne are rightly not just mute dummys they can on occasion campaign and express things they believe in
I didn't say they couldn't. But they should be wary of how they go about it. Environmental policies are popular, but attacking space exploration is not necessary to talk up environmental policies. It's a short step from that to those whingers who complain if everyone doesnt talk about the environment all the time.
He's not crossed a line yet, but he soon will if he wants to start in effect condemning people for not doing what he would prefer.
The purpose of space exploration ultimately is to leave this planet, we should focus on preserving this planet first as he correctly said.
Yes you can have some space exploration but it does not give you license to destroy your current planet and ignore the problems on it, note too the only people going into space so far are mostly the rich.
As many have pointed out on here before the plural of anecdote is not anecdata. I don't doubt your personal experience but on average wages are currently rising considerably faster than inflation. Some of this (most in fact) is a distortion caused by people coming off furlough where they were receiving 80% of their wages but that is not all of it. Wages are currently rising faster than inflation, especially in those areas where there is particularly high demand, such as HGV drivers.
Ingredient and component supply price inflation is real and in some cases crushing. Logistics costs rises are real and amplified here by Brexit. Import cost rises are real thanks to Brexit. Energy cost rises are real and amplified here by Brexit.
And we are already seeing the start of a price rise surge. Forget arbitrary baskets of items counted for artificial measures of inflation and look at the real world evidence.
Its almost certainly true now that wage growth outstrips inflation. Its almost certainly true that the process of reversing this is underway and the impact for many will be brutal.
The largest components of inflation at the moment are fuel costs (both petrol and gas). Absolutely nothing to do with Brexit. They are a consequence of poor storage capacity in this country and high international demand on an internationally traded product.
The disruptions in supply chains you are describing are being felt all around the world, particularly in relation to chips and electrical products. This has resulted in reductions in car manufacturing and an increase in the value of second hand cars, for example. Once again, absolutely nothing to do with Brexit.
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.
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 ?
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
You cannot preserve wealth while taxing those without it
HMG will have no choice but to increase wealth taxes
This Tory HMG will not and certainly will not lower the IHT threshold for married couples below the current £1 million.
If you disagree you can always vote LD or go back to voting Labour again as you did under Blair
Big G come and vote Labour again. We will be much nicer to you than HYUFD!
So the same people saying that it was evil to criminalise people working in lifeboats for accidental deaths, are now saying that it’s evil to give them an exemption?
No, that its evil to be prepping for giving Border Force patrols orders to drag the boats away and if they sink and the people die don't worry we have your back.
Perhaps we should give the police exemption that Operation "Smack peaceful protestors around the head with your Baton" won't lead to any charges if the Home Secretary decidsed that the just response to another Sarah Everard-style peace vigil is to try and kill the protestors to deter others.
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.
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 ?
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
You cannot preserve wealth while taxing those without it
HMG will have no choice but to increase wealth taxes
This Tory HMG will not and certainly will not lower the IHT threshold for married couples below the current £1 million.
If you disagree you can always vote LD or go back to voting Labour again as you did under Blair
You have told so many conservative voters to clear off you will end up having nobody apart from yourself voting for it
As many have pointed out on here before the plural of anecdote is not anecdata. I don't doubt your personal experience but on average wages are currently rising considerably faster than inflation. Some of this (most in fact) is a distortion caused by people coming off furlough where they were receiving 80% of their wages but that is not all of it. Wages are currently rising faster than inflation, especially in those areas where there is particularly high demand, such as HGV drivers.
Ingredient and component supply price inflation is real and in some cases crushing. Logistics costs rises are real and amplified here by Brexit. Import cost rises are real thanks to Brexit. Energy cost rises are real and amplified here by Brexit.
And we are already seeing the start of a price rise surge. Forget arbitrary baskets of items counted for artificial measures of inflation and look at the real world evidence.
Its almost certainly true now that wage growth outstrips inflation. Its almost certainly true that the process of reversing this is underway and the impact for many will be brutal.
The largest components of inflation at the moment are fuel costs (both petrol and gas). Absolutely nothing to do with Brexit. They are a consequence of poor storage capacity in this country and high international demand on an internationally traded product.
The disruptions in supply chains you are describing are being felt all around the world, particularly in relation to chips and electrical products. This has resulted in reductions in car manufacturing and an increase in the value of second hand cars, for example. Once again, absolutely nothing to do with Brexit.
FBPE types blame Brexit for everything bad. It is tiresome and ignores the point we would be in pretty much the same position had we remained.
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.
Someone should ask him
- Are you in favour of satellites that monitor the Earth - sea leave, temperature, atmospheric composition, pollution sources? - Are you in favour of the atmospheric science that has been done regarding Mars and Venus - which has directly lead to increased understanding of the Earths atmosphere and er... Global Warming? - Are you in favour of internet/phone services in remote areas such as the less developed parts of Africa?
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.
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 ?
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
You cannot preserve wealth while taxing those without it
HMG will have no choice but to increase wealth taxes
You are entirely correct Big G! And let's have a large tax on buy to let too.
It's time to tax unearned wealth properly to balance the books.
And @HYUFD although I have voted CON recently I voted LAB in 1992, 1997 and 2001 and it is entirely fine to change parties. Otherwise elections would be boring! 👍
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.
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 ?
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
You cannot preserve wealth while taxing those without it
HMG will have no choice but to increase wealth taxes
This Tory HMG will not and certainly will not lower the IHT threshold for married couples below the current £1 million.
If you disagree you can always vote LD or go back to voting Labour again as you did under Blair
Did I say IHT would be touched?
It's going to be a separate tax on property - based on current value..
I'm sure @HYUFD is right politically; a Conservative government increasing taxes on inheritance would be writing the shortest (but most effective) suicide note in history. Ditto headline income tax rates. An annual property wealth tax- same thing.
The reason for messes like the Health (and Social Care, of course Social Care, when the time is ripe) Levy is to raise money without looking like it's raising taxes.
However, governmentally, Johnson and Sunak really, really need the money. Lots of money. More money than they can scrape together from all these fiddly measures.
Interesting to see how they square the politics and the government here.
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.
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) )
Have you read the James bond story "the Hildebrand Rarity"? Sadly in for your eyes only, not octopussy, but about a rich villain who passes off his yacht as a research ship for tax purposes.
