I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
Who is "travelling to Somalia to be radicalised" that isn't already radicalised?
And how do you know someone is travelling to Somalia to be radicalised? Should travelling to Somalia to visit family, or for tourism, or other reasons be banned?
I'd be very surprised if you could travel directly between the UK and Somalia. People would have to travel via neighbouring countries like Kenya - coincidentally where we have signed an agreement to recruit 20,000 nurses, who might want to travel back to see their families occasionally, but HYUFD wouldn't want that, on account of the risk that they might cross into Somalia and return as jihadis.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
Rubbish, if they try an fly via other nations then we should work with French and Spanish agencies too to ensure they also enforce mandatory checks on travel to Somalia etc from there. They equally wish to stop Jihadism so I am sure would oblige
Do you realise how ridiculous this is? An effective blanket ban on travelling for anyone who has links to countries that have terrorists without any due process.
Should TSE be banned from travelling to visit family in Pakistan? Or Spain because he can get to Pakistan from there?
If TSE is travelling to visit family in Pakistan, his family in Pakistan can confirm that to the UK and Spanish authorities
How do you know they are his family and not people pretending to be his family.
Your fix for the problem in your plan shows how completely insane and unthought through it is.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
Rubbish, if they try an fly via other nations then we should work with French and Spanish agencies too to ensure they also enforce mandatory checks on travel to Somalia etc from there. They equally wish to stop Jihadism so I am sure would oblige
Do you realise how ridiculous this is? An effective blanket ban on travelling for anyone who has links to countries that have terrorists without any due process.
Should TSE be banned from travelling to visit family in Pakistan? Or Spain because he can get to Pakistan from there?
If TSE is travelling to visit family in Pakistan, his family in Pakistan can confirm that to the UK and Spanish authorities
You're legitimately insane. Once again, you prove to me that I was right to leave the Tory party.
Just heard Lisa Nandy saying “this [abuse directed at MPs] is not felt equally” and then said that Dianne Abbott is the most abused MP.
How is that relevant to this? I don’t think Twitter abuse contributed to the radicalisation of the perpetrator.
Abbott is black, and a bit overweight, and that is a factor in the abuse she gets. But she is also very outspoke, gaffe prone and was a weekly contributor to one of the most watched political tv shows, and I think that is the main reason
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
The real problem is that the intelligence services and all the other agencies involved in the Prevent programmes simply do not have the resources they need to monitor effectively, let alone deradicalise, all those they know about.
Unless @HYUFD's Tory government is willing to put their money where their mouth is then this is all talk and little will be achieved. Effective counter-terrorism and deradicalisation take time and resources.
Whisper it quietly: there isn’t much evidence that deradicalisation works.
From what I can tell, the best solution to angry young men/women is to tie them down with a job, a mortgage, a relationship and young children and they tend to move on and cease to be a threat.
Doesn’t always work, but better than what the bullshit deradicalisation industry can achieve.
Prevention is better than a cure - but we didn't want to listen to anyone who said we should prevent mass immigration, so we are where we are
I don't have a problem with mass immigration. I have a real problem with multiculturalism and in particular the encouragement of the idea that it is ok to recreate the societies of the poorer parts of Pakistan or Somalia here. If people want to come and be British and we need additional people at the time, fine. But we need to make sure that those people are encouraged to become committed to British values, including sexual equality, gender equality and respect, freedom of speech and mutual tolerance. If they are not so willing we don't really want them here. What we do about those already here and indeed were born here like this particular murderer is tricky but it is a consequence of not putting in the effort to integrate in the first place.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
The real problem is that the intelligence services and all the other agencies involved in the Prevent programmes simply do not have the resources they need to monitor effectively, let alone deradicalise, all those they know about.
Unless @HYUFD's Tory government is willing to put their money where their mouth is then this is all talk and little will be achieved. Effective counter-terrorism and deradicalisation take time and resources.
Whisper it quietly: there isn’t much evidence that deradicalisation works.
From what I can tell, the best solution to angry young men/women is to tie them down with a job, a mortgage, a relationship and young children and they tend to move on and cease to be a threat.
Doesn’t always work, but better than what the bullshit deradicalisation industry can achieve.
Prevention is better than a cure - but we didn't want to listen to anyone who said we should prevent mass immigration, so we are where we are
I don't have a problem with mass immigration. I have a real problem with multiculturalism and in particular the encouragement of the idea that it is ok to recreate the societies of the poorer parts of Pakistan or Somalia here. If people want to come and be British and we need additional people at the time, fine. But we need to make sure that those people are encouraged to become committed to British values, including sexual equality, gender equality and respect, freedom of speech and mutual tolerance. If they are not so willing we don't really want them here. What we do about those already here and indeed were born here like this particular murderer is tricky but it is a consequence of not putting in the effort to integrate in the first place.
We're at that point in the terrorism cycle where everyone rushes to push their proposed response before we know anything about the attacker or what might have prevented the attack.
I guess it makes tactical sense because even if it later turns out that the attack was motivated because the MP was banging the Somali dude's wife you still get to advance your agenda.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
The real problem is that the intelligence services and all the other agencies involved in the Prevent programmes simply do not have the resources they need to monitor effectively, let alone deradicalise, all those they know about.
Unless @HYUFD's Tory government is willing to put their money where their mouth is then this is all talk and little will be achieved. Effective counter-terrorism and deradicalisation take time and resources.
Whisper it quietly: there isn’t much evidence that deradicalisation works.
From what I can tell, the best solution to angry young men/women is to tie them down with a job, a mortgage, a relationship and young children and they tend to move on and cease to be a threat.
Doesn’t always work, but better than what the bullshit deradicalisation industry can achieve.
You may very well be right.
I was once involved with the intelligence services in relation to an individual travelling to a very dodgy country indeed. The person was someone with a good job, a good salary etc - all the things you mention. So even that may not be the answer.
Just heard Lisa Nandy saying “this [abuse directed at MPs] is not felt equally” and then said that Dianne Abbott is the most abused MP.
How is that relevant to this? I don’t think Twitter abuse contributed to the radicalisation of the perpetrator.
If you are an MP I would imagine their focus is primarily about MP's security and safety. Seems perfectly natural that their take on this is focused on that rather than the broader issue of terrorism, Islamic or otherwise, when family members will this weekend have been asking them to quit or not do public meetings without security.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
The significance of him being a constituent of Starmers is that he shouldn't have been at Amess's constituency surgery. It is normal for such requests to be redirected to the appropriate MP. Admittedly this can be a problem when your own MP is a waste of space, but the first step in security should be that surgery's are by appointment only.
This can help with security. It is normal for appointments in my line to be labelled "not to be seen alone" or "not for female staff" because of past inappropriate behaviour, for example.
Indeed, and I know security has been beefed up. My sis-in-law used to work for a Labour MP when they were in government and they would just book a venue and keep an eye out for the people who shouldn't be allowed in.
Point is that MPs and their staff do not know every person in their constituency. We can't make such things completely secure without utterly changing what they are.
It wouldn't be unreasonable to check names against the electoral register and against the Prevent list of referrals. This would not mean refusing to see but could mean seeing in a safer situation.
Sadly I think we will have to. The problem is that MPs also go to public places where they are not able to have this protection. Jo Cox was murdered in the street. As was David Amess.
David Amess was murdered in a Church serving his constituents who loved him
Should the fact he was killed in a church make it worse? I think so, but maybe that is an old fashioned view
For me no, because its not possible to get any worse.
Whether he was killed in a Church, or in his own office, or on the street, or in a supermarket, or in a restaurant or anywhere else . . . the fact he was killed is as bad as it gets.
Its why I think all murder (not manslaughter) should get whole life tariffs automatically. It doesn't get worse than murder for me. Its like asking what's the number higher than infinity?
I did find the slaughter of the 84 year old priest while he was actually giving Communion in a French church a few years back particularly shocking. There was a reason why the killer chose that moment and that location to carry out his horrible deed - it was intended to be a desecration, a sign of contempt and hatred. And that it was being done by someone who claimed to want respect for his own religion was why it was so horrible. There was a symbolic aspect to what he did which was intended to show utter contempt to something that others valued. I do not think you need to be religious to see that.
In the same way the fact that Sir David was killed while serving others shows utter contempt for the idea of public service and democracy. The murder - as all murders are - is horrible. But the symbolism of what was done, how and where also matters.
I like you hope he gets a whole life murder. And I hope this does not stop MPs doing their surgeries. It is a precious part of our democracy.
I hope too that it is not just MPs who are protected but also their staff who are often those who see people, read the emails and letters etc. And I also hope that those within parties and activist movements who target MPs or others in the public eye with abuse take a long hard look at themselves. Some of the stuff we have seen written in public places - as recently as yesterday - is pretty unpleasant and comes close to - or in some cases amounts to - threats of violence. This has got to stop. Vigorous free speech is one thing. Threatening violence is quite another.
Vigorous free speech in a society fragmented by race and religion leads to violence. That is why mass immigration of people from countries with wildly different takes on society should have been limited to the absolute minimum
It wasn't - and now we have religious attacks leading to soldiers beheaded in the street and MPs killed in churches, not to mention 7/7, G-Mex, London Bridge (twice) and so on
We're at that point in the terrorism cycle where everyone rushes to push their proposed response before we know anything about the attacker or what might have prevented the attack.
I guess it makes tactical sense because even if it later turns out that the attack was motivated because the MP was banging the Somali dude's wife you still get to advance your agenda.
If the victim was known to the attacker, and the motive was domestic, he’d be in a lot less trouble.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
Rubbish, if they try an fly via other nations then we should work with French and Spanish agencies too to ensure they also enforce mandatory checks on travel to Somalia etc from there. They equally wish to stop Jihadism so I am sure would oblige
Do you realise how ridiculous this is? An effective blanket ban on travelling for anyone who has links to countries that have terrorists without any due process.
Should TSE be banned from travelling to visit family in Pakistan? Or Spain because he can get to Pakistan from there?
If TSE is travelling to visit family in Pakistan, his family in Pakistan can confirm that to the UK and Spanish authorities
How do you know they are his family and not people pretending to be his family.
Your fix for the problem in your plan shows how completely insane and unthought through it is.
Well passport ID, photographic evidence, phonecalls to them to check they know TSE and the key elements of his life.
Obviously DNA checks would match too as a last resort.
It is the same as with any moral panic - if you can categorise the threat as the "other", you can deflect away from your own moral failings.
Jo Cox was murdered by a far right lunatic, so its ok to be hard right and want to drown migrants and call judges the enemy, thats safe still. David Amess was murdered by a "Somali" man. So its ok to call the Tories scum, thats safe.
Or, we do the hard bit and look into ourselves. People can have different policies and idea without being seen as some kind of enemy. And yes, mea culpa I can point at some immoral (IMHO) Tory policies and call them out. That doesn't mean I think the "smirking cow" Priti Patel is evil and needs to be murdered. I just fundamentally disagree with the people who have been gaslit to support such policies.
David Amess was killed by a Jihadi. That does not mean we do not need to be more civil in our discourse but no matter how bad the spats on social media they do not lead to people murdering each other.
The vast amount of terrorism and political murder in this country is caused by Jihadis following an extremist version of Islam or the Far Right (not the mainstream right). That was what produced the killers of Jo Cox and David Amess and that is what the police and intelligence services need to focus on identifying and countering, not twatter spats between Corbynites, Brexiteers, Scottish Nationalists and FBPE diehard Remainers
With all due respect - which in this case is almost none - for you to turn his murder into a platform to get support for your government wanting to drown future jihadis is beyond shameful.
Race and nation have been weaponised by your party. Instead of the moral disgust that most people felt when that 3 year-old boy washed up on that Greek beach, you have hardened people's souls to see the boy and other boys as the enemy invaders. If they drown due to government directive then somehow its their fault.
A period of silence from you would be welcomed. For your own good as much as ours. Stop. And. Think.
If I recall the date of that photo was a couple of days after Merkel had thrown open her borders and told refugees / economic migrants to come en masse to Germany. Whether the link is causal or just association in time, it makes the point.
(Sept 2 in the Guardian after Merkel's famous "we can do this" at the end of August I believe.)
Merkel did not provide any transport, so they had to hand themselves over to traffickers, and those who did not die, like this poor child, had a chance of making it to Germany.
The rather more ethical UK policy at the time was to provide very heavy funding to help refugees stay in region.
I’m going to be cynical here but I think Nandy’s (and probably Labour’s) aim is to switch the focus from what it was ie a radical Islamic attack and try to weave into the general theme of abuse MPs get, which is where they feel more comfortable.
Just heard Lisa Nandy saying “this [abuse directed at MPs] is not felt equally” and then said that Dianne Abbott is the most abused MP.
How is that relevant to this? I don’t think Twitter abuse contributed to the radicalisation of the perpetrator.
Question of definitions, isn't it. Ms Abbott is abused by racists, Britain First-ers, that sort of people. Many of whom are all mouth and no trousers. Are people 'likely' to commit the sort of acts we saw in North Leigh last week likely to Twit about it a lot? Don't know, but suspect it's unlikely.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
Rubbish, if they try an fly via other nations then we should work with French and Spanish agencies too to ensure they also enforce mandatory checks on travel to Somalia etc from there. They equally wish to stop Jihadism so I am sure would oblige
Do you realise how ridiculous this is? An effective blanket ban on travelling for anyone who has links to countries that have terrorists without any due process.
Should TSE be banned from travelling to visit family in Pakistan? Or Spain because he can get to Pakistan from there?
If TSE is travelling to visit family in Pakistan, his family in Pakistan can confirm that to the UK and Spanish authorities
How do you know they are his family and not people pretending to be his family.
Your fix for the problem in your plan shows how completely insane and unthought through it is.
Well passport ID, photographic evidence, phonecalls to them to check they know TSE and the key elements of his life.
Obviously DNA checks would match too as a last resort.
The thing most likely to end SNP hegemony in Scotland imo is a Sindy Referendum. If it's won, there'll probably be a realignment of politics since with independence achieved people in larger numbers will start to vote their broader political view rather than just on this issue. And if it's lost, the drive for independence will lose salience and priority. The SNP could fight against this, keep "banging on" about independence, put yet another vote on it front and centre in their platform, but this would probably shed votes and end their dominance. Or alternatively, if it is another "No", they could go with the grain, de-prioritize independence, talk less about it, drop the commitment to hold another vote in the near future, and if they do this they will still likely shed votes (just maybe different ones) and see an end to their dominance.
So, that's my advice to Boris Johnson. Want to cut the SNP down to size? Hold that Sindy vote.
Why would he want to do that when he can keep the threat of a PM Stamer as puppet of the SNP in a hung parliament to keep English Tories voting Tory?
Depends what the calculus and priorities are. The argument to hold the vote is compelling both ways. For Nats, there's a mandate (Holyrood) and supporting rationale (Brexit), and a chance to realize the dream. For Unionists, there's a chance to kill it and (imo) the bigger risk to the Union is to deny & defer. But if what Boris Johnson is all about is the narrow short-term electoral interests of himself and the Tory Party, then, as you say, he might see things differently.
I’m going to be cynical here but I think Nandy’s (and probably Labour’s) aim is to switch the focus from what it was ie a radical Islamic attack and try to weave into the general theme of abuse MPs get, which is where they feel more comfortable.
Of course it is, they aren't even trying to hide it. The more focus Islamic terrorism gets the more chance there is that people realise the Labour party has been captured by Islamist interests in certain parts of the country to hold onto those seats.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
The real problem is that the intelligence services and all the other agencies involved in the Prevent programmes simply do not have the resources they need to monitor effectively, let alone deradicalise, all those they know about.
Unless @HYUFD's Tory government is willing to put their money where their mouth is then this is all talk and little will be achieved. Effective counter-terrorism and deradicalisation take time and resources.
Whisper it quietly: there isn’t much evidence that deradicalisation works.
From what I can tell, the best solution to angry young men/women is to tie them down with a job, a mortgage, a relationship and young children and they tend to move on and cease to be a threat.
Doesn’t always work, but better than what the bullshit deradicalisation industry can achieve.
Prevention is better than a cure - but we didn't want to listen to anyone who said we should prevent mass immigration, so we are where we are
I don't have a problem with mass immigration. I have a real problem with multiculturalism and in particular the encouragement of the idea that it is ok to recreate the societies of the poorer parts of Pakistan or Somalia here. If people want to come and be British and we need additional people at the time, fine. But we need to make sure that those people are encouraged to become committed to British values, including sexual equality, gender equality and respect, freedom of speech and mutual tolerance. If they are not so willing we don't really want them here. What we do about those already here and indeed were born here like this particular murderer is tricky but it is a consequence of not putting in the effort to integrate in the first place.
Completely agree - but mass immigration of the type you mention has happened; a kind of academic experiment, doomed to failure in which we all are participating. Anyone with an ounce of common sense could have forseen it could never work, and time and time again we have been shown it doesn't work. But it has got to the stage where politicians have bought into the project so much that it can never be reversed.
As with Lee Rigby, 7/7, Ariana Grande concert, the death of Sir David looks like it can only be described as an act of civil war
I've been catching up with what is happening in the fishing debate, and it is full of shouting French politicians, with some interesting commentary from fishing organisations.
Has anyone seen *any* coverage *anywhere* of how UK-based fisherman have been getting on fishing in EU waters since the start of the year?
The thing most likely to end SNP hegemony in Scotland imo is a Sindy Referendum. If it's won, there'll probably be a realignment of politics since with independence achieved people in larger numbers will start to vote their broader political view rather than just on this issue. And if it's lost, the drive for independence will lose salience and priority. The SNP could fight against this, keep "banging on" about independence, put yet another vote on it front and centre in their platform, but this would probably shed votes and end their dominance. Or alternatively, if it is another "No", they could go with the grain, de-prioritize independence, talk less about it, drop the commitment to hold another vote in the near future, and if they do this they will still likely shed votes (just maybe different ones) and see an end to their dominance.
So, that's my advice to Boris Johnson. Want to cut the SNP down to size? Hold that Sindy vote.
The last thing he wants to do is cut the SNP down to size. They are the biggest single obstacle to a Labour government. He is more than happy for them to retain their hegemony.