I think that taxing certain types of (legal) activity and not others is a distraction and an infinite rabbithole - yachts vs mansions vs spacecraft, etc. As a socialist I'm in favour of redistributive taxation to balance out some of the advatanges of accidents of birth and sheer luck, but after we've taxed someone, I do not want a say in what they do with the rest - fast cars, gambling, yachts, whatever, it's not our business. Naturally, though, I don't want tax exemptions pretending to be for research or the like - tax should be simple and hard to avoid. If the billionaire wants to do research with his own money, fine.
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 have been in favour of wage growth all along. It's the Tories that have delivered essentially no real wage growth and essentially no productivity growth over the past decade.
I still think Brexit is going to mean lower real wages for most people. Guess we'll see in three-five years time.
Worth noting that the "real wage growth" train was more a thing of 2020 than 2021. Real wages have been roughly flat this year.
(And I'd happily bet a shiny sixpence that the average covers a lot of variation. Real terms rises for certain jobs that have to be done in a certain place (transport, construction?) and real terms falls elsewhere?)
2020 - the middle class gain but the working class don't 2021 - the working class gain but the middle class don't
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.
It all comes back to his current focus on climate change and preserving the environment on this planet first before putting too much focus on outer space.
The monarch and heirs to the throne are rightly not just mute dummys they can on occasion campaign and express things they believe in
I didn't say they couldn't. But they should be wary of how they go about it. Environmental policies are popular, but attacking space exploration is not necessary to talk up environmental policies. It's a short step from that to those whingers who complain if everyone doesnt talk about the environment all the time.
He's not crossed a line yet, but he soon will if he wants to start in effect condemning people for not doing what he would prefer.
The purpose of space exploration ultimately is to leave this planet, we should focus on preserving this planet first as he correctly said.
Yes you can have some space exploration but it does not give you license to destroy your current planet and ignore the problems on it, note too the only people going into space so far are mostly the rich.
Thats a political debate. He can get involved in that if he likes, but getting involved in the rough and tumble of that debate rather than keeping a general position above the political squabbling may be inadvisable.
Keep to the sentiment rather than specifics I'd say. People can criticise the latter more than the former.
And I'm surprised you dont think thede people can focus on what they like as private citizens. Should they be forced to help in ways you prefer?
As many have pointed out on here before the plural of anecdote is not anecdata. I don't doubt your personal experience but on average wages are currently rising considerably faster than inflation. Some of this (most in fact) is a distortion caused by people coming off furlough where they were receiving 80% of their wages but that is not all of it. Wages are currently rising faster than inflation, especially in those areas where there is particularly high demand, such as HGV drivers.
Ingredient and component supply price inflation is real and in some cases crushing. Logistics costs rises are real and amplified here by Brexit. Import cost rises are real thanks to Brexit. Energy cost rises are real and amplified here by Brexit.
And we are already seeing the start of a price rise surge. Forget arbitrary baskets of items counted for artificial measures of inflation and look at the real world evidence.
Its almost certainly true now that wage growth outstrips inflation. Its almost certainly true that the process of reversing this is underway and the impact for many will be brutal.
The largest components of inflation at the moment are fuel costs (both petrol and gas). Absolutely nothing to do with Brexit. They are a consequence of poor storage capacity in this country and high international demand on an internationally traded product.
The disruptions in supply chains you are describing are being felt all around the world, particularly in relation to chips and electrical products. This has resulted in reductions in car manufacturing and an increase in the value of second hand cars, for example. Once again, absolutely nothing to do with Brexit.
David this is simply wrong. Gas price rises have absolutely been amplified by Brexit. The government was warned by its own advisors that if it quit the regulated European market that only our gas storage would insulate us from the risk of spot price rises. We quit the market *and* let the storage get closed so we are at the mercy of Putin in a way that the rest of Europe is not. How can you seriously say "nothing to do with Brexit"? Its not *exclusively* the fault of Brexit and nobody says it it. But "nothing to do with" is delusional.
Nor have I blamed ingredient and component supply on Brexit - read what I said above and tell me where the word "Brexit" is on that line? You are deflecting worse than a Daily Express headline writer.
Rail freight operators are having to mothball their electric locomotives and switch back to diesel trains, which are slower and cause more pollution, because of the unfolding energy crisis.
The logistics firms say a surge in wholesale energy prices and an increase in the track access charges they pay has made the low-carbon trains uneconomical to operate.
So the same people saying that it was evil to criminalise people working in lifeboats for accidental deaths, are now saying that it’s evil to give them an exemption?
No
Priti wants immunity if immigrants drown, and jail if lifeboats try to save them
As many have pointed out on here before the plural of anecdote is not anecdata. I don't doubt your personal experience but on average wages are currently rising considerably faster than inflation. Some of this (most in fact) is a distortion caused by people coming off furlough where they were receiving 80% of their wages but that is not all of it. Wages are currently rising faster than inflation, especially in those areas where there is particularly high demand, such as HGV drivers.
Ingredient and component supply price inflation is real and in some cases crushing. Logistics costs rises are real and amplified here by Brexit. Import cost rises are real thanks to Brexit. Energy cost rises are real and amplified here by Brexit.
And we are already seeing the start of a price rise surge. Forget arbitrary baskets of items counted for artificial measures of inflation and look at the real world evidence.
Its almost certainly true now that wage growth outstrips inflation. Its almost certainly true that the process of reversing this is underway and the impact for many will be brutal.
The largest components of inflation at the moment are fuel costs (both petrol and gas). Absolutely nothing to do with Brexit. They are a consequence of poor storage capacity in this country and high international demand on an internationally traded product.
The disruptions in supply chains you are describing are being felt all around the world, particularly in relation to chips and electrical products. This has resulted in reductions in car manufacturing and an increase in the value of second hand cars, for example. Once again, absolutely nothing to do with Brexit.
FBPE types blame Brexit for everything bad. It is tiresome and ignores the point we would be in pretty much the same position had we remained.
I am not a FBPE type. But its absurd to say we would be in "pretty much the same position" when the rest of Europe has been spared the worst of our position. Europe is not having to pay spot gas prices because it has a regulated market. Europe is not suffering supermarket and fuel shortages because it has a free market in labour. Europe is not facing a Christmas with a lack of choice of favourite food products and toys etc etc etc etc.