Yes, the current situation suits Johnson well. As you said, it blocks off effectively the route to a Labour Government or, if Labour and the SNP did come together, Labour’s brand would take another big hit. Also, Unionism has revived the Scottish Conservatives (cue Malcolm) - for those opposed to independence, the Conservatives are seen as the best option. Why would he change that?
To be fair, same for the SNP. Keep power, blame the Tory Government and kick independence down the road.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
Rubbish, if they try an fly via other nations then we should work with French and Spanish agencies too to ensure they also enforce mandatory checks on travel to Somalia etc from there. They equally wish to stop Jihadism so I am sure would oblige
Do you realise how ridiculous this is? An effective blanket ban on travelling for anyone who has links to countries that have terrorists without any due process.
Should TSE be banned from travelling to visit family in Pakistan? Or Spain because he can get to Pakistan from there?
If TSE is travelling to visit family in Pakistan, his family in Pakistan can confirm that to the UK and Spanish authorities
How do you know they are his family and not people pretending to be his family.
Your fix for the problem in your plan shows how completely insane and unthought through it is.
Well passport ID, photographic evidence, phonecalls to them to check they know TSE and the key elements of his life.
Obviously DNA checks would match too as a last resort.
DNA checks ffs
He's completely mental. The modern face of the Tory party. I'm shocked (but also not) he hasn't been excommunicated yet.
And his measures do nothing about the type of attack in Denmark which was perpetrated by a white European convert.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
Rubbish, if they try an fly via other nations then we should work with French and Spanish agencies too to ensure they also enforce mandatory checks on travel to Somalia etc from there. They equally wish to stop Jihadism so I am sure would oblige
Do you realise how ridiculous this is? An effective blanket ban on travelling for anyone who has links to countries that have terrorists without any due process.
Should TSE be banned from travelling to visit family in Pakistan? Or Spain because he can get to Pakistan from there?
If TSE is travelling to visit family in Pakistan, his family in Pakistan can confirm that to the UK and Spanish authorities
And how do we know his family aren't jihadis? How do we know he won't say "hi" to the family for a day then spend the rest of the fortnight at Jihadi school?
Just heard Lisa Nandy saying “this [abuse directed at MPs] is not felt equally” and then said that Dianne Abbott is the most abused MP.
How is that relevant to this? I don’t think Twitter abuse contributed to the radicalisation of the perpetrator.
If you are an MP I would imagine their focus is primarily about MP's security and safety. Seems perfectly natural that their take on this is focused on that rather than the broader issue of terrorism, Islamic or otherwise, when family members will this weekend have been asking them to quit or not do public meetings without security.
Do you think Dianne Abbott is in more danger than other MPs?
Just heard Lisa Nandy saying “this [abuse directed at MPs] is not felt equally” and then said that Dianne Abbott is the most abused MP.
How is that relevant to this? I don’t think Twitter abuse contributed to the radicalisation of the perpetrator.
If you are an MP I would imagine their focus is primarily about MP's security and safety. Seems perfectly natural that their take on this is focused on that rather than the broader issue of terrorism, Islamic or otherwise, when family members will this weekend have been asking them to quit or not do public meetings without security.
Do you think Dianne Abbott is in more danger than other MPs?
Without security then yes sure. I would imagine she has more security than others due to more threats so given that I don't know.
The reason Labour have been smashed by the SNP is not that they have attacked them insufficiently. Anyone who has seen the invective spouted by SLab members and activists at the SNP would find that ridiculous.
The reason is much simpler. A very large percentage of former Labour voters were in favour of independence.
If your party is implacably opposed to a policy that a large amount of your voters are in favour of you have only two options.
1) bring your voters round to your point of view with well constructed arguments. 2) call them Nazi's and watch as they abandon you and vote for party that favours their position instead.
Labour went with option 2.
It's that simple.
It really isn't. If that were the case there would be an overwhelming majority in Scotland for independence instead of a minority. What we are now seeing, bizarrely, is situations where people vote for the SNP but don't seem to favour independence. They vote for the SNP because they are the centre left party, just as Labour used to be.
And whatever activists say about the SNP, it is not what Labour says to the voters. I live in Dundee West. Labour leaflets at the last election said vote Labour to stop the Tories. The SNP have a 10k+ majority in the seat, the Tories are nowhere and Labour did not lay a glove on the SNP. They were massacred again and not by the Tories. Its madness.
Do you think leaflets saying vote Labour to stop the SNP would make any difference? It would just confirm what is pretty much fact that they're guddling in the same pool of voters as SCons and SLDs.
It also ignores that what happens in Dundee is motnwhat happens in the rest of Scotland.
In Glasgow Labour leaflets have been anti-SNP focused for over a decade (2005 election the first Labour flyer i got through the door was "Break up Britain, Scotland goes broke") and I haven't noticed a lack of anti-SNP messaging in Edinburgh either.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
Rubbish, if they try an fly via other nations then we should work with French and Spanish agencies too to ensure they also enforce mandatory checks on travel to Somalia etc from there. They equally wish to stop Jihadism so I am sure would oblige
Do you realise how ridiculous this is? An effective blanket ban on travelling for anyone who has links to countries that have terrorists without any due process.
Should TSE be banned from travelling to visit family in Pakistan? Or Spain because he can get to Pakistan from there?
If TSE is travelling to visit family in Pakistan, his family in Pakistan can confirm that to the UK and Spanish authorities
How do you know they are his family and not people pretending to be his family.
Your fix for the problem in your plan shows how completely insane and unthought through it is.
Well passport ID, photographic evidence, phonecalls to them to check they know TSE and the key elements of his life.
Obviously DNA checks would match too as a last resort.
DNA checks ffs
He's completely mental. The modern face of the Tory party. I'm shocked (but also not) he hasn't been excommunicated yet.
And his measures do nothing about the type of attack in Denmark which was perpetrated by a white European convert.
Excommunicated? In today's Tory party?
They'll more likely give him a peerage for services to Race Relations
The thing most likely to end SNP hegemony in Scotland imo is a Sindy Referendum. If it's won, there'll probably be a realignment of politics since with independence achieved people in larger numbers will start to vote their broader political view rather than just on this issue. And if it's lost, the drive for independence will lose salience and priority. The SNP could fight against this, keep "banging on" about independence, put yet another vote on it front and centre in their platform, but this would probably shed votes and end their dominance. Or alternatively, if it is another "No", they could go with the grain, de-prioritize independence, talk less about it, drop the commitment to hold another vote in the near future, and if they do this they will still likely shed votes (just maybe different ones) and see an end to their dominance.
So, that's my advice to Boris Johnson. Want to cut the SNP down to size? Hold that Sindy vote.
Why would he want to do that when he can keep the threat of a PM Stamer as puppet of the SNP in a hung parliament to keep English Tories voting Tory?
Because it is the sensible thing to do but sense and yourself are complete strangers
In terms of ending the SNP's dominance and reviving SLAB, a Labour government in Westminster would certainly help. Much of what is helping Sturgeon and the SNP at the moment is they can contrast themselves and independence to a Conservative government which is very unpopular in Scotland. And Labour meanwhile seem to be a complete irrelevance right now to their pre-2014 voters. If Labour could somehow manage to gain office in Westminster, then the SNP would find it much more difficult to demonise the UK government. And being the party in power, enacting policies which might be very popular in Scotland, Labour would actually be relevant again to people's lives in Scotland. The problem, however, is that it's very difficult for Labour to actually get back into power without Scotland. A majority government without Scottish seats is a tough challenge to say the least for Labour, and the prospect of a Labour - SNP arrangement - as we've seen - is not popular at all amongst the voters and constituencies Labour would need to win to even form a minority government. Labour are then in a sort of 'chicken or the egg' situation. They need to be in power to regain any votes in Scotland, but they can't gain power to begin with unless they can win votes in Scotland. Unfortunately, then, this very much suggests that the Conservatives will remain in power for the foreseeable future.
Quite an odd poll. Looks like movement straight from the Tories to the LDs.
Tory Remainers finally incensed by Brexit ‘shortages’? Suggests it won’t last IF the shortages ease
Shortages are just one thing; increased taxes and prices will also potentially begin to impact.
Disaffected Tory voters flocking to the LibDems is nothing new.
But this is just one poll - see how things look by the end of the year.
It looks as if pensioners are going to receive a near 4% rise in April and I assume other benefits will rise by the same amount
Also expect a substantial rise in the minimum wage in the budget, together with other measures to help the low paid
I would be very surprised if Rishi does not do the above
Where's the money coming from Big_G?
Exactly
And that is the unanswered question for both parties as they face the same demands
At least on the 27th we may have some idea
Easy - from future generations
I assume you mean IHT which I have argued incessantly with @HYUFD about as I believe I million exemption is too high
If not maybe you could expand your view
The only options are borrow more or create a wealth tax - IHT won’t generate much
As a matter of interest how do you see a wealth tax working
My suggestion: 1% pa on all individual assets over £1m. Legal obligation to self-declare and complete an annual return.
So, assets of £1m = £0 Wealth Tax (WT) pa Assets of £1.5m = £5k WT pac(£500k over threshold x 1%) Assets of £2m = £10k WT pa (£1m over threshold x 1%) Assets of £10m = £90k WT pa Assets of £101m = £1m WT pa etc.
Seems fair enough
I would probably go for 0.5%, but agree with the principle.
Will kill off farming. All the land will have to be sold to housing developers.
Sorry Tim, I appreciate you are a long way away but this comment is dumb on several levels:
First, pulling 1% per annum out of large estates will never bankrupt those who own them.
Secondly, do you realise how tight the planning rules are in the UK, how difficult it is to convert farmland to housing?
Wealth is not liquidity. You don't have to go with the stereotype of a little old widow living on the state pension in a mansion to see that lots of high net asset people would struggle to produce 1pc cash every year. That's why racing on death when everything gets liquidated anyway is so handy. You would have to have a roll over till death option for the asset rich, cash poor, so why not go to enhanced death duties anyway?
I agree completely not least because that describes me (not a a widow living on just a state pension in a mansion).
I am retired. I have no income other than my state pension, but I have assets that I live off of. Some cash for the next few years, DC pension that I am not taking yet, shares that I can sell but would only fund me for a few years and 2 houses (home and holiday) that I will sell when I need the money. Most of the value it tied up in the house I live in so I could only afford the tax if I sold my home.
I am not poor, but I could not pay 1% of my asset value in tax, but happy to owe the tax and pay when I can.
Also how would the tax be applied re the following 3 scenarios: DB pension value, DC pension value, savings for retirement?
If DB pensions are excluded how is that fair on the majority of people whose retirement assets are not these and had no opportunity to get a DB pension. If not how does someone on a DB pension get the funds to pay the tax?
If you have over £1m in assets as suggested in the proposal above, you could very easily get a loan against the property to cover 1% asset tax.
Personally I would set a wealth tax to start at £10m as many people will think similarly to yourself, and also see £1m as attainable even if they are far from it currently.
Yes you could, but not straight forward if you don't have an income (see below). It also doesn't cover the DB pension issue. Why should they be exempt and how do they pay if they aren't?
Re your proposal I agree.
Re the getting a loan I have a fun story and actually many would consider it revenge by the system on me for my exploiting it for the last few decades. I have used 0% credit cards and 0% balance transfer cards with 0% fees to play the system to get free money effectively which I then invest. The more you do the better the credit it also seems, so you can do more. As soon as the time period is up I pay them off or if a free transfer to another card is available I do that. Not a lot of use now interest rates are low, but was very profitable in the old days. It is surprising what credit you can get and how much you can build up on them.
Now I have no income to talk of and the selection criteria is almost entirely income based I am snookered. The conversation normally goes along the line of 'you have no income to pay your credit card', 'but I have plenty of money to do so', 'sorry sir we can't take that into account when issuing a card. How are you going to pay it', ' As I said I have cash.', 'Sorry sir that doesn't count', 'If I buy an annuity with it you will give me the card then', 'yes sir'. 'How is that any different? You do know that lots of people have drawdown pensions now and so don't take a regular income', '!'.
Equity release is very straightforward for the vast majority of people with over £1m of property assets and no income. That is different to getting an unsecured loan or credit card which of course may be harder.
On defined benefit pensions I see no reason they should be exempt. Take the most extreme example of someone with a £1m db pension and no other assets.
They would receive £30-40k income and have to pay £10k additional tax, which is perfectly do-able, if harsh for a very unlikely edge case. As and when their pension value, which depreciates each year as they get older, drops below £1m they stop paying.
It's a mistake to set the threshold or rate too high.
For a general wealth tax imo the best model is Switzerland, which tends to start at about 0 reportable net assets or a little more, at a rate of 0.1-0.2%, then built to perhaps 0.5% at 1-2 million of assets.
I can see that eg foreign owned property needs a higher rate, perhaps 1%, to make sure it is used effectively.
I’m going to be cynical here but I think Nandy’s (and probably Labour’s) aim is to switch the focus from what it was ie a radical Islamic attack and try to weave into the general theme of abuse MPs get, which is where they feel more comfortable.
Of course it is, they aren't even trying to hide it. The more focus Islamic terrorism gets the more chance there is that people realise the Labour party has been captured by Islamist interests in certain parts of the country to hold onto those seats.
Agreed. Plus, B&S has shown that Galloway could appeal to the more radical Islamic elements of the Labour vote with an anti-woke, pro-Muslim agenda. The problem for Labour is that every time they try and deny the issue, it just further weakens their chances of getting back in many Red Wall seats.
Just heard Lisa Nandy saying “this [abuse directed at MPs] is not felt equally” and then said that Dianne Abbott is the most abused MP.
How is that relevant to this? I don’t think Twitter abuse contributed to the radicalisation of the perpetrator.
Any abuse is bad. However, I'm pretty sure that these repeated claims about Abbott being the most abused MP are false. It seems to date back to a report from four or five years ago, where women MPs were studied, and she came top. But it was only amongst the female MPs, even if the headline neglected to mention that.
The abuse she gets is terrible. But so is ignoring similar abuse that happens towards other MPs.
Quite an odd poll. Looks like movement straight from the Tories to the LDs.
Tory Remainers finally incensed by Brexit ‘shortages’? Suggests it won’t last IF the shortages ease
Shortages are just one thing; increased taxes and prices will also potentially begin to impact.
Disaffected Tory voters flocking to the LibDems is nothing new.
But this is just one poll - see how things look by the end of the year.
It looks as if pensioners are going to receive a near 4% rise in April and I assume other benefits will rise by the same amount
Also expect a substantial rise in the minimum wage in the budget, together with other measures to help the low paid
I would be very surprised if Rishi does not do the above
Where's the money coming from Big_G?
Exactly
And that is the unanswered question for both parties as they face the same demands
At least on the 27th we may have some idea
Easy - from future generations
I assume you mean IHT which I have argued incessantly with @HYUFD about as I believe I million exemption is too high
If not maybe you could expand your view
The only options are borrow more or create a wealth tax - IHT won’t generate much
As a matter of interest how do you see a wealth tax working
My suggestion: 1% pa on all individual assets over £1m. Legal obligation to self-declare and complete an annual return.
So, assets of £1m = £0 Wealth Tax (WT) pa Assets of £1.5m = £5k WT pac(£500k over threshold x 1%) Assets of £2m = £10k WT pa (£1m over threshold x 1%) Assets of £10m = £90k WT pa Assets of £101m = £1m WT pa etc.
Seems fair enough
I would probably go for 0.5%, but agree with the principle.
Will kill off farming. All the land will have to be sold to housing developers.
Sorry Tim, I appreciate you are a long way away but this comment is dumb on several levels:
First, pulling 1% per annum out of large estates will never bankrupt those who own them.
Secondly, do you realise how tight the planning rules are in the UK, how difficult it is to convert farmland to housing?
Wealth is not liquidity. You don't have to go with the stereotype of a little old widow living on the state pension in a mansion to see that lots of high net asset people would struggle to produce 1pc cash every year. That's why racing on death when everything gets liquidated anyway is so handy. You would have to have a roll over till death option for the asset rich, cash poor, so why not go to enhanced death duties anyway?
I agree completely not least because that describes me (not a a widow living on just a state pension in a mansion).
I am retired. I have no income other than my state pension, but I have assets that I live off of. Some cash for the next few years, DC pension that I am not taking yet, shares that I can sell but would only fund me for a few years and 2 houses (home and holiday) that I will sell when I need the money. Most of the value it tied up in the house I live in so I could only afford the tax if I sold my home.
I am not poor, but I could not pay 1% of my asset value in tax, but happy to owe the tax and pay when I can.
Also how would the tax be applied re the following 3 scenarios: DB pension value, DC pension value, savings for retirement?
If DB pensions are excluded how is that fair on the majority of people whose retirement assets are not these and had no opportunity to get a DB pension. If not how does someone on a DB pension get the funds to pay the tax?
If you have over £1m in assets as suggested in the proposal above, you could very easily get a loan against the property to cover 1% asset tax.
Personally I would set a wealth tax to start at £10m as many people will think similarly to yourself, and also see £1m as attainable even if they are far from it currently.
Yes you could, but not straight forward if you don't have an income (see below). It also doesn't cover the DB pension issue. Why should they be exempt and how do they pay if they aren't?
Re your proposal I agree.
Re the getting a loan I have a fun story and actually many would consider it revenge by the system on me for my exploiting it for the last few decades. I have used 0% credit cards and 0% balance transfer cards with 0% fees to play the system to get free money effectively which I then invest. The more you do the better the credit it also seems, so you can do more. As soon as the time period is up I pay them off or if a free transfer to another card is available I do that. Not a lot of use now interest rates are low, but was very profitable in the old days. It is surprising what credit you can get and how much you can build up on them.
Now I have no income to talk of and the selection criteria is almost entirely income based I am snookered. The conversation normally goes along the line of 'you have no income to pay your credit card', 'but I have plenty of money to do so', 'sorry sir we can't take that into account when issuing a card. How are you going to pay it', ' As I said I have cash.', 'Sorry sir that doesn't count', 'If I buy an annuity with it you will give me the card then', 'yes sir'. 'How is that any different? You do know that lots of people have drawdown pensions now and so don't take a regular income', '!'.