Are any of the problems we face exclusively down to Brexit? No. Are any of the problems we face definitely nothing to do with Brexit? No.
The absolutism at both ends (and yes I absolutely agree that includes FBPE people but frankly also you at the opposite end of the spectrum) is just delusional.
Why can’t leavers just accept facts instead of trying to spin the loss of FOM as a mere footnote .
Many people that used that to move to other EU countries were not rich . Leavers can’t seem to accept that people don’t like having freedoms they were used to removed .
I voted to leave, on the basis that there was a strong case on both sides but that the case for leave was stronger. I still think so. The 52/48 vote to me quite accurately reflects the balance of argument.
FOM is an excellent thing in itself and was uncontroversial until it extended to countries in situations radically different from our own. No-one in real politics advocates global FOM, so all acknowledge it must have practical limits for economic and social reasons.
Prior to the referendum the opportunity was there to revisit this and it is a tragedy it was missed.
If each nation state in the EU could bilaterally agree with others over FOM it would be much easier for the Balkan states and Turkey to be admitted, which would be good, and would make a strong case for our reentry to either the EU or EFTA.
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.
Someone should ask him
- Are you in favour of satellites that monitor the Earth - sea leave, temperature, atmospheric composition, pollution sources? - Are you in favour of the atmospheric science that has been done regarding Mars and Venus - which has directly lead to increased understanding of the Earths atmosphere and er... Global Warming? - Are you in favour of internet/phone services in remote areas such as the less developed parts of Africa?
etc etc
Indeed. And the recent advances in space tourism seem on the face of it just to be the visible side of some very interesting developments which will be useful in many ways. It's not a case that as a species everything but direct focus on climate stuff should be ignored.
Had Jezbollah remained leader, with Ding Dong Burgon, Abbott, McDonnell, Wrong Daily etc as the senior shadow cabinet members Labour would have been 20 points behind ahead
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.
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) )
Have you read the James bond story "the Hildebrand Rarity"? Sadly in for your eyes only, not octopussy, but about a rich villain who passes off his yacht as a research ship for tax purposes.
I think that taxing certain types of (legal) activity and not others is a distraction and an infinite rabbithole - yachts vs mansions vs spacecraft, etc. As a socialist I'm in favour of redistributive taxation to balance out some of the advatanges of accidents of birth and sheer luck, but after we've taxed someone, I do not want a say in what they do with the rest - fast cars, gambling, yachts, whatever, it's not our business. Naturally, though, I don't want tax exemptions pretending to be for research or the like - tax should be simple and hard to avoid. If the billionaire wants to do research with his own money, fine.
A problem would be in classifying what is a silly hobby, and what is actually research.
As many have pointed out on here before the plural of anecdote is not anecdata. I don't doubt your personal experience but on average wages are currently rising considerably faster than inflation. Some of this (most in fact) is a distortion caused by people coming off furlough where they were receiving 80% of their wages but that is not all of it. Wages are currently rising faster than inflation, especially in those areas where there is particularly high demand, such as HGV drivers.
Ingredient and component supply price inflation is real and in some cases crushing. Logistics costs rises are real and amplified here by Brexit. Import cost rises are real thanks to Brexit. Energy cost rises are real and amplified here by Brexit.
And we are already seeing the start of a price rise surge. Forget arbitrary baskets of items counted for artificial measures of inflation and look at the real world evidence.
Its almost certainly true now that wage growth outstrips inflation. Its almost certainly true that the process of reversing this is underway and the impact for many will be brutal.
The largest components of inflation at the moment are fuel costs (both petrol and gas). Absolutely nothing to do with Brexit. They are a consequence of poor storage capacity in this country and high international demand on an internationally traded product.
The disruptions in supply chains you are describing are being felt all around the world, particularly in relation to chips and electrical products. This has resulted in reductions in car manufacturing and an increase in the value of second hand cars, for example. Once again, absolutely nothing to do with Brexit.
FBPE types blame Brexit for everything bad. It is tiresome and ignores the point we would be in pretty much the same position had we remained.
Brexit types blamed the EU for everything bad. It was tiresome and ignored the point we would likely be in pretty much the same position if we had left. In fact I don’t know why I put that in the past tense, Brexiteers are still obsessed with the EU.
Oh no, not a ten point lead for the government, when there’s so much bad news around it seems the world is going to end?
Why do people think this is the case? It is difficult to believe it is just because Labour and the LDs are invisible
IMO it’s a combination of an invisible opposition, and people not blaming the government for what are mostly global supply chain issues at the moment.
Also, the FBPE mob haven’t gone away from trying to link all the bad news to leaving the EU, which conversely rallies support for the government among those in favour of leaving the EU.
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.
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 ?
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?
Re no queues because countries allow use of same lanes. Well as you know I have been traveling recently and none do. It might be they will but no signs have changed so we all queue up while the odd Irish couple walk through the EU gate.
Philip you post what happens in theory not reality.
Which countries have you travelled to?
Others have said that they have travelled through EU gates in other countries and it differs from country to country.
I see no reason not to believe the. Are you saying they weren't telling the truth?
As many have pointed out on here before the plural of anecdote is not anecdata. I don't doubt your personal experience but on average wages are currently rising considerably faster than inflation. Some of this (most in fact) is a distortion caused by people coming off furlough where they were receiving 80% of their wages but that is not all of it. Wages are currently rising faster than inflation, especially in those areas where there is particularly high demand, such as HGV drivers.
Ingredient and component supply price inflation is real and in some cases crushing. Logistics costs rises are real and amplified here by Brexit. Import cost rises are real thanks to Brexit. Energy cost rises are real and amplified here by Brexit.
And we are already seeing the start of a price rise surge. Forget arbitrary baskets of items counted for artificial measures of inflation and look at the real world evidence.
Its almost certainly true now that wage growth outstrips inflation. Its almost certainly true that the process of reversing this is underway and the impact for many will be brutal.
Its also true that if costs are rising then that incentivises investment in automation or fuel efficiency etc to minimise those costs and improve efficiency. Which leads to real long term economic growth and can feed real terms pay rises.
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 have been in favour of wage growth all along. It's the Tories that have delivered essentially no real wage growth and essentially no productivity growth over the past decade.
I still think Brexit is going to mean lower real wages for most people. Guess we'll see in three-five years time.
Worth noting that the "real wage growth" train was more a thing of 2020 than 2021. Real wages have been roughly flat this year.
(And I'd happily bet a shiny sixpence that the average covers a lot of variation. Real terms rises for certain jobs that have to be done in a certain place (transport, construction?) and real terms falls elsewhere?)
2020 - the middle class gain but the working class don't 2021 - the working class gain but the middle class don't
Its in 2021 that people oppose pay rises.
But I'm not sure it's a simple class thing.
For certain working class jobs- those that have to be done here and have to be done now, the labour shortage is a definite boon for workers doing those jobs. No question about that, and best of luck to them.
But other working class jobs are as exposed as ever to the chill winds of global competition. Manufacturing and agriculture can just close down, be replaced by farms and factories in Romania, and the products can be imported freely. And that's before we get on to the working class jobs where the government is the ultimate paymaster and is (for now) using its monopsony to try to avoid pay rises at all.
And the criterion for who wins and who loses here looks like it isn't really about who has done badly out of the old arrangements, or whose job can be made more productive, it's just whether the job can be moved abroad or not.
Now, it might still be worth doing, despite all of this. But it's a gain for some workers, not all workers.
10 points behind with all thats been happening is incredible, I don't how Starmer is still in post. Perhaps its all the Starmer is great thread headers on PB that keeps him employed.
Had Jezbollah remained leader, with Ding Dong Burgon, Abbott, McDonnell, Wrong Daily etc as the senior shadow cabinet members Labour would have been 20 points behind ahead
It's just a post conference bounce. If it doesn't change when the lights go out later in the year I'll need a rethink!
(And beforebthe fanbois retort "there was no Labour bounce" I will pre-empt with " Starmer was drowned out by Wayne Couzens).
Anyway some of us peasants benefitting from Johnson's Party of the Workers need to wrll- work.
Oh no, not a ten point lead for the government, when there’s so much bad news around it seems the world is going to end?
Why do people think this is the case? It is difficult to believe it is just because Labour and the LDs are invisible
IMO it’s a combination of an invisible opposition, and people not blaming the government for what are mostly global supply chain issues at the moment.
Also, the FBPE mob haven’t gone away from trying to link all the bad news to leaving the EU, which conversely rallies support for the government among those in favour of leaving the EU.
That's a good point.
Sunak and Johnson seem to be doing everything they can to lose my vote at the moment.
But then Starmer and Rochdale and Scott and all the FBPE are really doing all they can to ensure there's no alternatives to the government.
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.
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.
I think that there is no justification for restrictions on liberty to protect those who refuse to take the vaccine, when if we had 100% vaccine takeup the number of hospitalizations would be very low.
The government's focus should be on increasing the vaccination rate, and reducing the impact of Covid hospitalizations on routine NHS care.
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.
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 ?
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?
Re no queues because countries allow use of same lanes. Well as you know I have been traveling recently and none do. It might be they will but no signs have changed so we all queue up while the odd Irish couple walk through the EU gate.
Philip you post what happens in theory not reality.
Which countries have you travelled to?
Others have said that they have travelled through EU gates in other countries and it differs from country to country.
I see no reason not to believe the. Are you saying they weren't telling the truth?
The EU rules allow use of e-Gates for EU EEA CH only. That the odd airport may waive this on the odd occasion doesn't make it universal or regular.
Incidentally I had been prepared for a long wait to re-enter the UK based on (a) past experience and (b) the growing reports of Border Force being too busy on their "how to drown migrants" course to actually staff the BCP. Nope - no queue at all, gates were not working properly but sufficient people to physically check passports.
Others have said (and provided photo / video evidence) of a FUBAR multi-hour queue at the same BCP I went through. I see no reason not to believe them or what they posted. Am I saying they weren't telling the truth because my experience was different...?
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 have been in favour of wage growth all along. It's the Tories that have delivered essentially no real wage growth and essentially no productivity growth over the past decade.
I still think Brexit is going to mean lower real wages for most people. Guess we'll see in three-five years time.
Worth noting that the "real wage growth" train was more a thing of 2020 than 2021. Real wages have been roughly flat this year.
(And I'd happily bet a shiny sixpence that the average covers a lot of variation. Real terms rises for certain jobs that have to be done in a certain place (transport, construction?) and real terms falls elsewhere?)
Yes, definitely true that the average will hide a lot of variation.
When Boris bangs on about how wages are growing and he's proud of it... Keir should look into the camera and ask people "Do you feel like your salary has gone up?". For most people the answer will be no...
Oh no, not a ten point lead for the government, when there’s so much bad news around it seems the world is going to end?
Why do people think this is the case? It is difficult to believe it is just because Labour and the LDs are invisible
You do seriously have to ask why when everything is being thrown at HMG and an aggressive media, that the media and, may I say, many on here are just not in touch with the voters attitudes
It may just be that voters recognise covid, energy prices and supply issues are worldwide and that HMG is doing its best and that the opposition do not have any better ideas to deal with it
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.
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 ?
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?
Re no queues because countries allow use of same lanes. Well as you know I have been traveling recently and none do. It might be they will but no signs have changed so we all queue up while the odd Irish couple walk through the EU gate.
Philip you post what happens in theory not reality.
Which countries have you travelled to?
Others have said that they have travelled through EU gates in other countries and it differs from country to country.
I see no reason not to believe the. Are you saying they weren't telling the truth?
The EU rules allow use of e-Gates for EU EEA CH only. That the odd airport may waive this on the odd occasion doesn't make it universal or regular.
Incidentally I had been prepared for a long wait to re-enter the UK based on (a) past experience and (b) the growing reports of Border Force being too busy on their "how to drown migrants" course to actually staff the BCP. Nope - no queue at all, gates were not working properly but sufficient people to physically check passports.
Others have said (and provided photo / video evidence) of a FUBAR multi-hour queue at the same BCP I went through. I see no reason not to believe them or what they posted. Am I saying they weren't telling the truth because my experience was different...?
It seems from reports that some countries are insisting on border pedantry and others are deliberately not.
Since Britons are now valuable customers to be attracted and people like tourism, then that incentivises people to appeal to Britons. If Britons hard-earned cash gets spent in those nations that treat Britons with respect rather than those that don't, then so be it.
“ 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?”
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.