Equity release is very straightforward for the vast majority of people with over £1m of property assets and no income. That is different to getting an unsecured loan or credit card which of course may be harder.
On defined benefit pensions I see no reason they should be exempt. Take the most extreme example of someone with a £1m db pension and no other assets.
They would receive £30-40k income and have to pay £10k additional tax, which is perfectly do-able, if harsh for a very unlikely edge case. As and when their pension value, which depreciates each year as they get older, drops below £1m they stop paying.
It's a mistake to set the threshold or rate too high.
For a general wealth tax imo the best model is Switzerland, which tends to start at about 0 reportable net assets or a little more, at a rate of 0.1-0.2%, then built to perhaps 0.5% at 1-2 million of assets.
I can see that eg foreign owned property needs a higher rate, perhaps 1%, to make sure it is used effectively.
It is an interesting way of doing it, having a near neglible rate at the lower end (0.1% of 100k assets is £100 pa). Perhaps that takes away the aspirational fear of it suddenly kicking in at £0.5-1m type levels that many dream of and a lot do hit as they get older.
For me it is the ultra wealthy who have benefited the most from recent government and monetary policies so those who should be targeted, but I can see the Swiss method of including most people might be better than starting at the rich but achievable levels.
Being Ch, it is by Canton and a lot don't start until 100k ChF.
I think a wide base helps it be sustainable, and potentially become a normal part of tax for everyone. And amongst the selection of international wealth taxes the Swiss one seems to raise the most significant sums. Lux's tax is on business I think.
Perhaps a slight balance to the large cut in the population here who pay income tax, as the threshold has been raised to minimum wage level (ish).
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community with their young people.
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
The real problem is that the intelligence services and all the other agencies involved in the Prevent programmes simply do not have the resources they need to monitor effectively, let alone deradicalise, all those they know about.
Unless @HYUFD's Tory government is willing to put their money where their mouth is then this is all talk and little will be achieved. Effective counter-terrorism and deradicalisation take time and resources.
Whisper it quietly: there isn’t much evidence that deradicalisation works.
From what I can tell, the best solution to angry young men/women is to tie them down with a job, a mortgage, a relationship and young children and they tend to move on and cease to be a threat.
Doesn’t always work, but better than what the bullshit deradicalisation industry can achieve.
Prevention is better than a cure - but we didn't want to listen to anyone who said we should prevent mass immigration, so we are where we are
I don't have a problem with mass immigration. I have a real problem with multiculturalism and in particular the encouragement of the idea that it is ok to recreate the societies of the poorer parts of Pakistan or Somalia here. If people want to come and be British and we need additional people at the time, fine. But we need to make sure that those people are encouraged to become committed to British values, including sexual equality, gender equality and respect, freedom of speech and mutual tolerance. If they are not so willing we don't really want them here. What we do about those already here and indeed were born here like this particular murderer is tricky but it is a consequence of not putting in the effort to integrate in the first place.
Completely agree - but mass immigration of the type you mention has happened; a kind of academic experiment, doomed to failure in which we all are participating. Anyone with an ounce of common sense could have forseen it could never work, and time and time again we have been shown it doesn't work. But it has got to the stage where politicians have bought into the project so much that it can never be reversed.
As with Lee Rigby, 7/7, Ariana Grande concert, the death of Sir David looks like it can only be described as an act of civil war
The biggest thing we could do is ban religious schools of whatever faith. Traditionalists won't like it nor will those who say religious schools get better results, but get kids growing up together and they will blend together far more than seeing the divisions they do now in separated schools.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
Rubbish, if they try an fly via other nations then we should work with French and Spanish agencies too to ensure they also enforce mandatory checks on travel to Somalia etc from there. They equally wish to stop Jihadism so I am sure would oblige
Do you realise how ridiculous this is? An effective blanket ban on travelling for anyone who has links to countries that have terrorists without any due process.
Should TSE be banned from travelling to visit family in Pakistan? Or Spain because he can get to Pakistan from there?
If TSE is travelling to visit family in Pakistan, his family in Pakistan can confirm that to the UK and Spanish authorities
How do you know they are his family and not people pretending to be his family.
Your fix for the problem in your plan shows how completely insane and unthought through it is.
Well passport ID, photographic evidence, phonecalls to them to check they know TSE and the key elements of his life.
Obviously DNA checks would match too as a last resort.
They can't do that for all of people this would cover. She earlier post by me.
Quite an odd poll. Looks like movement straight from the Tories to the LDs.
Tory Remainers finally incensed by Brexit ‘shortages’? Suggests it won’t last IF the shortages ease
Shortages are just one thing; increased taxes and prices will also potentially begin to impact.
Disaffected Tory voters flocking to the LibDems is nothing new.
But this is just one poll - see how things look by the end of the year.
It looks as if pensioners are going to receive a near 4% rise in April and I assume other benefits will rise by the same amount
Also expect a substantial rise in the minimum wage in the budget, together with other measures to help the low paid
I would be very surprised if Rishi does not do the above
Where's the money coming from Big_G?
Exactly
And that is the unanswered question for both parties as they face the same demands
At least on the 27th we may have some idea
Easy - from future generations
I assume you mean IHT which I have argued incessantly with @HYUFD about as I believe I million exemption is too high
If not maybe you could expand your view
The only options are borrow more or create a wealth tax - IHT won’t generate much
As a matter of interest how do you see a wealth tax working
My suggestion: 1% pa on all individual assets over £1m. Legal obligation to self-declare and complete an annual return.
So, assets of £1m = £0 Wealth Tax (WT) pa Assets of £1.5m = £5k WT pac(£500k over threshold x 1%) Assets of £2m = £10k WT pa (£1m over threshold x 1%) Assets of £10m = £90k WT pa Assets of £101m = £1m WT pa etc.
Seems fair enough
I would probably go for 0.5%, but agree with the principle.
Will kill off farming. All the land will have to be sold to housing developers.
Sorry Tim, I appreciate you are a long way away but this comment is dumb on several levels:
First, pulling 1% per annum out of large estates will never bankrupt those who own them.
Secondly, do you realise how tight the planning rules are in the UK, how difficult it is to convert farmland to housing?
Wealth is not liquidity. You don't have to go with the stereotype of a little old widow living on the state pension in a mansion to see that lots of high net asset people would struggle to produce 1pc cash every year. That's why racing on death when everything gets liquidated anyway is so handy. You would have to have a roll over till death option for the asset rich, cash poor, so why not go to enhanced death duties anyway?
I agree completely not least because that describes me (not a a widow living on just a state pension in a mansion).
I am retired. I have no income other than my state pension, but I have assets that I live off of. Some cash for the next few years, DC pension that I am not taking yet, shares that I can sell but would only fund me for a few years and 2 houses (home and holiday) that I will sell when I need the money. Most of the value it tied up in the house I live in so I could only afford the tax if I sold my home.
I am not poor, but I could not pay 1% of my asset value in tax, but happy to owe the tax and pay when I can.
Also how would the tax be applied re the following 3 scenarios: DB pension value, DC pension value, savings for retirement?
If DB pensions are excluded how is that fair on the majority of people whose retirement assets are not these and had no opportunity to get a DB pension. If not how does someone on a DB pension get the funds to pay the tax?
If you have over £1m in assets as suggested in the proposal above, you could very easily get a loan against the property to cover 1% asset tax.
Personally I would set a wealth tax to start at £10m as many people will think similarly to yourself, and also see £1m as attainable even if they are far from it currently.
Yes you could, but not straight forward if you don't have an income (see below). It also doesn't cover the DB pension issue. Why should they be exempt and how do they pay if they aren't?
Re your proposal I agree.
Re the getting a loan I have a fun story and actually many would consider it revenge by the system on me for my exploiting it for the last few decades. I have used 0% credit cards and 0% balance transfer cards with 0% fees to play the system to get free money effectively which I then invest. The more you do the better the credit it also seems, so you can do more. As soon as the time period is up I pay them off or if a free transfer to another card is available I do that. Not a lot of use now interest rates are low, but was very profitable in the old days. It is surprising what credit you can get and how much you can build up on them.
Now I have no income to talk of and the selection criteria is almost entirely income based I am snookered. The conversation normally goes along the line of 'you have no income to pay your credit card', 'but I have plenty of money to do so', 'sorry sir we can't take that into account when issuing a card. How are you going to pay it', ' As I said I have cash.', 'Sorry sir that doesn't count', 'If I buy an annuity with it you will give me the card then', 'yes sir'. 'How is that any different? You do know that lots of people have drawdown pensions now and so don't take a regular income', '!'.
Equity release is very straightforward for the vast majority of people with over £1m of property assets and no income. That is different to getting an unsecured loan or credit card which of course may be harder.
On defined benefit pensions I see no reason they should be exempt. Take the most extreme example of someone with a £1m db pension and no other assets.
They would receive £30-40k income and have to pay £10k additional tax, which is perfectly do-able, if harsh for a very unlikely edge case. As and when their pension value, which depreciates each year as they get older, drops below £1m they stop paying.
It's a mistake to set the threshold or rate too high.
For a general wealth tax imo the best model is Switzerland, which tends to start at about 0 reportable net assets or a little more, at a rate of 0.1-0.2%, then built to perhaps 0.5% at 1-2 million of assets.
I can see that eg foreign owned property needs a higher rate, perhaps 1%, to make sure it is used effectively.
That could work if we had their top income tax rate of about 24%.
Is it not better for the economy to tax hoarded wealth much higher than income, which we want to encourage?
I could get board with a lower income tax, even at higher incomes, but a higher "wealth tax". Encourages people to invest their money rather than hoard it.
However I understand that income is much easier to tax, so who knows.
In terms of ending the SNP's dominance and reviving SLAB, a Labour government in Westminster would certainly help. Much of what is helping Sturgeon and the SNP at the moment is they can contrast themselves and independence to a Conservative government which is very unpopular in Scotland. And Labour meanwhile seem to be a complete irrelevance right now to their pre-2014 voters. If Labour could somehow manage to gain office in Westminster, then the SNP would find it much more difficult to demonise the UK government. And being the party in power, enacting policies which might be very popular in Scotland, Labour would actually be relevant again to people's lives in Scotland. The problem, however, is that it's very difficult for Labour to actually get back into power without Scotland. A majority government without Scottish seats is a tough challenge to say the least for Labour, and the prospect of a Labour - SNP arrangement - as we've seen - is not popular at all amongst the voters and constituencies Labour would need to win to even form a minority government. Labour are then in a sort of 'chicken or the egg' situation. They need to be in power to regain any votes in Scotland, but they can't gain power to begin with unless they can win votes in Scotland. Unfortunately, then, this very much suggests that the Conservatives will remain in power for the foreseeable future.
If Labour was a company, you would break it off and sell it for the Sum of the Parts - Red Wall voters to the Tories, urban professionals to the Greens (possibly to the LDs as well for the less radical) and much of its ethnic vote to Galloway. It’s tensions are unsustainable.
Just heard Lisa Nandy saying “this [abuse directed at MPs] is not felt equally” and then said that Dianne Abbott is the most abused MP.
How is that relevant to this? I don’t think Twitter abuse contributed to the radicalisation of the perpetrator.
If you are an MP I would imagine their focus is primarily about MP's security and safety. Seems perfectly natural that their take on this is focused on that rather than the broader issue of terrorism, Islamic or otherwise, when family members will this weekend have been asking them to quit or not do public meetings without security.
Do you think Dianne Abbott is in more danger than other MPs?
Without security then yes sure. I would imagine she has more security than others due to more threats so given that I don't know.
It’s sad that we are now likely to see MPs need daily police protection, making them less accessible to their constituents.
As several have noted over the past couple of days, meeting the people they represent is the primary role of a member of Parliament.
The thing most likely to end SNP hegemony in Scotland imo is a Sindy Referendum. If it's won, there'll probably be a realignment of politics since with independence achieved people in larger numbers will start to vote their broader political view rather than just on this issue. And if it's lost, the drive for independence will lose salience and priority. The SNP could fight against this, keep "banging on" about independence, put yet another vote on it front and centre in their platform, but this would probably shed votes and end their dominance. Or alternatively, if it is another "No", they could go with the grain, de-prioritize independence, talk less about it, drop the commitment to hold another vote in the near future, and if they do this they will still likely shed votes (just maybe different ones) and see an end to their dominance.
So, that's my advice to Boris Johnson. Want to cut the SNP down to size? Hold that Sindy vote.
That was the conclusion I came to some time ago. Its a risk but the alternatives may be worse.
Johnson can be a risk-taker but the trouble here is on a personal level he has a lot to lose and little to gain. Eg his Brexit election was a risk but with a massive (and realized) upside, and his position as he rolled the dice was not appealing. He was in the shit with a paralyzed parliament and no majority or mandate. His position now is king of the castle, so you and I are asking him to do what is right morally and for Scotland and for the Union, with no great personal reward accruing. I sense he isn't the sort of man who'd be attracted to such a proposition.
I’m going to be cynical here but I think Nandy’s (and probably Labour’s) aim is to switch the focus from what it was ie a radical Islamic attack and try to weave into the general theme of abuse MPs get, which is where they feel more comfortable.
Of course it is, they aren't even trying to hide it. The more focus Islamic terrorism gets the more chance there is that people realise the Labour party has been captured by Islamist interests in certain parts of the country to hold onto those seats.
Agreed. Plus, B&S has shown that Galloway could appeal to the more radical Islamic elements of the Labour vote with an anti-woke, pro-Muslim agenda. The problem for Labour is that every time they try and deny the issue, it just further weakens their chances of getting back in many Red Wall seats.
They'd be relying on Tory votes to put them in as a lesser of two evils, not a great position to be in.
Just heard Lisa Nandy saying “this [abuse directed at MPs] is not felt equally” and then said that Dianne Abbott is the most abused MP.
How is that relevant to this? I don’t think Twitter abuse contributed to the radicalisation of the perpetrator.
Question of definitions, isn't it. Ms Abbott is abused by racists, Britain First-ers, that sort of people. Many of whom are all mouth and no trousers. Are people 'likely' to commit the sort of acts we saw in North Leigh last week likely to Twit about it a lot? Don't know, but suspect it's unlikely.
I should point out that the last MP who was assassinated was the victim of just such a person.
Quite an odd poll. Looks like movement straight from the Tories to the LDs.
Tory Remainers finally incensed by Brexit ‘shortages’? Suggests it won’t last IF the shortages ease
Shortages are just one thing; increased taxes and prices will also potentially begin to impact.
Disaffected Tory voters flocking to the LibDems is nothing new.
But this is just one poll - see how things look by the end of the year.
It looks as if pensioners are going to receive a near 4% rise in April and I assume other benefits will rise by the same amount
Also expect a substantial rise in the minimum wage in the budget, together with other measures to help the low paid
I would be very surprised if Rishi does not do the above
Where's the money coming from Big_G?
Exactly
And that is the unanswered question for both parties as they face the same demands
At least on the 27th we may have some idea
Easy - from future generations
I assume you mean IHT which I have argued incessantly with @HYUFD about as I believe I million exemption is too high
If not maybe you could expand your view
The only options are borrow more or create a wealth tax - IHT won’t generate much
As a matter of interest how do you see a wealth tax working
My suggestion: 1% pa on all individual assets over £1m. Legal obligation to self-declare and complete an annual return.
So, assets of £1m = £0 Wealth Tax (WT) pa Assets of £1.5m = £5k WT pac(£500k over threshold x 1%) Assets of £2m = £10k WT pa (£1m over threshold x 1%) Assets of £10m = £90k WT pa Assets of £101m = £1m WT pa etc.
Seems fair enough
I would probably go for 0.5%, but agree with the principle.
Will kill off farming. All the land will have to be sold to housing developers.
Sorry Tim, I appreciate you are a long way away but this comment is dumb on several levels:
First, pulling 1% per annum out of large estates will never bankrupt those who own them.
Secondly, do you realise how tight the planning rules are in the UK, how difficult it is to convert farmland to housing?
Wealth is not liquidity. You don't have to go with the stereotype of a little old widow living on the state pension in a mansion to see that lots of high net asset people would struggle to produce 1pc cash every year. That's why racing on death when everything gets liquidated anyway is so handy. You would have to have a roll over till death option for the asset rich, cash poor, so why not go to enhanced death duties anyway?
I agree completely not least because that describes me (not a a widow living on just a state pension in a mansion).
I am retired. I have no income other than my state pension, but I have assets that I live off of. Some cash for the next few years, DC pension that I am not taking yet, shares that I can sell but would only fund me for a few years and 2 houses (home and holiday) that I will sell when I need the money. Most of the value it tied up in the house I live in so I could only afford the tax if I sold my home.
I am not poor, but I could not pay 1% of my asset value in tax, but happy to owe the tax and pay when I can.
Also how would the tax be applied re the following 3 scenarios: DB pension value, DC pension value, savings for retirement?
If DB pensions are excluded how is that fair on the majority of people whose retirement assets are not these and had no opportunity to get a DB pension. If not how does someone on a DB pension get the funds to pay the tax?
If you have over £1m in assets as suggested in the proposal above, you could very easily get a loan against the property to cover 1% asset tax.
Personally I would set a wealth tax to start at £10m as many people will think similarly to yourself, and also see £1m as attainable even if they are far from it currently.
Yes you could, but not straight forward if you don't have an income (see below). It also doesn't cover the DB pension issue. Why should they be exempt and how do they pay if they aren't?
Re your proposal I agree.
Re the getting a loan I have a fun story and actually many would consider it revenge by the system on me for my exploiting it for the last few decades. I have used 0% credit cards and 0% balance transfer cards with 0% fees to play the system to get free money effectively which I then invest. The more you do the better the credit it also seems, so you can do more. As soon as the time period is up I pay them off or if a free transfer to another card is available I do that. Not a lot of use now interest rates are low, but was very profitable in the old days. It is surprising what credit you can get and how much you can build up on them.
Now I have no income to talk of and the selection criteria is almost entirely income based I am snookered. The conversation normally goes along the line of 'you have no income to pay your credit card', 'but I have plenty of money to do so', 'sorry sir we can't take that into account when issuing a card. How are you going to pay it', ' As I said I have cash.', 'Sorry sir that doesn't count', 'If I buy an annuity with it you will give me the card then', 'yes sir'. 'How is that any different? You do know that lots of people have drawdown pensions now and so don't take a regular income', '!'.
Equity release is very straightforward for the vast majority of people with over £1m of property assets and no income. That is different to getting an unsecured loan or credit card which of course may be harder.
On defined benefit pensions I see no reason they should be exempt. Take the most extreme example of someone with a £1m db pension and no other assets.
They would receive £30-40k income and have to pay £10k additional tax, which is perfectly do-able, if harsh for a very unlikely edge case. As and when their pension value, which depreciates each year as they get older, drops below £1m they stop paying.
It's a mistake to set the threshold or rate too high.
For a general wealth tax imo the best model is Switzerland, which tends to start at about 0 reportable net assets or a little more, at a rate of 0.1-0.2%, then built to perhaps 0.5% at 1-2 million of assets.
I can see that eg foreign owned property needs a higher rate, perhaps 1%, to make sure it is used effectively.
That could work if we had their top income tax rate of about 24%.
Is it not better for the economy to tax hoarded wealth much higher than income, which we want to encourage?
I could get board with a lower income tax, even at higher incomes, but a higher "wealth tax". Encourages people to invest their money rather than hoard it.
However I understand that income is much easier to tax, so who knows.
Equity investments are also "wealth". It would need that exemption to get people to invest in asset classes we like, but yes in general with those exemptions it is better to tax unearned income and wealth rather than earned income.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
Rubbish, if they try an fly via other nations then we should work with French and Spanish agencies too to ensure they also enforce mandatory checks on travel to Somalia etc from there. They equally wish to stop Jihadism so I am sure would oblige
Do you realise how ridiculous this is? An effective blanket ban on travelling for anyone who has links to countries that have terrorists without any due process.
Should TSE be banned from travelling to visit family in Pakistan? Or Spain because he can get to Pakistan from there?
If TSE is travelling to visit family in Pakistan, his family in Pakistan can confirm that to the UK and Spanish authorities
You're legitimately insane. Once again, you prove to me that I was right to leave the Tory party.
I would just caution he does not speak for very many in the conservative party
Compare and contrast him to the wonderful kind person Sir David Amess was and how he integrated across the whole community
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
The real problem is that the intelligence services and all the other agencies involved in the Prevent programmes simply do not have the resources they need to monitor effectively, let alone deradicalise, all those they know about.
Unless @HYUFD's Tory government is willing to put their money where their mouth is then this is all talk and little will be achieved. Effective counter-terrorism and deradicalisation take time and resources.
Whisper it quietly: there isn’t much evidence that deradicalisation works.
From what I can tell, the best solution to angry young men/women is to tie them down with a job, a mortgage, a relationship and young children and they tend to move on and cease to be a threat.
Doesn’t always work, but better than what the bullshit deradicalisation industry can achieve.
Prevention is better than a cure - but we didn't want to listen to anyone who said we should prevent mass immigration, so we are where we are
I don't have a problem with mass immigration. I have a real problem with multiculturalism and in particular the encouragement of the idea that it is ok to recreate the societies of the poorer parts of Pakistan or Somalia here. If people want to come and be British and we need additional people at the time, fine. But we need to make sure that those people are encouraged to become committed to British values, including sexual equality, gender equality and respect, freedom of speech and mutual tolerance. If they are not so willing we don't really want them here. What we do about those already here and indeed were born here like this particular murderer is tricky but it is a consequence of not putting in the effort to integrate in the first place.
Completely agree - but mass immigration of the type you mention has happened; a kind of academic experiment, doomed to failure in which we all are participating. Anyone with an ounce of common sense could have forseen it could never work, and time and time again we have been shown it doesn't work. But it has got to the stage where politicians have bought into the project so much that it can never be reversed.
As with Lee Rigby, 7/7, Ariana Grande concert, the death of Sir David looks like it can only be described as an act of civil war
How do we unwind this mess? I would suggest banning deobandism and similar groups in this country would be a good start. Their control of Mosques and fundamentalism is completely inconsistent with what I have described as British values. We need to use schools and Universities to free girls and women from bondage and absurd patriarchy. We need to stop foreign funding for mosques and madrassas, particularly from Saudi Arabia, coming into this country. We need to make it clear that this is the United Kingdom and we live differently here. Personally, I would also ban the Burqa for the same reasons.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
The real problem is that the intelligence services and all the other agencies involved in the Prevent programmes simply do not have the resources they need to monitor effectively, let alone deradicalise, all those they know about.
Unless @HYUFD's Tory government is willing to put their money where their mouth is then this is all talk and little will be achieved. Effective counter-terrorism and deradicalisation take time and resources.
Whisper it quietly: there isn’t much evidence that deradicalisation works.
From what I can tell, the best solution to angry young men/women is to tie them down with a job, a mortgage, a relationship and young children and they tend to move on and cease to be a threat.
Doesn’t always work, but better than what the bullshit deradicalisation industry can achieve.
Prevention is better than a cure - but we didn't want to listen to anyone who said we should prevent mass immigration, so we are where we are
I don't have a problem with mass immigration. I have a real problem with multiculturalism and in particular the encouragement of the idea that it is ok to recreate the societies of the poorer parts of Pakistan or Somalia here. If people want to come and be British and we need additional people at the time, fine. But we need to make sure that those people are encouraged to become committed to British values, including sexual equality, gender equality and respect, freedom of speech and mutual tolerance. If they are not so willing we don't really want them here. What we do about those already here and indeed were born here like this particular murderer is tricky but it is a consequence of not putting in the effort to integrate in the first place.
Completely agree - but mass immigration of the type you mention has happened; a kind of academic experiment, doomed to failure in which we all are participating. Anyone with an ounce of common sense could have forseen it could never work, and time and time again we have been shown it doesn't work. But it has got to the stage where politicians have bought into the project so much that it can never be reversed.
As with Lee Rigby, 7/7, Ariana Grande concert, the death of Sir David looks like it can only be described as an act of civil war
The biggest thing we could do is ban religious schools of whatever faith. Traditionalists won't like it nor will those who say religious schools get better results, but get kids growing up together and they will blend together far more than seeing the divisions they do now in separated schools.
When I met my girlfriend she was working in an East London School - a non religious academy. 100% of the pupils were Muslim, either from Bangladeshi or Somalian parents.
I assumed she must be a Guardian reading type to work there, so said "I bet things are nowhere near as bad as The Daily Mail etc make out are they?"
"100 times worse" she said
The UN phoned her up to warn the kids were at the highest risk possible of online radicalisation. One of her duties was to spy on what internet sites they were looking at. Anjem Choudhary's son is one of the Alumni
The thing most likely to end SNP hegemony in Scotland imo is a Sindy Referendum. If it's won, there'll probably be a realignment of politics since with independence achieved people in larger numbers will start to vote their broader political view rather than just on this issue. And if it's lost, the drive for independence will lose salience and priority. The SNP could fight against this, keep "banging on" about independence, put yet another vote on it front and centre in their platform, but this would probably shed votes and end their dominance. Or alternatively, if it is another "No", they could go with the grain, de-prioritize independence, talk less about it, drop the commitment to hold another vote in the near future, and if they do this they will still likely shed votes (just maybe different ones) and see an end to their dominance.
So, that's my advice to Boris Johnson. Want to cut the SNP down to size? Hold that Sindy vote.
Boris isn’t that smart. I think you are quite right and there is a mandate for it following the recent elections in Scotland. I suspect the SNP would crap themselves, to coin a phrase, if he agreed.
I think @HYUFD's point might be in the mix. Johnson likes the idea of having "vote Starmer get Sturgeon" in his toolbox for the next election.
I've been looking at this thread in disbelief. Is Hyufd actually proposing that we DNA test British subjects who visit family members abroad to check that they have not been replaced by jihadis?
I mean, even by his standards of stubbornness he's walking into an absolute minefield here.
The reason Labour have been smashed by the SNP is not that they have attacked them insufficiently. Anyone who has seen the invective spouted by SLab members and activists at the SNP would find that ridiculous.
The reason is much simpler. A very large percentage of former Labour voters were in favour of independence.
If your party is implacably opposed to a policy that a large amount of your voters are in favour of you have only two options.
1) bring your voters round to your point of view with well constructed arguments. 2) call them Nazi's and watch as they abandon you and vote for party that favours their position instead.
Labour went with option 2.
It's that simple.
It really isn't. If that were the case there would be an overwhelming majority in Scotland for independence instead of a minority. What we are now seeing, bizarrely, is situations where people vote for the SNP but don't seem to favour independence. They vote for the SNP because they are the centre left party, just as Labour used to be.
And whatever activists say about the SNP, it is not what Labour says to the voters. I live in Dundee West. Labour leaflets at the last election said vote Labour to stop the Tories. The SNP have a 10k+ majority in the seat, the Tories are nowhere and Labour did not lay a glove on the SNP. They were massacred again and not by the Tories. Its madness.
Do you think leaflets saying vote Labour to stop the SNP would make any difference? It would just confirm what is pretty much fact that they're guddling in the same pool of voters as SCons and SLDs.
It also ignores that what happens in Dundee is motnwhat happens in the rest of Scotland.
In Glasgow Labour leaflets have been anti-SNP focused for over a decade (2005 election the first Labour flyer i got through the door was "Break up Britain, Scotland goes broke") and I haven't noticed a lack of anti-SNP messaging in Edinburgh either.
Also a variation on the 'if only the LDs had been positive about the coalition rather than attacked the Tories' theme. Tories can never quite believe that people who feel negatively about them are sincere rather than naive simps whipped into it by nasty lefties, Nats, luvvies etc.
The thing most likely to end SNP hegemony in Scotland imo is a Sindy Referendum. If it's won, there'll probably be a realignment of politics since with independence achieved people in larger numbers will start to vote their broader political view rather than just on this issue. And if it's lost, the drive for independence will lose salience and priority. The SNP could fight against this, keep "banging on" about independence, put yet another vote on it front and centre in their platform, but this would probably shed votes and end their dominance. Or alternatively, if it is another "No", they could go with the grain, de-prioritize independence, talk less about it, drop the commitment to hold another vote in the near future, and if they do this they will still likely shed votes (just maybe different ones) and see an end to their dominance.
So, that's my advice to Boris Johnson. Want to cut the SNP down to size? Hold that Sindy vote.
Boris isn’t that smart. I think you are quite right and there is a mandate for it following the recent elections in Scotland. I suspect the SNP would crap themselves, to coin a phrase, if he agreed.
I think @HYUFD's point might be in the mix. Johnson likes the idea of having "vote Starmer get Sturgeon" in his toolbox for the next election.
I don't think it's going to matter.
If the economy is in a reasonable state, Boris likely wins again regardless.
If the economy isn't in a reasonable state I don't think "vote Starmer get Sturgeon" is going to put people off.
Just heard Lisa Nandy saying “this [abuse directed at MPs] is not felt equally” and then said that Dianne Abbott is the most abused MP.
How is that relevant to this? I don’t think Twitter abuse contributed to the radicalisation of the perpetrator.
If you are an MP I would imagine their focus is primarily about MP's security and safety. Seems perfectly natural that their take on this is focused on that rather than the broader issue of terrorism, Islamic or otherwise, when family members will this weekend have been asking them to quit or not do public meetings without security.
Do you think Dianne Abbott is in more danger than other MPs?
Without security then yes sure. I would imagine she has more security than others due to more threats so given that I don't know.
It’s sad that we are now likely to see MPs need daily police protection, making them less accessible to their constituents.
As several have noted over the past couple of days, meeting the people they represent is the primary role of a member of Parliament.
I would suggest making private security (i.e. bouncers) available to any MPs holding public meetings with police in the higher risk meetings as required.
I fear it is now too late for Labour north of the border. They are too weak to take on the SNP in their former strongholds and their former supporters have really got out of the habit of voting for them.
Glasgow is the prime example.
The SNP took over the council for the first time in history, and by all accounts it's a disaster.
But people still vote for them.
Glasgow was almost Labour's last bastion in Scotland but it too has gone. They still have a reasonable number of councillors there but the trend is very much against them.
The Conservatives have 7/85. There is no opposition despite the incompetence.
One point for consideration is to what extent 'Labour' or 'Conservative' councils or oppositions are actually Unionist coalitions in all but name. In which case, objectively, Labour are further losing their distinction from the Conservatives, as well as being seen by some to be in bed with them: Better Together all over again.
The jointly run Councils are interesting.
That very much puts the division very down to LD/CON vs LAB/SNP. Junior coalition partner effect? Is the LD anti-Tory rhetoric weaker in Scotland than England, where a significant part of the chatter is *very* anti-Tory? Interesting that there are no joint SNP/GRN councils.
Out of 32 Councils we have, I think (IND ignored, one or two may be 1 out)):
CON / LAB Joint - zero CON / SNP Joint - zero LAB / SNP Joint - 6 LAB / LD Joint - 1 SNP / LD Joint - 0 CON / LD Joint - 6
I've been looking at this thread in disbelief. Is Hyufd actually proposing that we DNA test British subjects who visit family members abroad to check that they have not been replaced by jihadis?
I mean, even by his standards of stubbornness he's walking into an absolute minefield here.
Yep - which is why it's such fun directing him towards it step by step.
The thing most likely to end SNP hegemony in Scotland imo is a Sindy Referendum. If it's won, there'll probably be a realignment of politics since with independence achieved people in larger numbers will start to vote their broader political view rather than just on this issue. And if it's lost, the drive for independence will lose salience and priority. The SNP could fight against this, keep "banging on" about independence, put yet another vote on it front and centre in their platform, but this would probably shed votes and end their dominance. Or alternatively, if it is another "No", they could go with the grain, de-prioritize independence, talk less about it, drop the commitment to hold another vote in the near future, and if they do this they will still likely shed votes (just maybe different ones) and see an end to their dominance.
So, that's my advice to Boris Johnson. Want to cut the SNP down to size? Hold that Sindy vote.
Boris isn’t that smart. I think you are quite right and there is a mandate for it following the recent elections in Scotland. I suspect the SNP would crap themselves, to coin a phrase, if he agreed.
I think @HYUFD's point might be in the mix. Johnson likes the idea of having "vote Starmer get Sturgeon" in his toolbox for the next election.
I will be extremely surprised if Sturgeon is still in post at the next election. I would personally think an exit by mid-2023 is likely if only because her likely successor will start to worry he'll be seen as too old to replace her otherwise.
I've visited Pakistan three times in my life, once when I was two and we attended a wedding, same when I was 8, the last time was back in 2005 when I was 26 to sell the ancestral family homes.
I was really scared about the last trip, I kept on joking to my mother that she was taking me to Pakistan so she force me into an arranged marriage over there.
I don't think I'll ever go back to Pakistan, there's no need, no family over there.
My worst experience going overseas and dealing with the authorities (outside of America) was a trip to Istanbul in 2015.
Got asked so many questions, at the end one of the border force guys admitted it was a farce, turns out a lot of people who go up to join ISIS go via Turkey.
Quite an odd poll. Looks like movement straight from the Tories to the LDs.
Tory Remainers finally incensed by Brexit ‘shortages’? Suggests it won’t last IF the shortages ease
Shortages are just one thing; increased taxes and prices will also potentially begin to impact.
Disaffected Tory voters flocking to the LibDems is nothing new.
But this is just one poll - see how things look by the end of the year.
It looks as if pensioners are going to receive a near 4% rise in April and I assume other benefits will rise by the same amount
Also expect a substantial rise in the minimum wage in the budget, together with other measures to help the low paid
I would be very surprised if Rishi does not do the above
Where's the money coming from Big_G?
Exactly
And that is the unanswered question for both parties as they face the same demands
At least on the 27th we may have some idea
Easy - from future generations
I assume you mean IHT which I have argued incessantly with @HYUFD about as I believe I million exemption is too high
If not maybe you could expand your view
The only options are borrow more or create a wealth tax - IHT won’t generate much
As a matter of interest how do you see a wealth tax working
My suggestion: 1% pa on all individual assets over £1m. Legal obligation to self-declare and complete an annual return.
So, assets of £1m = £0 Wealth Tax (WT) pa Assets of £1.5m = £5k WT pac(£500k over threshold x 1%) Assets of £2m = £10k WT pa (£1m over threshold x 1%) Assets of £10m = £90k WT pa Assets of £101m = £1m WT pa etc.
Seems fair enough
I would probably go for 0.5%, but agree with the principle.
Will kill off farming. All the land will have to be sold to housing developers.
Sorry Tim, I appreciate you are a long way away but this comment is dumb on several levels:
First, pulling 1% per annum out of large estates will never bankrupt those who own them.
Secondly, do you realise how tight the planning rules are in the UK, how difficult it is to convert farmland to housing?
Wealth is not liquidity. You don't have to go with the stereotype of a little old widow living on the state pension in a mansion to see that lots of high net asset people would struggle to produce 1pc cash every year. That's why racing on death when everything gets liquidated anyway is so handy. You would have to have a roll over till death option for the asset rich, cash poor, so why not go to enhanced death duties anyway?
I agree completely not least because that describes me (not a a widow living on just a state pension in a mansion).
I am retired. I have no income other than my state pension, but I have assets that I live off of. Some cash for the next few years, DC pension that I am not taking yet, shares that I can sell but would only fund me for a few years and 2 houses (home and holiday) that I will sell when I need the money. Most of the value it tied up in the house I live in so I could only afford the tax if I sold my home.
I am not poor, but I could not pay 1% of my asset value in tax, but happy to owe the tax and pay when I can.
Also how would the tax be applied re the following 3 scenarios: DB pension value, DC pension value, savings for retirement?
If DB pensions are excluded how is that fair on the majority of people whose retirement assets are not these and had no opportunity to get a DB pension. If not how does someone on a DB pension get the funds to pay the tax?
If you have over £1m in assets as suggested in the proposal above, you could very easily get a loan against the property to cover 1% asset tax.
Personally I would set a wealth tax to start at £10m as many people will think similarly to yourself, and also see £1m as attainable even if they are far from it currently.