Interestingly it was contrary to my experience. I'd become quite insular and inactive and I found that adding just a short walk each morning - mostly still short of 10k steps a day - had a dramatic impact on reducing my resting heart rate and also a modest reduction in weight. But perhaps I was starting from an inferior starting position.
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 have been in favour of wage growth all along. It's the Tories that have delivered essentially no real wage growth and essentially no productivity growth over the past decade.
I still think Brexit is going to mean lower real wages for most people. Guess we'll see in three-five years time.
Worth noting that the "real wage growth" train was more a thing of 2020 than 2021. Real wages have been roughly flat this year.
(And I'd happily bet a shiny sixpence that the average covers a lot of variation. Real terms rises for certain jobs that have to be done in a certain place (transport, construction?) and real terms falls elsewhere?)
Yes, definitely true that the average will hide a lot of variation.
When Boris bangs on about how wages are growing and he's proud of it... Keir should look into the camera and ask people "Do you feel like your salary has gone up?". For most people the answer will be no...
Yes. What did it for Major's government was that the post Black Wednesday recovery was there on paper but not in most people's reality. There has long been a disconnect between the paper economy and the lived economy. When politicians say "you've never had it so good" and most people don't feel that it does two things. One - this politician is clueless about reality, and Two - other people must be doing great and he's only talking about them.
I keep making the point - the red wall expects results and quickly. Being told how amazing things are when they remain just as shit as before is a guaranteed way to lose.
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.
Could you point me to actual evidence that "Starmer has shown that he opposes pay increases for the low paid". I can't find it. Thanks in advance.
Oh no, not a ten point lead for the government, when there’s so much bad news around it seems the world is going to end?
Why do people think this is the case? It is difficult to believe it is just because Labour and the LDs are invisible
It is odd. It doesn't feel as if the Tories should be doing this well. Anecdotal of course, but everyone I encounter in the South East these days seems to think that Boris is an absolute arse and his government hopeless. This from people whom I would have put down as Tory at any other point in recent history. So is the polling broken, with too much weight being given to the Red Wall mavericks?
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.
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 ?
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?
Re no queues because countries allow use of same lanes. Well as you know I have been traveling recently and none do. It might be they will but no signs have changed so we all queue up while the odd Irish couple walk through the EU gate.
Philip you post what happens in theory not reality.
Which countries have you travelled to?
Others have said that they have travelled through EU gates in other countries and it differs from country to country.
I see no reason not to believe the. Are you saying they weren't telling the truth?
The EU rules allow use of e-Gates for EU EEA CH only. That the odd airport may waive this on the odd occasion doesn't make it universal or regular.
Incidentally I had been prepared for a long wait to re-enter the UK based on (a) past experience and (b) the growing reports of Border Force being too busy on their "how to drown migrants" course to actually staff the BCP. Nope - no queue at all, gates were not working properly but sufficient people to physically check passports.
Others have said (and provided photo / video evidence) of a FUBAR multi-hour queue at the same BCP I went through. I see no reason not to believe them or what they posted. Am I saying they weren't telling the truth because my experience was different...?
It seems from reports that some countries are insisting on border pedantry and others are deliberately not.
Since Britons are now valuable customers to be attracted and people like tourism, then that incentivises people to appeal to Britons. If Britons hard-earned cash gets spent in those nations that treat Britons with respect rather than those that don't, then so be it.
Yes. By "Border Pedantry" you mean the rules. By "countries" can you point to any EU state who have formally or informally chosen to ignore their obligations and allow us to use the e-Gates?
The odd airport doing it now and then to fix an issue is not the same as Spain (as an example) saying "we'll let you in, please come and spend your money here!"
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 have been in favour of wage growth all along. It's the Tories that have delivered essentially no real wage growth and essentially no productivity growth over the past decade.
I still think Brexit is going to mean lower real wages for most people. Guess we'll see in three-five years time.
Worth noting that the "real wage growth" train was more a thing of 2020 than 2021. Real wages have been roughly flat this year.
(And I'd happily bet a shiny sixpence that the average covers a lot of variation. Real terms rises for certain jobs that have to be done in a certain place (transport, construction?) and real terms falls elsewhere?)
Yes, definitely true that the average will hide a lot of variation.
When Boris bangs on about how wages are growing and he's proud of it... Keir should look into the camera and ask people "Do you feel like your salary has gone up?". For most people the answer will be no...
Yes. What did it for Major's government was that the post Black Wednesday recovery was there on paper but not in most people's reality. There has long been a disconnect between the paper economy and the lived economy. When politicians say "you've never had it so good" and most people don't feel that it does two things. One - this politician is clueless about reality, and Two - other people must be doing great and he's only talking about them.
I keep making the point - the red wall expects results and quickly. Being told how amazing things are when they remain just as shit as before is a guaranteed way to lose.
Do you really think the Tories lost in 1997 because people didn't feel better off? In my mind, they lost because Labour offered "another way" that meant we could have better public services without the fear of Labour trashing the economy.
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 have been in favour of wage growth all along. It's the Tories that have delivered essentially no real wage growth and essentially no productivity growth over the past decade.
I still think Brexit is going to mean lower real wages for most people. Guess we'll see in three-five years time.
Worth noting that the "real wage growth" train was more a thing of 2020 than 2021. Real wages have been roughly flat this year.
(And I'd happily bet a shiny sixpence that the average covers a lot of variation. Real terms rises for certain jobs that have to be done in a certain place (transport, construction?) and real terms falls elsewhere?)
Yes, definitely true that the average will hide a lot of variation.
When Boris bangs on about how wages are growing and he's proud of it... Keir should look into the camera and ask people "Do you feel like your salary has gone up?". For most people the answer will be no...
Yes. What did it for Major's government was that the post Black Wednesday recovery was there on paper but not in most people's reality. There has long been a disconnect between the paper economy and the lived economy. When politicians say "you've never had it so good" and most people don't feel that it does two things. One - this politician is clueless about reality, and Two - other people must be doing great and he's only talking about them.
I keep making the point - the red wall expects results and quickly. Being told how amazing things are when they remain just as shit as before is a guaranteed way to lose.
And the reason the red wall turned blue is because high construction here has meant that more people have gone from being tenants to home owners. So they do feel that they are doing great. It was increasing satisfaction not envy that turned the red wall blue.
The key to continue that is to keep building homes faster than the population rises and getting people into a home of their own. And yet you keep hypocritically bewailing housing construction while advocating for immigration.
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.
Could you point me to actual evidence that "Starmer has shown that he opposes pay increases for the low paid". I can't find it. Thanks in advance.
But Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer on Sunday said the government should issue 100,000 visas for HGV drivers, rather than 5,000.
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.
Could you point me to actual evidence that "Starmer has shown that he opposes pay increases for the low paid". I can't find it. Thanks in advance.
You could say that his response to the HGV shortage on Marr was to import 100,000 drivers and the same in hospitality and agriculture
The impression is that he would increase immigration considerably and at present that is not a winning hand due to its effect on wages
Driving home the other day, I had R5 on in the car and the presenters were having a typically banal discussion triggered by the announcement of various new Korean words being added to the dictionary. R5's response was : what words should we throw out to make room?
One texter to the show suggested that we could do away with one of the words 'leaflet' or 'pamphlet', and preferred to be rid of pamphlet as she hated the word (and I have heard many people express the same sentiment in the past. And lots of people don't like 'moist' either?!). My Etymology Etcetera antenna twitched..
Surely, of these two words for historically one of the most important kinds of political propaganda (ablative female gerundive of propagare, so literally - things to be spread), pamphlet must have the more interesting etymology?
A leaflet is just a small leaf (which is derived from old German laub meaning leaf. So dull)
Pamphlet certainly does have a more 'interesting' etymology. It is derived from the name of the first famous pamphlet; Pamphilus de amore, or 'Pamphilus On Love', which was a 12th century Latin "comedic" play.
The eponymous Pamphilus (from Greek pan- & -philos, literally 'loved by all') is the "hero" who falls in love with a virgin, Galathea. He considers trying to win her heart, but then decides to get an old lady to trick her and capture her so that he can rape her.
This play was widely spread across Europe for boys learning Latin to study, so widely that it eventually became the hoover of vacuum cleaners of its day, with its name used for the generic.
I wonder how many rapes the original pamphlet was responsible for?
I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that pamphlet should be consigned to history, if not expunged from the language altogether.
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.
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.
I think that there is no justification for restrictions on liberty to protect those who refuse to take the vaccine, when if we had 100% vaccine takeup the number of hospitalizations would be very low.
The government's focus should be on increasing the vaccination rate, and reducing the impact of Covid hospitalizations on routine NHS care.
The "case rate", not infection rate, is a function of how much testing is being done.
The UK is currently testing at a rate of 13.42 per thousand per day, which is quite high by the standards of other countries around the world
YouGov surveyed on the question of whether students should be allowed to have various sorts of society at universities - things like Men's Rights and Feminism societies. (Twitter Oct 12)
In every case a significant % of the public said that they should not. (The highest % saying this should not be allowed was on Pro Life issues.)
In a liberal, freedom of speech and thought world this is not even be a question.
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 have been in favour of wage growth all along. It's the Tories that have delivered essentially no real wage growth and essentially no productivity growth over the past decade.
I still think Brexit is going to mean lower real wages for most people. Guess we'll see in three-five years time.
Worth noting that the "real wage growth" train was more a thing of 2020 than 2021. Real wages have been roughly flat this year.
(And I'd happily bet a shiny sixpence that the average covers a lot of variation. Real terms rises for certain jobs that have to be done in a certain place (transport, construction?) and real terms falls elsewhere?)
2020 - the middle class gain but the working class don't 2021 - the working class gain but the middle class don't
Its in 2021 that people oppose pay rises.
But I'm not sure it's a simple class thing.
For certain working class jobs- those that have to be done here and have to be done now, the labour shortage is a definite boon for workers doing those jobs. No question about that, and best of luck to them.
But other working class jobs are as exposed as ever to the chill winds of global competition. Manufacturing and agriculture can just close down, be replaced by farms and factories in Romania, and the products can be imported freely. And that's before we get on to the working class jobs where the government is the ultimate paymaster and is (for now) using its monopsony to try to avoid pay rises at all.
And the criterion for who wins and who loses here looks like it isn't really about who has done badly out of the old arrangements, or whose job can be made more productive, it's just whether the job can be moved abroad or not.
Now, it might still be worth doing, despite all of this. But it's a gain for some workers, not all workers.
Its a generalisation but its based in reality.
Its only when jobs at the lower levels of the ladder start having pay increase do we get the 'pay rises must be earned through productivity increases' and 'it will lead to price rises and make everyone poorer' talk.
As you rise up the jobs ladder then its 'paying the going rate' and 'recruiting talent' instead.
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.
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 ?
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?
Re no queues because countries allow use of same lanes. Well as you know I have been traveling recently and none do. It might be they will but no signs have changed so we all queue up while the odd Irish couple walk through the EU gate.
Philip you post what happens in theory not reality.
Which countries have you travelled to?
Others have said that they have travelled through EU gates in other countries and it differs from country to country.
I see no reason not to believe the. Are you saying they weren't telling the truth?
No I am just saying often what you post works in theory but differs in reality. Life isn't black and white and is beuracratic. Nothing had changed in terms of signage in 5 ports/airports l have been through in the last month.
To be frank l haven't been bothered by queues. It has run smoothly because of low numbers, but you made a statement that was not happening in the real world. The most notable was in Portugal where an entire plane queued up for non EU passport checks and 2 people went through the EU checking gate.
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.
Could you point me to actual evidence that "Starmer has shown that he opposes pay increases for the low paid". I can't find it. Thanks in advance.
But Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer on Sunday said the government should issue 100,000 visas for HGV drivers, rather than 5,000.
So where are these HGV drivers who are going to come here ?
It is just not feasible. Cheap politics
There are global shortages in truck drivers. Even nations as far afield as Uzbekistan and Mexico have shortages. It is not just confined to the UK or EU.
He should be calling for more training, better conditions for those in the industry, local councils adopting HGV friendly policies such as removing double yellow lines on industrial estates and speeding up the testing process and eliminating the backlog.
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.
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 ?
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
You cannot preserve wealth while taxing those without it
HMG will have no choice but to increase wealth taxes
This Tory HMG will not and certainly will not lower the IHT threshold for married couples below the current £1 million.
If you disagree you can always vote LD or go back to voting Labour again as you did under Blair
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.
Could you point me to actual evidence that "Starmer has shown that he opposes pay increases for the low paid". I can't find it. Thanks in advance.