Yes you could, but not straight forward if you don't have an income (see below). It also doesn't cover the DB pension issue. Why should they be exempt and how do they pay if they aren't?
Re your proposal I agree.
Re the getting a loan I have a fun story and actually many would consider it revenge by the system on me for my exploiting it for the last few decades. I have used 0% credit cards and 0% balance transfer cards with 0% fees to play the system to get free money effectively which I then invest. The more you do the better the credit it also seems, so you can do more. As soon as the time period is up I pay them off or if a free transfer to another card is available I do that. Not a lot of use now interest rates are low, but was very profitable in the old days. It is surprising what credit you can get and how much you can build up on them.
Now I have no income to talk of and the selection criteria is almost entirely income based I am snookered. The conversation normally goes along the line of 'you have no income to pay your credit card', 'but I have plenty of money to do so', 'sorry sir we can't take that into account when issuing a card. How are you going to pay it', ' As I said I have cash.', 'Sorry sir that doesn't count', 'If I buy an annuity with it you will give me the card then', 'yes sir'. 'How is that any different? You do know that lots of people have drawdown pensions now and so don't take a regular income', '!'.
Equity release is very straightforward for the vast majority of people with over £1m of property assets and no income. That is different to getting an unsecured loan or credit card which of course may be harder.
On defined benefit pensions I see no reason they should be exempt. Take the most extreme example of someone with a £1m db pension and no other assets.
They would receive £30-40k income and have to pay £10k additional tax, which is perfectly do-able, if harsh for a very unlikely edge case. As and when their pension value, which depreciates each year as they get older, drops below £1m they stop paying.
It's a mistake to set the threshold or rate too high.
For a general wealth tax imo the best model is Switzerland, which tends to start at about 0 reportable net assets or a little more, at a rate of 0.1-0.2%, then built to perhaps 0.5% at 1-2 million of assets.
I can see that eg foreign owned property needs a higher rate, perhaps 1%, to make sure it is used effectively.
That could work if we had their top income tax rate of about 24%.
Is it not better for the economy to tax hoarded wealth much higher than income, which we want to encourage?
I could get board with a lower income tax, even at higher incomes, but a higher "wealth tax". Encourages people to invest their money rather than hoard it.
However I understand that income is much easier to tax, so who knows.
Equity investments are also "wealth". It would need that exemption to get people to invest in asset classes we like, but yes in general with those exemptions it is better to tax unearned income and wealth rather than earned income.
Need to watch out for pension pots though - a 1% tax on that would destroy the limited returns many people get there.
It's not "Tories" using bent statistics, it's iSage who say "look at how Europe has mask mandates and better outcomes than "England" "- then quote UK numbers which include Scotland and Wales, and which have similar mask mandates to those proposed by iSage, yet worse outcomes than England.....
As I said fake numbers, Scotland has been behind England all through the pandemic overall, even if still crap. Picking the odd day or week as usual to try and deflect.
I've been looking at this thread in disbelief. Is Hyufd actually proposing that we DNA test British subjects who visit family members abroad to check that they have not been replaced by jihadis?
I mean, even by his standards of stubbornness he's walking into an absolute minefield here.
I got hung up (no pun intended) much earlier than that: how can he tell whether X is going to Y to be radicalised?
And what if X is going to, say, the USA or some other state to be radicalised?
I didn't know that there were machines for that sort of thing.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
The real problem is that the intelligence services and all the other agencies involved in the Prevent programmes simply do not have the resources they need to monitor effectively, let alone deradicalise, all those they know about.
Unless @HYUFD's Tory government is willing to put their money where their mouth is then this is all talk and little will be achieved. Effective counter-terrorism and deradicalisation take time and resources.
Whisper it quietly: there isn’t much evidence that deradicalisation works.
From what I can tell, the best solution to angry young men/women is to tie them down with a job, a mortgage, a relationship and young children and they tend to move on and cease to be a threat.
Doesn’t always work, but better than what the bullshit deradicalisation industry can achieve.
Prevention is better than a cure - but we didn't want to listen to anyone who said we should prevent mass immigration, so we are where we are
I don't have a problem with mass immigration. I have a real problem with multiculturalism and in particular the encouragement of the idea that it is ok to recreate the societies of the poorer parts of Pakistan or Somalia here. If people want to come and be British and we need additional people at the time, fine. But we need to make sure that those people are encouraged to become committed to British values, including sexual equality, gender equality and respect, freedom of speech and mutual tolerance. If they are not so willing we don't really want them here. What we do about those already here and indeed were born here like this particular murderer is tricky but it is a consequence of not putting in the effort to integrate in the first place.
Completely agree - but mass immigration of the type you mention has happened; a kind of academic experiment, doomed to failure in which we all are participating. Anyone with an ounce of common sense could have forseen it could never work, and time and time again we have been shown it doesn't work. But it has got to the stage where politicians have bought into the project so much that it can never be reversed.
As with Lee Rigby, 7/7, Ariana Grande concert, the death of Sir David looks like it can only be described as an act of civil war
How do we unwind this mess? I would suggest banning deobandism and similar groups in this country would be a good start. Their control of Mosques and fundamentalism is completely inconsistent with what I have described as British values. We need to use schools and Universities to free girls and women from bondage and absurd patriarchy. We need to stop foreign funding for mosques and madrassas, particularly from Saudi Arabia, coming into this country. We need to make it clear that this is the United Kingdom and we live differently here. Personally, I would also ban the Burqa for the same reasons.
The problem with talking about "British values" is that they are contested and change. Were we "un-British" before female suffrage or when women needed a male guarantor to get a mortgage?
I've been looking at this thread in disbelief. Is Hyufd actually proposing that we DNA test British subjects who visit family members abroad to check that they have not been replaced by jihadis?
I mean, even by his standards of stubbornness he's walking into an absolute minefield here.
They all look the same to him. And what about Voight-Kampff? Some of these guys have seen things you people wouldn't believe.
The thing most likely to end SNP hegemony in Scotland imo is a Sindy Referendum. If it's won, there'll probably be a realignment of politics since with independence achieved people in larger numbers will start to vote their broader political view rather than just on this issue. And if it's lost, the drive for independence will lose salience and priority. The SNP could fight against this, keep "banging on" about independence, put yet another vote on it front and centre in their platform, but this would probably shed votes and end their dominance. Or alternatively, if it is another "No", they could go with the grain, de-prioritize independence, talk less about it, drop the commitment to hold another vote in the near future, and if they do this they will still likely shed votes (just maybe different ones) and see an end to their dominance.
So, that's my advice to Boris Johnson. Want to cut the SNP down to size? Hold that Sindy vote.
Why would he want to do that when he can keep the threat of a PM Stamer as puppet of the SNP in a hung parliament to keep English Tories voting Tory?
The thing most likely to end SNP hegemony in Scotland imo is a Sindy Referendum. If it's won, there'll probably be a realignment of politics since with independence achieved people in larger numbers will start to vote their broader political view rather than just on this issue. And if it's lost, the drive for independence will lose salience and priority. The SNP could fight against this, keep "banging on" about independence, put yet another vote on it front and centre in their platform, but this would probably shed votes and end their dominance. Or alternatively, if it is another "No", they could go with the grain, de-prioritize independence, talk less about it, drop the commitment to hold another vote in the near future, and if they do this they will still likely shed votes (just maybe different ones) and see an end to their dominance.
So, that's my advice to Boris Johnson. Want to cut the SNP down to size? Hold that Sindy vote.
Boris isn’t that smart. I think you are quite right and there is a mandate for it following the recent elections in Scotland. I suspect the SNP would crap themselves, to coin a phrase, if he agreed.
I think @HYUFD's point might be in the mix. Johnson likes the idea of having "vote Starmer get Sturgeon" in his toolbox for the next election.
I don't think it's going to matter.
If the economy is in a reasonable state, Boris likely wins again regardless.
If the economy isn't in a reasonable state I don't think "vote Starmer get Sturgeon" is going to put people off.
It really depends on her ratings nationally, the more negative her ratings become the lower Labour's chances of forming a government. The Tories weaponised Alex Salmond so well because the wider company really didn't like him despite being popular in Scotland with Labour and SNP voters. If the Tories can shift opinion on Nicola in the same direction Labour will struggle a lot because English and Welsh voters won't want to make Nicola kingmaker or deputy PM.
Labour really need to show that they can win without the SNP. I don't know the mechanism of that or what that victory looks like but relying on the SNP will mean a fairly easy Tory win.
The thing most likely to end SNP hegemony in Scotland imo is a Sindy Referendum. If it's won, there'll probably be a realignment of politics since with independence achieved people in larger numbers will start to vote their broader political view rather than just on this issue. And if it's lost, the drive for independence will lose salience and priority. The SNP could fight against this, keep "banging on" about independence, put yet another vote on it front and centre in their platform, but this would probably shed votes and end their dominance. Or alternatively, if it is another "No", they could go with the grain, de-prioritize independence, talk less about it, drop the commitment to hold another vote in the near future, and if they do this they will still likely shed votes (just maybe different ones) and see an end to their dominance.
So, that's my advice to Boris Johnson. Want to cut the SNP down to size? Hold that Sindy vote.
Boris isn’t that smart. I think you are quite right and there is a mandate for it following the recent elections in Scotland. I suspect the SNP would crap themselves, to coin a phrase, if he agreed.
I think @HYUFD's point might be in the mix. Johnson likes the idea of having "vote Starmer get Sturgeon" in his toolbox for the next election.
I don't think it's going to matter.
If the economy is in a reasonable state, Boris likely wins again regardless.
If the economy isn't in a reasonable state I don't think "vote Starmer get Sturgeon" is going to put people off.
I've visited Pakistan three times in my life, once when I was two and we attended a wedding, same when I was 8, the last time was back in 2005 when I was 26 to sell the ancestral family homes.
I was really scared about the last trip, I kept on joking to my mother that she was taking me to Pakistan so she force me into an arranged marriage over there.
I don't think I'll ever go back to Pakistan, there's no need, no family over there.
My worst experience going overseas and dealing with the authorities (outside of America) was a trip to Istanbul in 2015.
Got asked so many questions, at the end one of the border force guys admitted it was a farce, turns out a lot of people who go up to join ISIS go via Turkey.
My sarcasm so wanted to make an experience.
When I first visited America, twenty years ago, I was asked if I had taken part in the Holocaust.
Given I was 19 at the time this struck me as a rather silly question and I was tempted to answer 'yes' just to see what the response was. (I didn't because I'm not stupid.)
It wasn't until a lot later that it dawned on me by answering 'no' - as everyone did, of course - that meant if I(!) were later found to have taken part in the Holocaust (or terrorism was another one) then my visa would be invalid and I could just be removed from the country without all that boring extradition BS.
Which really is quite clever when you think about it.
The thing most likely to end SNP hegemony in Scotland imo is a Sindy Referendum. If it's won, there'll probably be a realignment of politics since with independence achieved people in larger numbers will start to vote their broader political view rather than just on this issue. And if it's lost, the drive for independence will lose salience and priority. The SNP could fight against this, keep "banging on" about independence, put yet another vote on it front and centre in their platform, but this would probably shed votes and end their dominance. Or alternatively, if it is another "No", they could go with the grain, de-prioritize independence, talk less about it, drop the commitment to hold another vote in the near future, and if they do this they will still likely shed votes (just maybe different ones) and see an end to their dominance.
So, that's my advice to Boris Johnson. Want to cut the SNP down to size? Hold that Sindy vote.
Boris isn’t that smart. I think you are quite right and there is a mandate for it following the recent elections in Scotland. I suspect the SNP would crap themselves, to coin a phrase, if he agreed.
I think @HYUFD's point might be in the mix. Johnson likes the idea of having "vote Starmer get Sturgeon" in his toolbox for the next election.
I don't think it's going to matter.
If the economy is in a reasonable state, Boris likely wins again regardless.
If the economy isn't in a reasonable state I don't think "vote Starmer get Sturgeon" is going to put people off.
Yep
The tories will have to run on a “cling to nurse for fear of worse” campaign.
I don’t think it’ll work though.
Also, the Nicola in Kier’s pocket only works if the polls show a hung parliament.
If the economy is up the shitter, lab have a decent chance of polling an outright majority.
I've been looking at this thread in disbelief. Is Hyufd actually proposing that we DNA test British subjects who visit family members abroad to check that they have not been replaced by jihadis?
I mean, even by his standards of stubbornness he's walking into an absolute minefield here.
@HYUFD posts this last 24 hours have been breath-taking and ill thought through
Mind you he has offered to pay my membership fee to join the labour party notwithstanding that I was helping the conservative party when he was in nappies and long before !!!!
The thing most likely to end SNP hegemony in Scotland imo is a Sindy Referendum. If it's won, there'll probably be a realignment of politics since with independence achieved people in larger numbers will start to vote their broader political view rather than just on this issue. And if it's lost, the drive for independence will lose salience and priority. The SNP could fight against this, keep "banging on" about independence, put yet another vote on it front and centre in their platform, but this would probably shed votes and end their dominance. Or alternatively, if it is another "No", they could go with the grain, de-prioritize independence, talk less about it, drop the commitment to hold another vote in the near future, and if they do this they will still likely shed votes (just maybe different ones) and see an end to their dominance.
So, that's my advice to Boris Johnson. Want to cut the SNP down to size? Hold that Sindy vote.
That was the conclusion I came to some time ago. Its a risk but the alternatives may be worse.
Johnson can be a risk-taker but the trouble here is on a personal level he has a lot to lose and little to gain. Eg his Brexit election was a risk but with a massive (and realized) upside, and his position as he rolled the dice was not appealing. He was in the shit with a paralyzed parliament and no majority or mandate. His position now is king of the castle, so you and I are asking him to do what is right morally and for Scotland and for the Union, with no great personal reward accruing. I sense he isn't the sort of man who'd be attracted to such a proposition.
What he has to gain is going down as the man who saved the Union but what he has to lose is being another David Cameron who will never be forgiven for his inevitable decision to allow the Brexit vote.
I suspect that he has enough other priorities, what with the aftermath of Covid and the tidying up of Brexit but we can live in hope.
The reason Labour have been smashed by the SNP is not that they have attacked them insufficiently. Anyone who has seen the invective spouted by SLab members and activists at the SNP would find that ridiculous.
The reason is much simpler. A very large percentage of former Labour voters were in favour of independence.
If your party is implacably opposed to a policy that a large amount of your voters are in favour of you have only two options.
1) bring your voters round to your point of view with well constructed arguments. 2) call them Nazi's and watch as they abandon you and vote for party that favours their position instead.
Labour went with option 2.
It's that simple.
It really isn't. If that were the case there would be an overwhelming majority in Scotland for independence instead of a minority. What we are now seeing, bizarrely, is situations where people vote for the SNP but don't seem to favour independence. They vote for the SNP because they are the centre left party, just as Labour used to be.
And whatever activists say about the SNP, it is not what Labour says to the voters. I live in Dundee West. Labour leaflets at the last election said vote Labour to stop the Tories. The SNP have a 10k+ majority in the seat, the Tories are nowhere and Labour did not lay a glove on the SNP. They were massacred again and not by the Tories. Its madness.
Do you think leaflets saying vote Labour to stop the SNP would make any difference? It would just confirm what is pretty much fact that they're guddling in the same pool of voters as SCons and SLDs.
It also ignores that what happens in Dundee is motnwhat happens in the rest of Scotland.
In Glasgow Labour leaflets have been anti-SNP focused for over a decade (2005 election the first Labour flyer i got through the door was "Break up Britain, Scotland goes broke") and I haven't noticed a lack of anti-SNP messaging in Edinburgh either.
Also a variation on the 'if only the LDs had been positive about the coalition rather than attacked the Tories' theme. Tories can never quite believe that people who feel negatively about them are sincere rather than naive simps whipped into it by nasty lefties, Nats, luvvies etc.
It's also interesting that some of us still can't grasp that the left field in Scotland is composed of the SNP but also of the Greens (now more substantial than the LDs in some respects) and as Alistair points out an element of the Labour voting demographic.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
The real problem is that the intelligence services and all the other agencies involved in the Prevent programmes simply do not have the resources they need to monitor effectively, let alone deradicalise, all those they know about.
Unless @HYUFD's Tory government is willing to put their money where their mouth is then this is all talk and little will be achieved. Effective counter-terrorism and deradicalisation take time and resources.
Whisper it quietly: there isn’t much evidence that deradicalisation works.
From what I can tell, the best solution to angry young men/women is to tie them down with a job, a mortgage, a relationship and young children and they tend to move on and cease to be a threat.
Doesn’t always work, but better than what the bullshit deradicalisation industry can achieve.
Prevention is better than a cure - but we didn't want to listen to anyone who said we should prevent mass immigration, so we are where we are
I don't have a problem with mass immigration. I have a real problem with multiculturalism and in particular the encouragement of the idea that it is ok to recreate the societies of the poorer parts of Pakistan or Somalia here. If people want to come and be British and we need additional people at the time, fine. But we need to make sure that those people are encouraged to become committed to British values, including sexual equality, gender equality and respect, freedom of speech and mutual tolerance. If they are not so willing we don't really want them here. What we do about those already here and indeed were born here like this particular murderer is tricky but it is a consequence of not putting in the effort to integrate in the first place.
Completely agree - but mass immigration of the type you mention has happened; a kind of academic experiment, doomed to failure in which we all are participating. Anyone with an ounce of common sense could have forseen it could never work, and time and time again we have been shown it doesn't work. But it has got to the stage where politicians have bought into the project so much that it can never be reversed.
As with Lee Rigby, 7/7, Ariana Grande concert, the death of Sir David looks like it can only be described as an act of civil war
How do we unwind this mess? I would suggest banning deobandism and similar groups in this country would be a good start. Their control of Mosques and fundamentalism is completely inconsistent with what I have described as British values. We need to use schools and Universities to free girls and women from bondage and absurd patriarchy. We need to stop foreign funding for mosques and madrassas, particularly from Saudi Arabia, coming into this country. We need to make it clear that this is the United Kingdom and we live differently here. Personally, I would also ban the Burqa for the same reasons.