You could say that his response to the HGV shortage on Marr was to import 100,000 drivers and the same in hospitality and agriculture
The impression is that he would increase immigration considerably and at present that is not a winning hand due to its effect on wages
And its effect on housing availability, without a commensurate embrace of freely available construction.
Its a policy of screwing the working, in favour of the landlords.
Oh no, not a ten point lead for the government, when there’s so much bad news around it seems the world is going to end?
Why do people think this is the case? It is difficult to believe it is just because Labour and the LDs are invisible
IMO it’s a combination of an invisible opposition, and people not blaming the government for what are mostly global supply chain issues at the moment.
Also, the FBPE mob haven’t gone away from trying to link all the bad news to leaving the EU, which conversely rallies support for the government among those in favour of leaving the EU.
That is my view also. I can't see anything else. I think your last point is important and I think Boris is exploiting this. Although not good for the country to be divided like this it's good politics that any politician worth his salt would do sadly.
Comments
Many people that used that to move to other EU countries were not rich . Leavers can’t seem to accept that people don’t like having freedoms they were used to removed .
The monarch and heirs to the throne are rightly not just mute dummys they can on occasion campaign and express things they believe in
I still think Brexit is going to mean lower real wages for most people. Guess we'll see in three-five years time.
Plus of course plenty of people especially in London and the Home Counties who are homeowners may not be rich but they and their children would also be hit by an IHT rise too
HMG will have no choice but to increase wealth taxes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RV_Petrel
A real espionage story behind a billionaire's ship is the Glomar Explorer, and the way it was really a CIA front for Project Azorian:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
If you disagree you can always vote LD or go back to voting Labour again as you did under Blair
FPDA Member-Nations to Commemorate 50th Anniversary with Flypast and Naval Vessel Display
https://twitter.com/mindefsg/status/1448559853211848704?s=20
As I said earlier I hope some day accommodation can be agreed with the EU over this issue
Philip you post what happens in theory not reality.
Logistics costs rises are real and amplified here by Brexit.
Import cost rises are real thanks to Brexit.
Energy cost rises are real and amplified here by Brexit.
And we are already seeing the start of a price rise surge. Forget arbitrary baskets of items counted for artificial measures of inflation and look at the real world evidence.
Its almost certainly true now that wage growth outstrips inflation. Its almost certainly true that the process of reversing this is underway and the impact for many will be brutal.
https://twitter.com/BruceReuters/status/1447836456010067968?s=20
(And I'd happily bet a shiny sixpence that the average covers a lot of variation. Real terms rises for certain jobs that have to be done in a certain place (transport, construction?) and real terms falls elsewhere?)
He's not crossed a line yet, but he soon will if he wants to start in effect condemning people for not doing what he would prefer.
It's going to be a separate tax on property - based on current value..
Yes you can have some space exploration but it does not give you license to destroy your current planet and ignore the problems on it, note too the only people going into space so far are mostly the rich.
The disruptions in supply chains you are describing are being felt all around the world, particularly in relation to chips and electrical products. This has resulted in reductions in car manufacturing and an increase in the value of second hand cars, for example. Once again, absolutely nothing to do with Brexit.
Perhaps we should give the police exemption that Operation "Smack peaceful protestors around the head with your Baton" won't lead to any charges if the Home Secretary decidsed that the just response to another Sarah Everard-style peace vigil is to try and kill the protestors to deter others.
C 41 (+1)
Lab 31
LD 9
Green 8 (-1)
- Are you in favour of satellites that monitor the Earth - sea leave, temperature, atmospheric composition, pollution sources?
- Are you in favour of the atmospheric science that has been done regarding Mars and Venus - which has directly lead to increased understanding of the Earths atmosphere and er... Global Warming?
- Are you in favour of internet/phone services in remote areas such as the less developed parts of Africa?
etc etc
It's time to tax unearned wealth properly to balance the books.
And @HYUFD although I have voted CON recently I voted LAB in 1992, 1997 and 2001 and it is entirely fine to change parties. Otherwise elections would be boring! 👍
Wait until @Bigjohnowls reads that
The reason for messes like the Health (and Social Care, of course Social Care, when the time is ripe) Levy is to raise money without looking like it's raising taxes.
However, governmentally, Johnson and Sunak really, really need the money. Lots of money. More money than they can scrape together from all these fiddly measures.
Interesting to see how they square the politics and the government here.
2021 - the working class gain but the middle class don't
Its in 2021 that people oppose pay rises.
Keep to the sentiment rather than specifics I'd say. People can criticise the latter more than the former.
And I'm surprised you dont think thede people can focus on what they like as private citizens. Should they be forced to help in ways you prefer?
Nor have I blamed ingredient and component supply on Brexit - read what I said above and tell me where the word "Brexit" is on that line? You are deflecting worse than a Daily Express headline writer.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/uk-energy-prices-crisis-rail-diesel-b1937543.html
Rail freight operators are having to mothball their electric locomotives and switch back to diesel trains, which are slower and cause more pollution, because of the unfolding energy crisis.
The logistics firms say a surge in wholesale energy prices and an increase in the track access charges they pay has made the low-carbon trains uneconomical to operate.
Priti wants immunity if immigrants drown, and jail if lifeboats try to save them
State sponsored manslaughter.
And still the fanbois cheer...
Are any of the problems we face exclusively down to Brexit? No.
Are any of the problems we face definitely nothing to do with Brexit? No.
The absolutism at both ends (and yes I absolutely agree that includes FBPE people but frankly also you at the opposite end of the spectrum) is just delusional.
FOM is an excellent thing in itself and was uncontroversial until it extended to countries in situations radically different from our own. No-one in real politics advocates global FOM, so all acknowledge it must have practical limits for economic and social reasons.
Prior to the referendum the opportunity was there to revisit this and it is a tragedy it was missed.
If each nation state in the EU could bilaterally agree with others over FOM it would be much easier for the Balkan states and Turkey to be admitted, which would be good, and would make a strong case for our reentry to either the EU or EFTA.
what else we getting wrong on here today?
behindaheadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy,_Lady_Houston had a silly hobby horse about winning airplane races.
In fact I don’t know why I put that in the past tense, Brexiteers are still obsessed with the EU.
Also, the FBPE mob haven’t gone away from trying to link all the bad news to leaving the EU, which conversely rallies support for the government among those in favour of leaving the EU.