I don't think it is possible to be unwound, it has happened already and we just have to deal with it. And the war between left wing enablers of it and right wingers who are concerned is just as bad
Look at the example of the new Islamic Shopping Hall in Romford, taking the place of the largest department store in town. It has been bought for £12m by two Muslim Shopkeepers from East London whose current businesses are worth about ten grand. The address on Companies House is a crappy little flat in Bow. In their promotional video they mention the third floor of the shop is going to be a Mosque. As someone born in Romford, and lived in Havering the majority of my life this more than raised an eyebrow.
I mention it on here and at first was told it wasn't going to be a Mosque, then that it was a fantastic example of free enterprise! I will get called names, but I see it as a Trojan Horse
If you look at the academic work done over a longer period in 2015 and 2017, their wider dataset showed that the most abused MPs in the 2017 election were male Tories (which makes sense when you consider that political social media is rather dominated by the left):
The Toon is already buzzing for later. Can’t wait to get pumped by Spurs and not care one bit 🏳️🏴
It was reported that are to spend 50 million in the January window so hardly a bonanza
I think the most important issue is for them is to avoid relegation if they want to attract stars for next season
Yes. Toon needs to avoid being the richest team in the Championship, but that wouldn't be a disaster. It is a good way of building a winning mentality and momentum.
Our owners took us over in the Championship in 2011 and opened the chequebook with Sven and what were quite big name signings. It took several false starts and some years to get the momentum for promotion then our sensational win in 2016, and FA Cup this year.
We now have major signings but what got us here was a team of free transfers and bargain basement. A team needs to be greater than the sum of its parts, not like the Man United who we dominated yesterday.
I've been looking at this thread in disbelief. Is Hyufd actually proposing that we DNA test British subjects who visit family members abroad to check that they have not been replaced by jihadis?
I mean, even by his standards of stubbornness he's walking into an absolute minefield here.
@HYUFD posts this last 24 hours have been breath-taking and ill thought through
Mind you he has offered to pay my membership fee to join the labour party notwithstanding that I was helping the conservative party when he was in nappies and long before !!!!
Go on - ask him for your membership fee for PC. It's the closest fit to your beliefs, remember, and it's not as if Wales is at immediate risk of a referendum at present.
Quite an odd poll. Looks like movement straight from the Tories to the LDs.
Tory Remainers finally incensed by Brexit ‘shortages’? Suggests it won’t last IF the shortages ease
Shortages are just one thing; increased taxes and prices will also potentially begin to impact.
Disaffected Tory voters flocking to the LibDems is nothing new.
But this is just one poll - see how things look by the end of the year.
It looks as if pensioners are going to receive a near 4% rise in April and I assume other benefits will rise by the same amount
Also expect a substantial rise in the minimum wage in the budget, together with other measures to help the low paid
I would be very surprised if Rishi does not do the above
Where's the money coming from Big_G?
Exactly
And that is the unanswered question for both parties as they face the same demands
At least on the 27th we may have some idea
Easy - from future generations
I assume you mean IHT which I have argued incessantly with @HYUFD about as I believe I million exemption is too high
If not maybe you could expand your view
The only options are borrow more or create a wealth tax - IHT won’t generate much
As a matter of interest how do you see a wealth tax working
My suggestion: 1% pa on all individual assets over £1m. Legal obligation to self-declare and complete an annual return.
So, assets of £1m = £0 Wealth Tax (WT) pa Assets of £1.5m = £5k WT pac(£500k over threshold x 1%) Assets of £2m = £10k WT pa (£1m over threshold x 1%) Assets of £10m = £90k WT pa Assets of £101m = £1m WT pa etc.
Seems fair enough
I would probably go for 0.5%, but agree with the principle.
Will kill off farming. All the land will have to be sold to housing developers.
Sorry Tim, I appreciate you are a long way away but this comment is dumb on several levels:
First, pulling 1% per annum out of large estates will never bankrupt those who own them.
Secondly, do you realise how tight the planning rules are in the UK, how difficult it is to convert farmland to housing?
Wealth is not liquidity. You don't have to go with the stereotype of a little old widow living on the state pension in a mansion to see that lots of high net asset people would struggle to produce 1pc cash every year. That's why racing on death when everything gets liquidated anyway is so handy. You would have to have a roll over till death option for the asset rich, cash poor, so why not go to enhanced death duties anyway?
I agree completely not least because that describes me (not a a widow living on just a state pension in a mansion).
I am retired. I have no income other than my state pension, but I have assets that I live off of. Some cash for the next few years, DC pension that I am not taking yet, shares that I can sell but would only fund me for a few years and 2 houses (home and holiday) that I will sell when I need the money. Most of the value it tied up in the house I live in so I could only afford the tax if I sold my home.
I am not poor, but I could not pay 1% of my asset value in tax, but happy to owe the tax and pay when I can.
Also how would the tax be applied re the following 3 scenarios: DB pension value, DC pension value, savings for retirement?
If DB pensions are excluded how is that fair on the majority of people whose retirement assets are not these and had no opportunity to get a DB pension. If not how does someone on a DB pension get the funds to pay the tax?
If you have over £1m in assets as suggested in the proposal above, you could very easily get a loan against the property to cover 1% asset tax.
Personally I would set a wealth tax to start at £10m as many people will think similarly to yourself, and also see £1m as attainable even if they are far from it currently.
Yes you could, but not straight forward if you don't have an income (see below). It also doesn't cover the DB pension issue. Why should they be exempt and how do they pay if they aren't?
Re your proposal I agree.
Re the getting a loan I have a fun story and actually many would consider it revenge by the system on me for my exploiting it for the last few decades. I have used 0% credit cards and 0% balance transfer cards with 0% fees to play the system to get free money effectively which I then invest. The more you do the better the credit it also seems, so you can do more. As soon as the time period is up I pay them off or if a free transfer to another card is available I do that. Not a lot of use now interest rates are low, but was very profitable in the old days. It is surprising what credit you can get and how much you can build up on them.
Now I have no income to talk of and the selection criteria is almost entirely income based I am snookered. The conversation normally goes along the line of 'you have no income to pay your credit card', 'but I have plenty of money to do so', 'sorry sir we can't take that into account when issuing a card. How are you going to pay it', ' As I said I have cash.', 'Sorry sir that doesn't count', 'If I buy an annuity with it you will give me the card then', 'yes sir'. 'How is that any different? You do know that lots of people have drawdown pensions now and so don't take a regular income', '!'.
Equity release is very straightforward for the vast majority of people with over £1m of property assets and no income. That is different to getting an unsecured loan or credit card which of course may be harder.
On defined benefit pensions I see no reason they should be exempt. Take the most extreme example of someone with a £1m db pension and no other assets.
They would receive £30-40k income and have to pay £10k additional tax, which is perfectly do-able, if harsh for a very unlikely edge case. As and when their pension value, which depreciates each year as they get older, drops below £1m they stop paying.
£1m house and £1m DB pension. Neither of which are extreme. How do they pay then? £30 - £40k gross income, so income tax to pay then £20k wealth tax. Practically nothing left
Quite an odd poll. Looks like movement straight from the Tories to the LDs.
Tory Remainers finally incensed by Brexit ‘shortages’? Suggests it won’t last IF the shortages ease
Shortages are just one thing; increased taxes and prices will also potentially begin to impact.
Disaffected Tory voters flocking to the LibDems is nothing new.
But this is just one poll - see how things look by the end of the year.
It looks as if pensioners are going to receive a near 4% rise in April and I assume other benefits will rise by the same amount
Also expect a substantial rise in the minimum wage in the budget, together with other measures to help the low paid
I would be very surprised if Rishi does not do the above
Where's the money coming from Big_G?
Exactly
And that is the unanswered question for both parties as they face the same demands
At least on the 27th we may have some idea
Easy - from future generations
I assume you mean IHT which I have argued incessantly with @HYUFD about as I believe I million exemption is too high
If not maybe you could expand your view
The only options are borrow more or create a wealth tax - IHT won’t generate much
As a matter of interest how do you see a wealth tax working
My suggestion: 1% pa on all individual assets over £1m. Legal obligation to self-declare and complete an annual return.
So, assets of £1m = £0 Wealth Tax (WT) pa Assets of £1.5m = £5k WT pac(£500k over threshold x 1%) Assets of £2m = £10k WT pa (£1m over threshold x 1%) Assets of £10m = £90k WT pa Assets of £101m = £1m WT pa etc.
Seems fair enough
I would probably go for 0.5%, but agree with the principle.
Will kill off farming. All the land will have to be sold to housing developers.
Sorry Tim, I appreciate you are a long way away but this comment is dumb on several levels:
First, pulling 1% per annum out of large estates will never bankrupt those who own them.
Secondly, do you realise how tight the planning rules are in the UK, how difficult it is to convert farmland to housing?
Wealth is not liquidity. You don't have to go with the stereotype of a little old widow living on the state pension in a mansion to see that lots of high net asset people would struggle to produce 1pc cash every year. That's why racing on death when everything gets liquidated anyway is so handy. You would have to have a roll over till death option for the asset rich, cash poor, so why not go to enhanced death duties anyway?
I agree completely not least because that describes me (not a a widow living on just a state pension in a mansion).
I am retired. I have no income other than my state pension, but I have assets that I live off of. Some cash for the next few years, DC pension that I am not taking yet, shares that I can sell but would only fund me for a few years and 2 houses (home and holiday) that I will sell when I need the money. Most of the value it tied up in the house I live in so I could only afford the tax if I sold my home.
I am not poor, but I could not pay 1% of my asset value in tax, but happy to owe the tax and pay when I can.
Also how would the tax be applied re the following 3 scenarios: DB pension value, DC pension value, savings for retirement?
If DB pensions are excluded how is that fair on the majority of people whose retirement assets are not these and had no opportunity to get a DB pension. If not how does someone on a DB pension get the funds to pay the tax?
If you have over £1m in assets as suggested in the proposal above, you could very easily get a loan against the property to cover 1% asset tax.
Personally I would set a wealth tax to start at £10m as many people will think similarly to yourself, and also see £1m as attainable even if they are far from it currently.
Yes you could, but not straight forward if you don't have an income (see below). It also doesn't cover the DB pension issue. Why should they be exempt and how do they pay if they aren't?
Re your proposal I agree.
Re the getting a loan I have a fun story and actually many would consider it revenge by the system on me for my exploiting it for the last few decades. I have used 0% credit cards and 0% balance transfer cards with 0% fees to play the system to get free money effectively which I then invest. The more you do the better the credit it also seems, so you can do more. As soon as the time period is up I pay them off or if a free transfer to another card is available I do that. Not a lot of use now interest rates are low, but was very profitable in the old days. It is surprising what credit you can get and how much you can build up on them.
Now I have no income to talk of and the selection criteria is almost entirely income based I am snookered. The conversation normally goes along the line of 'you have no income to pay your credit card', 'but I have plenty of money to do so', 'sorry sir we can't take that into account when issuing a card. How are you going to pay it', ' As I said I have cash.', 'Sorry sir that doesn't count', 'If I buy an annuity with it you will give me the card then', 'yes sir'. 'How is that any different? You do know that lots of people have drawdown pensions now and so don't take a regular income', '!'.
Equity release is very straightforward for the vast majority of people with over £1m of property assets and no income. That is different to getting an unsecured loan or credit card which of course may be harder.
On defined benefit pensions I see no reason they should be exempt. Take the most extreme example of someone with a £1m db pension and no other assets.
They would receive £30-40k income and have to pay £10k additional tax, which is perfectly do-able, if harsh for a very unlikely edge case. As and when their pension value, which depreciates each year as they get older, drops below £1m they stop paying.
It's a mistake to set the threshold or rate too high.
For a general wealth tax imo the best model is Switzerland, which tends to start at about 0 reportable net assets or a little more, at a rate of 0.1-0.2%, then built to perhaps 0.5% at 1-2 million of assets.
I can see that eg foreign owned property needs a higher rate, perhaps 1%, to make sure it is used effectively.
That could work if we had their top income tax rate of about 24%.
Is it not better for the economy to tax hoarded wealth much higher than income, which we want to encourage?
I could get board with a lower income tax, even at higher incomes, but a higher "wealth tax". Encourages people to invest their money rather than hoard it.
However I understand that income is much easier to tax, so who knows.
Not necessarily. Partly, as you say, income is much easier to tax than wealth. But also, as a country, we need to encourage savings not expenditure if anything as we have an ageing population and a large balance of payments deficit. And also if you tax wealth you make your tax receipts much more variable because asset prices change more than income.
I think the best form of tax from an economic point of view is on sales, especially luxuries or harmful goods like tobacco and alcohol. It reduces economic growth less than taxes on income and capital gains.
I've visited Pakistan three times in my life, once when I was two and we attended a wedding, same when I was 8, the last time was back in 2005 when I was 26 to sell the ancestral family homes.
I was really scared about the last trip, I kept on joking to my mother that she was taking me to Pakistan so she force me into an arranged marriage over there.
I don't think I'll ever go back to Pakistan, there's no need, no family over there.
My worst experience going overseas and dealing with the authorities (outside of America) was a trip to Istanbul in 2015.
Got asked so many questions, at the end one of the border force guys admitted it was a farce, turns out a lot of people who go up to join ISIS go via Turkey.
My sarcasm so wanted to make an experience.
That's interesting. I did a few work trips to Bull about that same time and I never had any hassle at all. Bit of the old white privilege there, maybe, given we were (I guess) both on UK passports.
I've been looking at this thread in disbelief. Is Hyufd actually proposing that we DNA test British subjects who visit family members abroad to check that they have not been replaced by jihadis?
I mean, even by his standards of stubbornness he's walking into an absolute minefield here.
@HYUFD posts this last 24 hours have been breath-taking and ill thought through
Mind you he has offered to pay my membership fee to join the labour party notwithstanding that I was helping the conservative party when he was in nappies and long before !!!!
Go on - ask him for your membership fee for PC. It's the closest fit to your beliefs, remember, and it's not as if Wales is at immediate risk of a referendum at present.
I'd love to see his reaction.
Plaid Cymru is a close fit for everyone's beliefs because they don't really have any fundamental core values except the belief that Wales gets a shit deal.
Which TBF is not really a controversial position.
However, unless Big_G is fluent in Welsh I don't think he would be terribly popular with the Plaid activists in that part of Wales.
Quite an odd poll. Looks like movement straight from the Tories to the LDs.
Tory Remainers finally incensed by Brexit ‘shortages’? Suggests it won’t last IF the shortages ease
Shortages are just one thing; increased taxes and prices will also potentially begin to impact.
Disaffected Tory voters flocking to the LibDems is nothing new.
But this is just one poll - see how things look by the end of the year.
It looks as if pensioners are going to receive a near 4% rise in April and I assume other benefits will rise by the same amount
Also expect a substantial rise in the minimum wage in the budget, together with other measures to help the low paid
I would be very surprised if Rishi does not do the above
Where's the money coming from Big_G?
Exactly
And that is the unanswered question for both parties as they face the same demands
At least on the 27th we may have some idea
Easy - from future generations
I assume you mean IHT which I have argued incessantly with @HYUFD about as I believe I million exemption is too high
If not maybe you could expand your view
The only options are borrow more or create a wealth tax - IHT won’t generate much
As a matter of interest how do you see a wealth tax working
My suggestion: 1% pa on all individual assets over £1m. Legal obligation to self-declare and complete an annual return.
So, assets of £1m = £0 Wealth Tax (WT) pa Assets of £1.5m = £5k WT pac(£500k over threshold x 1%) Assets of £2m = £10k WT pa (£1m over threshold x 1%) Assets of £10m = £90k WT pa Assets of £101m = £1m WT pa etc.
Seems fair enough
I would probably go for 0.5%, but agree with the principle.
Will kill off farming. All the land will have to be sold to housing developers.
Sorry Tim, I appreciate you are a long way away but this comment is dumb on several levels:
First, pulling 1% per annum out of large estates will never bankrupt those who own them.
Secondly, do you realise how tight the planning rules are in the UK, how difficult it is to convert farmland to housing?
Wealth is not liquidity. You don't have to go with the stereotype of a little old widow living on the state pension in a mansion to see that lots of high net asset people would struggle to produce 1pc cash every year. That's why racing on death when everything gets liquidated anyway is so handy. You would have to have a roll over till death option for the asset rich, cash poor, so why not go to enhanced death duties anyway?
I agree completely not least because that describes me (not a a widow living on just a state pension in a mansion).
I am retired. I have no income other than my state pension, but I have assets that I live off of. Some cash for the next few years, DC pension that I am not taking yet, shares that I can sell but would only fund me for a few years and 2 houses (home and holiday) that I will sell when I need the money. Most of the value it tied up in the house I live in so I could only afford the tax if I sold my home.
I am not poor, but I could not pay 1% of my asset value in tax, but happy to owe the tax and pay when I can.
Also how would the tax be applied re the following 3 scenarios: DB pension value, DC pension value, savings for retirement?
If DB pensions are excluded how is that fair on the majority of people whose retirement assets are not these and had no opportunity to get a DB pension. If not how does someone on a DB pension get the funds to pay the tax?
If you have over £1m in assets as suggested in the proposal above, you could very easily get a loan against the property to cover 1% asset tax.
Personally I would set a wealth tax to start at £10m as many people will think similarly to yourself, and also see £1m as attainable even if they are far from it currently.
Yes you could, but not straight forward if you don't have an income (see below). It also doesn't cover the DB pension issue. Why should they be exempt and how do they pay if they aren't?
Re your proposal I agree.
Re the getting a loan I have a fun story and actually many would consider it revenge by the system on me for my exploiting it for the last few decades. I have used 0% credit cards and 0% balance transfer cards with 0% fees to play the system to get free money effectively which I then invest. The more you do the better the credit it also seems, so you can do more. As soon as the time period is up I pay them off or if a free transfer to another card is available I do that. Not a lot of use now interest rates are low, but was very profitable in the old days. It is surprising what credit you can get and how much you can build up on them.