Others have said that they have travelled through EU gates in other countries and it differs from country to country.
I see no reason not to believe the. Are you saying they weren't telling the truth?
For certain working class jobs- those that have to be done here and have to be done now, the labour shortage is a definite boon for workers doing those jobs. No question about that, and best of luck to them.
But other working class jobs are as exposed as ever to the chill winds of global competition. Manufacturing and agriculture can just close down, be replaced by farms and factories in Romania, and the products can be imported freely. And that's before we get on to the working class jobs where the government is the ultimate paymaster and is (for now) using its monopsony to try to avoid pay rises at all.
And the criterion for who wins and who loses here looks like it isn't really about who has done badly out of the old arrangements, or whose job can be made more productive, it's just whether the job can be moved abroad or not.
Now, it might still be worth doing, despite all of this. But it's a gain for some workers, not all workers.
(And beforebthe fanbois retort "there was no Labour bounce" I will pre-empt with " Starmer was drowned out by Wayne Couzens).
Anyway some of us peasants benefitting from Johnson's Party of the Workers need to wrll- work.
Sunak and Johnson seem to be doing everything they can to lose my vote at the moment.
But then Starmer and Rochdale and Scott and all the FBPE are really doing all they can to ensure there's no alternatives to the government.
The government's focus should be on increasing the vaccination rate, and reducing the impact of Covid hospitalizations on routine NHS care.
Incidentally I had been prepared for a long wait to re-enter the UK based on (a) past experience and (b) the growing reports of Border Force being too busy on their "how to drown migrants" course to actually staff the BCP. Nope - no queue at all, gates were not working properly but sufficient people to physically check passports.
Others have said (and provided photo / video evidence) of a FUBAR multi-hour queue at the same BCP I went through. I see no reason not to believe them or what they posted. Am I saying they weren't telling the truth because my experience was different...?
When Boris bangs on about how wages are growing and he's proud of it... Keir should look into the camera and ask people "Do you feel like your salary has gone up?". For most people the answer will be no...
It may just be that voters recognise covid, energy prices and supply issues are worldwide and that HMG is doing its best and that the opposition do not have any better ideas to deal with it
Since Britons are now valuable customers to be attracted and people like tourism, then that incentivises people to appeal to Britons. If Britons hard-earned cash gets spent in those nations that treat Britons with respect rather than those that don't, then so be it.
I keep making the point - the red wall expects results and quickly. Being told how amazing things are when they remain just as shit as before is a guaranteed way to lose.
Thanks in advance.
The odd airport doing it now and then to fix an issue is not the same as Spain (as an example) saying "we'll let you in, please come and spend your money here!"
The key to continue that is to keep building homes faster than the population rises and getting people into a home of their own. And yet you keep hypocritically bewailing housing construction while advocating for immigration.
https://www.ft.com/content/683b4e41-9470-46ce-9c32-fe75214c4bf2
The impression is that he would increase immigration considerably and at present that is not a winning hand due to its effect on wages
One texter to the show suggested that we could do away with one of the words 'leaflet' or 'pamphlet', and preferred to be rid of pamphlet as she hated the word (and I have heard many people express the same sentiment in the past. And lots of people don't like 'moist' either?!). My Etymology Etcetera antenna twitched..
Surely, of these two words for historically one of the most important kinds of political propaganda (ablative female gerundive of propagare, so literally - things to be spread), pamphlet must have the more interesting etymology?
A leaflet is just a small leaf (which is derived from old German laub meaning leaf. So dull)
Pamphlet certainly does have a more 'interesting' etymology. It is derived from the name of the first famous pamphlet; Pamphilus de amore, or 'Pamphilus On Love', which was a 12th century Latin "comedic" play.
The eponymous Pamphilus (from Greek pan- & -philos, literally 'loved by all') is the "hero" who falls in love with a virgin, Galathea. He considers trying to win her heart, but then decides to get an old lady to trick her and capture her so that he can rape her.
This play was widely spread across Europe for boys learning Latin to study, so widely that it eventually became the hoover of vacuum cleaners of its day, with its name used for the generic.
I wonder how many rapes the original pamphlet was responsible for?
I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that pamphlet should be consigned to history, if not expunged from the language altogether.
The UK is currently testing at a rate of 13.42 per thousand per day, which is quite high by the standards of other countries around the world
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-tests-per-thousand-people-smoothed-7-day?tab=table
Germany is apparently doing 1.3 per thousand, for example.
My car insurance renewal notice is just in. Increase of just under 15% on last year. A short spell on comparison sites beckons.
In every case a significant % of the public said that they should not. (The highest % saying this should not be allowed was on Pro Life issues.)
In a liberal, freedom of speech and thought world this is not even be a question.
Troubling times.
Most sensible voters are not like the hard left that infects the Labour Party.
Best to shop around
Its only when jobs at the lower levels of the ladder start having pay increase do we get the 'pay rises must be earned through productivity increases' and 'it will lead to price rises and make everyone poorer' talk.
As you rise up the jobs ladder then its 'paying the going rate' and 'recruiting talent' instead.
To be frank l haven't been bothered by queues. It has run smoothly because of low numbers, but you made a statement that was not happening in the real world. The most notable was in Portugal where an entire plane queued up for non EU passport checks and 2 people went through the EU checking gate.
It is just not feasible. Cheap politics
There are global shortages in truck drivers. Even nations as far afield as Uzbekistan and Mexico have shortages. It is not just confined to the UK or EU.
He should be calling for more training, better conditions for those in the industry, local councils adopting HGV friendly policies such as removing double yellow lines on industrial estates and speeding up the testing process and eliminating the backlog.
Its a policy of screwing the working, in favour of the landlords.
Would be interesting to compare to inflation also.
Wait a minute so my hometown of Arbroath will be taken out of the Angus constituency and lumped in with Dundee East?? What the hell!
https://twitter.com/RaymondSouthorn/status/1448567701186691072?s=20
YouGov
Latest Westminster voting intention (12-13 Oct)
Con: 41% (+2 from 5-6 Oct)
Lab: 31% (n/c)
Lib Dem: 9% (n/c)
Green: 8% (-1)
SNP: 4% (-2)
Reform UK: 4% (n/c)
I guess it's Corbynites saying they won't vote for Starmer. (Most of them will.)