Now I have no income to talk of and the selection criteria is almost entirely income based I am snookered. The conversation normally goes along the line of 'you have no income to pay your credit card', 'but I have plenty of money to do so', 'sorry sir we can't take that into account when issuing a card. How are you going to pay it', ' As I said I have cash.', 'Sorry sir that doesn't count', 'If I buy an annuity with it you will give me the card then', 'yes sir'. 'How is that any different? You do know that lots of people have drawdown pensions now and so don't take a regular income', '!'.
Equity release is very straightforward for the vast majority of people with over £1m of property assets and no income. That is different to getting an unsecured loan or credit card which of course may be harder.
On defined benefit pensions I see no reason they should be exempt. Take the most extreme example of someone with a £1m db pension and no other assets.
They would receive £30-40k income and have to pay £10k additional tax, which is perfectly do-able, if harsh for a very unlikely edge case. As and when their pension value, which depreciates each year as they get older, drops below £1m they stop paying.
£1m house and £1m DB pension. Neither of which are extreme. How do they pay then? £30 - £40k gross income, so income tax to pay then £20k wealth tax. Practically nothing left
Borrow! Ridiculous privilege to pretend that would be a hardship, it is just a form to fill in and you can live your life as if it didnt exist, with your beneficiaries getting slightly less on your death.
I fear it is now too late for Labour north of the border. They are too weak to take on the SNP in their former strongholds and their former supporters have really got out of the habit of voting for them.
Glasgow is the prime example.
The SNP took over the council for the first time in history, and by all accounts it's a disaster.
But people still vote for them.
Glasgow was almost Labour's last bastion in Scotland but it too has gone. They still have a reasonable number of councillors there but the trend is very much against them.
The Conservatives have 7/85. There is no opposition despite the incompetence.
One point for consideration is to what extent 'Labour' or 'Conservative' councils or oppositions are actually Unionist coalitions in all but name. In which case, objectively, Labour are further losing their distinction from the Conservatives, as well as being seen by some to be in bed with them: Better Together all over again.
The jointly run Councils are interesting.
That very much puts the division very down to LD/CON vs LAB/SNP. Junior coalition partner effect? Is the LD anti-Tory rhetoric weaker in Scotland than England, where a significant part of the chatter is *very* anti-Tory? Interesting that there are no joint SNP/GRN councils.
Out of 32 Councils we have, I think (IND ignored, one or two may be 1 out)):
CON / LAB Joint - zero CON / SNP Joint - zero LAB / SNP Joint - 6 LAB / LD Joint - 1 SNP / LD Joint - 0 CON / LD Joint - 6
The Toon is already buzzing for later. Can’t wait to get pumped by Spurs and not care one bit 🏳️🏴
It was reported that are to spend 50 million in the January window so hardly a bonanza
I think the most important issue is for them is to avoid relegation if they want to attract stars for next season
Yes. Toon needs to avoid being the richest team in the Championship, but that wouldn't be a disaster. It is a good way of building a winning mentality and momentum.
Our owners took us over in the Championship in 2011 and opened the chequebook with Sven and what were quite big name signings. It took several false starts and some years to get the momentum for promotion then our sensational win in 2016, and FA Cup this year.
We now have major signings but what got us here was a team of free transfers and bargain basement. A team needs to be greater than the sum of its parts, not like the Man United who we dominated yesterday.
Good result yesterday and Ole's tenure is coming to an end
Just heard Lisa Nandy saying “this [abuse directed at MPs] is not felt equally” and then said that Dianne Abbott is the most abused MP.
How is that relevant to this? I don’t think Twitter abuse contributed to the radicalisation of the perpetrator.
If you are an MP I would imagine their focus is primarily about MP's security and safety. Seems perfectly natural that their take on this is focused on that rather than the broader issue of terrorism, Islamic or otherwise, when family members will this weekend have been asking them to quit or not do public meetings without security.
Do you think Dianne Abbott is in more danger than other MPs?
Without security then yes sure. I would imagine she has more security than others due to more threats so given that I don't know.
It’s sad that we are now likely to see MPs need daily police protection, making them less accessible to their constituents.
As several have noted over the past couple of days, meeting the people they represent is the primary role of a member of Parliament.
You can be sure they will love having personal bodyguards, they will show plenty enthusiasm for that. Pity they don't do much about decent policing for the public, as ever if it is for them they are always keen. Only a handful of people ever see them and most times they achieve zilch. Maybe if they tried running the country fairly and helping the public rather than themselves it would help.
I've been looking at this thread in disbelief. Is Hyufd actually proposing that we DNA test British subjects who visit family members abroad to check that they have not been replaced by jihadis?
I mean, even by his standards of stubbornness he's walking into an absolute minefield here.
@HYUFD posts this last 24 hours have been breath-taking and ill thought through
Mind you he has offered to pay my membership fee to join the labour party notwithstanding that I was helping the conservative party when he was in nappies and long before !!!!
Go on - ask him for your membership fee for PC. It's the closest fit to your beliefs, remember, and it's not as if Wales is at immediate risk of a referendum at present.
I'd love to see his reaction.
Plaid Cymru is a close fit for everyone's beliefs because they don't really have any fundamental core values except the belief that Wales gets a shit deal.
Which TBF is not really a controversial position.
However, unless Big_G is fluent in Welsh I don't think he would be terribly popular with the Plaid activists in that part of Wales.
Don't know. I have a very old colleague from Glasgow (long time as a colleague I mean) who got a job in Wales. He learnt the language to a high standard - always good fun to see the barman's face in a pub when he orders Felinfoel or whatever with a Glaswegian accent.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
The real problem is that the intelligence services and all the other agencies involved in the Prevent programmes simply do not have the resources they need to monitor effectively, let alone deradicalise, all those they know about.
Unless @HYUFD's Tory government is willing to put their money where their mouth is then this is all talk and little will be achieved. Effective counter-terrorism and deradicalisation take time and resources.
Whisper it quietly: there isn’t much evidence that deradicalisation works.
From what I can tell, the best solution to angry young men/women is to tie them down with a job, a mortgage, a relationship and young children and they tend to move on and cease to be a threat.
Doesn’t always work, but better than what the bullshit deradicalisation industry can achieve.
Prevention is better than a cure - but we didn't want to listen to anyone who said we should prevent mass immigration, so we are where we are
I don't have a problem with mass immigration. I have a real problem with multiculturalism and in particular the encouragement of the idea that it is ok to recreate the societies of the poorer parts of Pakistan or Somalia here. If people want to come and be British and we need additional people at the time, fine. But we need to make sure that those people are encouraged to become committed to British values, including sexual equality, gender equality and respect, freedom of speech and mutual tolerance. If they are not so willing we don't really want them here. What we do about those already here and indeed were born here like this particular murderer is tricky but it is a consequence of not putting in the effort to integrate in the first place.
Completely agree - but mass immigration of the type you mention has happened; a kind of academic experiment, doomed to failure in which we all are participating. Anyone with an ounce of common sense could have forseen it could never work, and time and time again we have been shown it doesn't work. But it has got to the stage where politicians have bought into the project so much that it can never be reversed.
As with Lee Rigby, 7/7, Ariana Grande concert, the death of Sir David looks like it can only be described as an act of civil war
How do we unwind this mess? I would suggest banning deobandism and similar groups in this country would be a good start. Their control of Mosques and fundamentalism is completely inconsistent with what I have described as British values. We need to use schools and Universities to free girls and women from bondage and absurd patriarchy. We need to stop foreign funding for mosques and madrassas, particularly from Saudi Arabia, coming into this country. We need to make it clear that this is the United Kingdom and we live differently here. Personally, I would also ban the Burqa for the same reasons.
The problem with talking about "British values" is that they are contested and change. Were we "un-British" before female suffrage or when women needed a male guarantor to get a mortgage?
I completely agree that they evolve over time. I remember the bigotry of my youth towards the gay community all too clearly and some pretty nasty racism too. But the answer here is straightforward: they adhere to British values as they are at the time that they come. If we are starting from here they adhere to the values we are currently committed to.
Quite an odd poll. Looks like movement straight from the Tories to the LDs.
Tory Remainers finally incensed by Brexit ‘shortages’? Suggests it won’t last IF the shortages ease
Shortages are just one thing; increased taxes and prices will also potentially begin to impact.
Disaffected Tory voters flocking to the LibDems is nothing new.
But this is just one poll - see how things look by the end of the year.
It looks as if pensioners are going to receive a near 4% rise in April and I assume other benefits will rise by the same amount
Also expect a substantial rise in the minimum wage in the budget, together with other measures to help the low paid
I would be very surprised if Rishi does not do the above
Where's the money coming from Big_G?
Exactly
And that is the unanswered question for both parties as they face the same demands
At least on the 27th we may have some idea
Easy - from future generations
I assume you mean IHT which I have argued incessantly with @HYUFD about as I believe I million exemption is too high
If not maybe you could expand your view
The only options are borrow more or create a wealth tax - IHT won’t generate much
As a matter of interest how do you see a wealth tax working
My suggestion: 1% pa on all individual assets over £1m. Legal obligation to self-declare and complete an annual return.
So, assets of £1m = £0 Wealth Tax (WT) pa Assets of £1.5m = £5k WT pac(£500k over threshold x 1%) Assets of £2m = £10k WT pa (£1m over threshold x 1%) Assets of £10m = £90k WT pa Assets of £101m = £1m WT pa etc.
Seems fair enough
I would probably go for 0.5%, but agree with the principle.
Will kill off farming. All the land will have to be sold to housing developers.
Sorry Tim, I appreciate you are a long way away but this comment is dumb on several levels:
First, pulling 1% per annum out of large estates will never bankrupt those who own them.
Secondly, do you realise how tight the planning rules are in the UK, how difficult it is to convert farmland to housing?
Wealth is not liquidity. You don't have to go with the stereotype of a little old widow living on the state pension in a mansion to see that lots of high net asset people would struggle to produce 1pc cash every year. That's why racing on death when everything gets liquidated anyway is so handy. You would have to have a roll over till death option for the asset rich, cash poor, so why not go to enhanced death duties anyway?
I agree completely not least because that describes me (not a a widow living on just a state pension in a mansion).
I am retired. I have no income other than my state pension, but I have assets that I live off of. Some cash for the next few years, DC pension that I am not taking yet, shares that I can sell but would only fund me for a few years and 2 houses (home and holiday) that I will sell when I need the money. Most of the value it tied up in the house I live in so I could only afford the tax if I sold my home.
I am not poor, but I could not pay 1% of my asset value in tax, but happy to owe the tax and pay when I can.
Also how would the tax be applied re the following 3 scenarios: DB pension value, DC pension value, savings for retirement?
If DB pensions are excluded how is that fair on the majority of people whose retirement assets are not these and had no opportunity to get a DB pension. If not how does someone on a DB pension get the funds to pay the tax?
If you have over £1m in assets as suggested in the proposal above, you could very easily get a loan against the property to cover 1% asset tax.
Personally I would set a wealth tax to start at £10m as many people will think similarly to yourself, and also see £1m as attainable even if they are far from it currently.
Yes you could, but not straight forward if you don't have an income (see below). It also doesn't cover the DB pension issue. Why should they be exempt and how do they pay if they aren't?
Re your proposal I agree.
Re the getting a loan I have a fun story and actually many would consider it revenge by the system on me for my exploiting it for the last few decades. I have used 0% credit cards and 0% balance transfer cards with 0% fees to play the system to get free money effectively which I then invest. The more you do the better the credit it also seems, so you can do more. As soon as the time period is up I pay them off or if a free transfer to another card is available I do that. Not a lot of use now interest rates are low, but was very profitable in the old days. It is surprising what credit you can get and how much you can build up on them.
Now I have no income to talk of and the selection criteria is almost entirely income based I am snookered. The conversation normally goes along the line of 'you have no income to pay your credit card', 'but I have plenty of money to do so', 'sorry sir we can't take that into account when issuing a card. How are you going to pay it', ' As I said I have cash.', 'Sorry sir that doesn't count', 'If I buy an annuity with it you will give me the card then', 'yes sir'. 'How is that any different? You do know that lots of people have drawdown pensions now and so don't take a regular income', '!'.
Equity release is very straightforward for the vast majority of people with over £1m of property assets and no income. That is different to getting an unsecured loan or credit card which of course may be harder.
On defined benefit pensions I see no reason they should be exempt. Take the most extreme example of someone with a £1m db pension and no other assets.
They would receive £30-40k income and have to pay £10k additional tax, which is perfectly do-able, if harsh for a very unlikely edge case. As and when their pension value, which depreciates each year as they get older, drops below £1m they stop paying.
£1m house and £1m DB pension. Neither of which are extreme. How do they pay then? £30 - £40k gross income, so income tax to pay then £20k wealth tax. Practically nothing left
Pensions and primary residences would have to be exempt from any wealth tax, but it also seriously reduces the scope of what could be raised from a wealth tax which is then purely targeted at owners of second properties and some commercial property holdings.
Just heard Lisa Nandy saying “this [abuse directed at MPs] is not felt equally” and then said that Dianne Abbott is the most abused MP.
How is that relevant to this? I don’t think Twitter abuse contributed to the radicalisation of the perpetrator.
If you are an MP I would imagine their focus is primarily about MP's security and safety. Seems perfectly natural that their take on this is focused on that rather than the broader issue of terrorism, Islamic or otherwise, when family members will this weekend have been asking them to quit or not do public meetings without security.
Do you think Dianne Abbott is in more danger than other MPs?
Without security then yes sure. I would imagine she has more security than others due to more threats so given that I don't know.
It’s sad that we are now likely to see MPs need daily police protection, making them less accessible to their constituents.
As several have noted over the past couple of days, meeting the people they represent is the primary role of a member of Parliament.
You can be sure they will love having personal bodyguards, they will show plenty enthusiasm for that. Pity they don't do much about decent policing for the public, as ever if it is for them they are always keen. Only a handful of people ever see them and most times they achieve zilch. Maybe if they tried running the country fairly and helping the public rather than themselves it would help.
It's not their job to run the country, it's their job to protect the public.
Oh sorry, did you mean politicians rather than the police?
I've visited Pakistan three times in my life, once when I was two and we attended a wedding, same when I was 8, the last time was back in 2005 when I was 26 to sell the ancestral family homes.
I was really scared about the last trip, I kept on joking to my mother that she was taking me to Pakistan so she force me into an arranged marriage over there.
I don't think I'll ever go back to Pakistan, there's no need, no family over there.
My worst experience going overseas and dealing with the authorities (outside of America) was a trip to Istanbul in 2015.
Got asked so many questions, at the end one of the border force guys admitted it was a farce, turns out a lot of people who go up to join ISIS go via Turkey.
My sarcasm so wanted to make an experience.
That's interesting. I did a few work trips to Bull about that same time and I never had any hassle at all. Bit of the old white privilege there, maybe, given we were (I guess) both on UK passports.
Yup.
It was funny in some respects, there’s me getting asked if I was a devout Muslim as I was sat next to my very white wife who was dressed as Western as you can get.
The thing most likely to end SNP hegemony in Scotland imo is a Sindy Referendum. If it's won, there'll probably be a realignment of politics since with independence achieved people in larger numbers will start to vote their broader political view rather than just on this issue. And if it's lost, the drive for independence will lose salience and priority. The SNP could fight against this, keep "banging on" about independence, put yet another vote on it front and centre in their platform, but this would probably shed votes and end their dominance. Or alternatively, if it is another "No", they could go with the grain, de-prioritize independence, talk less about it, drop the commitment to hold another vote in the near future, and if they do this they will still likely shed votes (just maybe different ones) and see an end to their dominance.
So, that's my advice to Boris Johnson. Want to cut the SNP down to size? Hold that Sindy vote.
Boris isn’t that smart. I think you are quite right and there is a mandate for it following the recent elections in Scotland. I suspect the SNP would crap themselves, to coin a phrase, if he agreed.
I think @HYUFD's point might be in the mix. Johnson likes the idea of having "vote Starmer get Sturgeon" in his toolbox for the next election.
I will be extremely surprised if Sturgeon is still in post at the next election. I would personally think an exit by mid-2023 is likely if only because her likely successor will start to worry he'll be seen as too old to replace her otherwise.
Hopefully Macbeth will get a doing , poetic justice for him and Lady Macbeth.
The reason Labour have been smashed by the SNP is not that they have attacked them insufficiently. Anyone who has seen the invective spouted by SLab members and activists at the SNP would find that ridiculous.
The reason is much simpler. A very large percentage of former Labour voters were in favour of independence.
If your party is implacably opposed to a policy that a large amount of your voters are in favour of you have only two options.
1) bring your voters round to your point of view with well constructed arguments. 2) call them Nazi's and watch as they abandon you and vote for party that favours their position instead.
Labour went with option 2.
It's that simple.
It really isn't. If that were the case there would be an overwhelming majority in Scotland for independence instead of a minority. What we are now seeing, bizarrely, is situations where people vote for the SNP but don't seem to favour independence. They vote for the SNP because they are the centre left party, just as Labour used to be.
And whatever activists say about the SNP, it is not what Labour says to the voters. I live in Dundee West. Labour leaflets at the last election said vote Labour to stop the Tories. The SNP have a 10k+ majority in the seat, the Tories are nowhere and Labour did not lay a glove on the SNP. They were massacred again and not by the Tories. Its madness.
Do you think leaflets saying vote Labour to stop the SNP would make any difference? It would just confirm what is pretty much fact that they're guddling in the same pool of voters as SCons and SLDs.
It also ignores that what happens in Dundee is motnwhat happens in the rest of Scotland.
In Glasgow Labour leaflets have been anti-SNP focused for over a decade (2005 election the first Labour flyer i got through the door was "Break up Britain, Scotland goes broke") and I haven't noticed a lack of anti-SNP messaging in Edinburgh either.
Also a variation on the 'if only the LDs had been positive about the coalition rather than attacked the Tories' theme. Tories can never quite believe that people who feel negatively about them are sincere rather than naive simps whipped into it by nasty lefties, Nats, luvvies etc.
It's also interesting that some of us still can't grasp that the left field in Scotland is composed of the SNP but also of the Greens (now more substantial than the LDs in some respects) and as Alistair points out an element of the Labour voting demographic.
Yes, I think the dismissal of the Greens as the SNP's little helpers and a protest vote rather than the first choice of a big chunk of Scottish voters has a way to unwind. Unpalatable as it is for those folk, they should consider the Greens are in government in Scotland while their parties have not been for at least 10 years, and with no prospect of it.
If you look at the academic work done over a longer period in 2015 and 2017, their wider dataset showed that the most abused MPs in the 2017 election were male Tories (which makes sense when you consider that political social media is rather dominated by the left):
I think online abuse is like violent crime: you often hear a lot more about it when perpetrated against women, but the victims are significantly more likely to be men. As no doubt are the perpetrators. Of course neither is acceptable, no matter who it's directed against.
I've been looking at this thread in disbelief. Is Hyufd actually proposing that we DNA test British subjects who visit family members abroad to check that they have not been replaced by jihadis?
I mean, even by his standards of stubbornness he's walking into an absolute minefield here.
@HYUFD posts this last 24 hours have been breath-taking and ill thought through
Mind you he has offered to pay my membership fee to join the labour party notwithstanding that I was helping the conservative party when he was in nappies and long before !!!!
Go on - ask him for your membership fee for PC. It's the closest fit to your beliefs, remember, and it's not as if Wales is at immediate risk of a referendum at present.
I'd love to see his reaction.
Plaid Cymru is a close fit for everyone's beliefs because they don't really have any fundamental core values except the belief that Wales gets a shit deal.
Which TBF is not really a controversial position.
However, unless Big_G is fluent in Welsh I don't think he would be terribly popular with the Plaid activists in that part of Wales.
Don't know. I have a very old colleague from Glasgow (long time as a colleague I mean) who got a job in Wales. He learnt the language to a high standard - always good fun to see the barman's face in a pub when he orders Felinfoel or whatever with a Glaswegian accent.
I speak Welsh fairly well, although not quite fluently, but when I speak English I have no accent (long story). So what I enjoyed doing to troll Welsh Nats when I lived there was going into a shop, ordering something in English, letting them slag off these fecking English incomers and then breaking in in Welsh with, 'Diolch, diddorol, alla chi'n wasanaeth i mi nawr?' ('Thank you, interesting, perhaps you could serve me now?')
I've been looking at this thread in disbelief. Is Hyufd actually proposing that we DNA test British subjects who visit family members abroad to check that they have not been replaced by jihadis?
I mean, even by his standards of stubbornness he's walking into an absolute minefield here.
@HYUFD posts this last 24 hours have been breath-taking and ill thought through
Mind you he has offered to pay my membership fee to join the labour party notwithstanding that I was helping the conservative party when he was in nappies and long before !!!!
Go on - ask him for your membership fee for PC. It's the closest fit to your beliefs, remember, and it's not as if Wales is at immediate risk of a referendum at present.
I'd love to see his reaction.
Plaid Cymru is a close fit for everyone's beliefs because they don't really have any fundamental core values except the belief that Wales gets a shit deal.
Which TBF is not really a controversial position.
However, unless Big_G is fluent in Welsh I don't think he would be terribly popular with the Plaid activists in that part of Wales.
No Plaid for me and Lib Dems are extinct and as for labour in Wales !!!
While my children and grandchildren speak Welsh to differing levels I do not other than Diolch yn fawr and Da iawn
The thing most likely to end SNP hegemony in Scotland imo is a Sindy Referendum. If it's won, there'll probably be a realignment of politics since with independence achieved people in larger numbers will start to vote their broader political view rather than just on this issue. And if it's lost, the drive for independence will lose salience and priority. The SNP could fight against this, keep "banging on" about independence, put yet another vote on it front and centre in their platform, but this would probably shed votes and end their dominance. Or alternatively, if it is another "No", they could go with the grain, de-prioritize independence, talk less about it, drop the commitment to hold another vote in the near future, and if they do this they will still likely shed votes (just maybe different ones) and see an end to their dominance.
So, that's my advice to Boris Johnson. Want to cut the SNP down to size? Hold that Sindy vote.
Boris isn’t that smart. I think you are quite right and there is a mandate for it following the recent elections in Scotland. I suspect the SNP would crap themselves, to coin a phrase, if he agreed.
I think @HYUFD's point might be in the mix. Johnson likes the idea of having "vote Starmer get Sturgeon" in his toolbox for the next election.
I don't think it's going to matter.
If the economy is in a reasonable state, Boris likely wins again regardless.
If the economy isn't in a reasonable state I don't think "vote Starmer get Sturgeon" is going to put people off.
Yep
The tories will have to run on a “cling to nurse for fear of worse” campaign.
I don’t think it’ll work though.
Also, the Nicola in Kier’s pocket only works if the polls show a hung parliament.
If the economy is up the shitter, lab have a decent chance of polling an outright majority.
An outright LAB majority would require 124 seat gains which is hardly likely.
I am not sure at all as to what you are trying to say here.
Are you implicating Starmer and the Labour Party and/or are you demanding that the suspect should be referred to as an immigrant despite the country of birth?
Whatever your point(s) they appear both irrelevant and tasteless.
Boilerplate lefty knee jerk
How would I be implicating Sir Keir or Labour by mentioning he happened to be a constituent of his?! What planet do you live on?
And I’m saying it’s a bit unnecessary to call the murderer Somalian when he was born in England, so the opposite of what you want me to be saying so you can have a dig
You really weren’t sure, but alas went on one
0/2 try harder
You and I don't agree on a lot. But you are correct here. This man was not a Somali jihadi as a certain other poster insists. He was British. And if he was a constituent of SKS then that doesn't make his MP in any way complicit.
Initial reports I saw said he was Somali. However he’s English, born and bred. I would guess initial reports knew who,he was, who,his father was and put two and two together and got 5.
His father was a Somali immigrant, his son was a 25 year old who obviously was radicalised by going back to Somalia as even his own father warned was a major problem in some parts of the Somali community that had settled in Britain.
We therefore still need tighter border controls to check who is coming in and out of the country and their reasons for doing so
We don't know whether the arrested individual has ever set foot in Somalia.
As posted earlier, the words of the father of the suspect show quite clearly this is a big problem in the Somali community
'CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.'
Just go away BigG to Labour, in fact never mind Labour go even further left because you are becoming even more leftwing than Starmer now.
You have no place in the Tory Party and we do not want your vote if all you do is support the liberal left
Post after post after post broadcasting the exact intolerance that is getting MPs murdered.
That you are the elected Chair of your local Conservative Association is an appalling indictment of the party.
Crap.
The vast majority of Tories agree with me, as does much of the country hence we have a Conservative government with an overall majority still leading in the polls.
If you throw your toys out the pram and shout 'racist' at merely discussing better enforcement of security to tackle jihadi extremism all to the good, it will keep you and your fellow left liberals further away from power than ever!
Please show me a poll showing that most of the country, or even most Tories, believe that people shouldn't be free to travel abroad.
Better enforcement of security is a good idea, and the intelligence services are good at what they do. That's not what you're talking about though.
There is a difference in travelling to Spain and Florida on holiday and travelling to Somalia to be radicalised.
The latter must be banned
You're also banning aid workers delivering the UK's aid programme, people travelling home for funerals of close family members etc. And most "Jihadis" are radicalised online in the comfort of their own home. It would just be a dumb thing to do. By all means treat travel to countries like that as a red flag for security services monitoring of course - but I'm sure they're doing that anyway.
Something that showed up during covid was how little we know about where people travel once they have left the UK. We rely on honest self reporting to know that.
So HYUFDs "ban" would be trivial to get round by flying to France or Spain on "holiday" and then onto whatever destination they like afterwards. The UK would end up knowing less about where they actually went than we do now.
The real problem is that the intelligence services and all the other agencies involved in the Prevent programmes simply do not have the resources they need to monitor effectively, let alone deradicalise, all those they know about.
Unless @HYUFD's Tory government is willing to put their money where their mouth is then this is all talk and little will be achieved. Effective counter-terrorism and deradicalisation take time and resources.
Whisper it quietly: there isn’t much evidence that deradicalisation works.
From what I can tell, the best solution to angry young men/women is to tie them down with a job, a mortgage, a relationship and young children and they tend to move on and cease to be a threat.
Doesn’t always work, but better than what the bullshit deradicalisation industry can achieve.
Prevention is better than a cure - but we didn't want to listen to anyone who said we should prevent mass immigration, so we are where we are
I don't have a problem with mass immigration. I have a real problem with multiculturalism and in particular the encouragement of the idea that it is ok to recreate the societies of the poorer parts of Pakistan or Somalia here. If people want to come and be British and we need additional people at the time, fine. But we need to make sure that those people are encouraged to become committed to British values, including sexual equality, gender equality and respect, freedom of speech and mutual tolerance. If they are not so willing we don't really want them here. What we do about those already here and indeed were born here like this particular murderer is tricky but it is a consequence of not putting in the effort to integrate in the first place.
Completely agree - but mass immigration of the type you mention has happened; a kind of academic experiment, doomed to failure in which we all are participating. Anyone with an ounce of common sense could have forseen it could never work, and time and time again we have been shown it doesn't work. But it has got to the stage where politicians have bought into the project so much that it can never be reversed.
As with Lee Rigby, 7/7, Ariana Grande concert, the death of Sir David looks like it can only be described as an act of civil war
The biggest thing we could do is ban religious schools of whatever faith. Traditionalists won't like it nor will those who say religious schools get better results, but get kids growing up together and they will blend together far more than seeing the divisions they do now in separated schools.
I very much agree. My 'all simply go to their good local state school' dream would have this as an (imo) not inconsiderable benefit, even forgetting about its main 'equal opportunities' aspect.
Posted to support your point rather to kick off another private schools dust up. Too soon for that. Have the next one penciled in for early December.
The reason Labour have been smashed by the SNP is not that they have attacked them insufficiently. Anyone who has seen the invective spouted by SLab members and activists at the SNP would find that ridiculous.
The reason is much simpler. A very large percentage of former Labour voters were in favour of independence.
If your party is implacably opposed to a policy that a large amount of your voters are in favour of you have only two options.
1) bring your voters round to your point of view with well constructed arguments. 2) call them Nazi's and watch as they abandon you and vote for party that favours their position instead.
Labour went with option 2.
It's that simple.
It really isn't. If that were the case there would be an overwhelming majority in Scotland for independence instead of a minority. What we are now seeing, bizarrely, is situations where people vote for the SNP but don't seem to favour independence. They vote for the SNP because they are the centre left party, just as Labour used to be.
And whatever activists say about the SNP, it is not what Labour says to the voters. I live in Dundee West. Labour leaflets at the last election said vote Labour to stop the Tories. The SNP have a 10k+ majority in the seat, the Tories are nowhere and Labour did not lay a glove on the SNP. They were massacred again and not by the Tories. Its madness.
Do you think leaflets saying vote Labour to stop the SNP would make any difference? It would just confirm what is pretty much fact that they're guddling in the same pool of voters as SCons and SLDs.
It also ignores that what happens in Dundee is motnwhat happens in the rest of Scotland.
In Glasgow Labour leaflets have been anti-SNP focused for over a decade (2005 election the first Labour flyer i got through the door was "Break up Britain, Scotland goes broke") and I haven't noticed a lack of anti-SNP messaging in Edinburgh either.
Also a variation on the 'if only the LDs had been positive about the coalition rather than attacked the Tories' theme. Tories can never quite believe that people who feel negatively about them are sincere rather than naive simps whipped into it by nasty lefties, Nats, luvvies etc.
It's also interesting that some of us still can't grasp that the left field in Scotland is composed of the SNP but also of the Greens (now more substantial than the LDs in some respects) and as Alistair points out an element of the Labour voting demographic.
Yes, I think the dismissal of the Greens as the SNP's little helpers and a protest vote rather than the first choice of a big chunk of Scottish voters has a way to unwind. Unpalatable as it is for those folk, they should consider the Greens are in government in Scotland while their parties have not been for at least 10 years, and with no prospect of it.
Particularly interesting that Electoral Compass, in that discussion we had the other week, had the SGs a lot closer to the centre (and to the SNP) (and IIRC the LDs a lot further to the authoritarian right?) than in E&W.
Ands there was that other website - I forget what it was but HYUFD kindly pointed it out - which showed an extraordinary and real difference at the border amongst rightwing voters - like the way the linguistic border has sharpened in recent centuries at the Tweed between Coldstream and Cornhill.
Quite an odd poll. Looks like movement straight from the Tories to the LDs.
Tory Remainers finally incensed by Brexit ‘shortages’? Suggests it won’t last IF the shortages ease
Shortages are just one thing; increased taxes and prices will also potentially begin to impact.
Disaffected Tory voters flocking to the LibDems is nothing new.
But this is just one poll - see how things look by the end of the year.
It looks as if pensioners are going to receive a near 4% rise in April and I assume other benefits will rise by the same amount
Also expect a substantial rise in the minimum wage in the budget, together with other measures to help the low paid
I would be very surprised if Rishi does not do the above
Where's the money coming from Big_G?
Exactly
And that is the unanswered question for both parties as they face the same demands
At least on the 27th we may have some idea
Easy - from future generations
I assume you mean IHT which I have argued incessantly with @HYUFD about as I believe I million exemption is too high
If not maybe you could expand your view
The only options are borrow more or create a wealth tax - IHT won’t generate much
As a matter of interest how do you see a wealth tax working
My suggestion: 1% pa on all individual assets over £1m. Legal obligation to self-declare and complete an annual return.
So, assets of £1m = £0 Wealth Tax (WT) pa Assets of £1.5m = £5k WT pac(£500k over threshold x 1%) Assets of £2m = £10k WT pa (£1m over threshold x 1%) Assets of £10m = £90k WT pa Assets of £101m = £1m WT pa etc.
Seems fair enough
I would probably go for 0.5%, but agree with the principle.
Will kill off farming. All the land will have to be sold to housing developers.
Sorry Tim, I appreciate you are a long way away but this comment is dumb on several levels:
First, pulling 1% per annum out of large estates will never bankrupt those who own them.
Secondly, do you realise how tight the planning rules are in the UK, how difficult it is to convert farmland to housing?
Wealth is not liquidity. You don't have to go with the stereotype of a little old widow living on the state pension in a mansion to see that lots of high net asset people would struggle to produce 1pc cash every year. That's why racing on death when everything gets liquidated anyway is so handy. You would have to have a roll over till death option for the asset rich, cash poor, so why not go to enhanced death duties anyway?
I agree completely not least because that describes me (not a a widow living on just a state pension in a mansion).
I am retired. I have no income other than my state pension, but I have assets that I live off of. Some cash for the next few years, DC pension that I am not taking yet, shares that I can sell but would only fund me for a few years and 2 houses (home and holiday) that I will sell when I need the money. Most of the value it tied up in the house I live in so I could only afford the tax if I sold my home.
I am not poor, but I could not pay 1% of my asset value in tax, but happy to owe the tax and pay when I can.
Also how would the tax be applied re the following 3 scenarios: DB pension value, DC pension value, savings for retirement?
If DB pensions are excluded how is that fair on the majority of people whose retirement assets are not these and had no opportunity to get a DB pension. If not how does someone on a DB pension get the funds to pay the tax?
If you have over £1m in assets as suggested in the proposal above, you could very easily get a loan against the property to cover 1% asset tax.
Personally I would set a wealth tax to start at £10m as many people will think similarly to yourself, and also see £1m as attainable even if they are far from it currently.
Yes you could, but not straight forward if you don't have an income (see below). It also doesn't cover the DB pension issue. Why should they be exempt and how do they pay if they aren't?
Re your proposal I agree.
Re the getting a loan I have a fun story and actually many would consider it revenge by the system on me for my exploiting it for the last few decades. I have used 0% credit cards and 0% balance transfer cards with 0% fees to play the system to get free money effectively which I then invest. The more you do the better the credit it also seems, so you can do more. As soon as the time period is up I pay them off or if a free transfer to another card is available I do that. Not a lot of use now interest rates are low, but was very profitable in the old days. It is surprising what credit you can get and how much you can build up on them.
Now I have no income to talk of and the selection criteria is almost entirely income based I am snookered. The conversation normally goes along the line of 'you have no income to pay your credit card', 'but I have plenty of money to do so', 'sorry sir we can't take that into account when issuing a card. How are you going to pay it', ' As I said I have cash.', 'Sorry sir that doesn't count', 'If I buy an annuity with it you will give me the card then', 'yes sir'. 'How is that any different? You do know that lots of people have drawdown pensions now and so don't take a regular income', '!'.
Equity release is very straightforward for the vast majority of people with over £1m of property assets and no income. That is different to getting an unsecured loan or credit card which of course may be harder.
On defined benefit pensions I see no reason they should be exempt. Take the most extreme example of someone with a £1m db pension and no other assets.
They would receive £30-40k income and have to pay £10k additional tax, which is perfectly do-able, if harsh for a very unlikely edge case. As and when their pension value, which depreciates each year as they get older, drops below £1m they stop paying.
£1m house and £1m DB pension. Neither of which are extreme. How do they pay then? £30 - £40k gross income, so income tax to pay then £20k wealth tax. Practically nothing left
Pensions and primary residences would have to be exempt from any wealth tax, but it also seriously reduces the scope of what could be raised from a wealth tax which is then purely targeted at owners of second properties and some commercial property holdings.
Pensions yes, primary residences nope, that part can be recovered on sale (and is easy to securitise for a pension fund investment).
I think this is Harbi Kullane, the father of the suspected killer, talking to the BBC File On Four in 2010 about the radicalisation of young Somali men
CUFFE: The Intelligence Service, of course, won’t reveal the source of their information about young British Somalis recruited to al-Shabaab. But rumours about youngsters being brainwashed and radicalised are causing growing concern among British Somalis – particularly the older generation, who fled chaos in Somalia and just want to see the return of stability and peace. Harbi Kullane tries to liaise between the community here and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, which has international backing, but is seen by many Somalis as a puppet of the west. He is critical of British Somalis for their reluctance to speak openly about al-Shabaab.
KULLANE: If you’re walking in the street of Camden, if you walk in the streets of Southall or if you go to Leicester or even Birmingham you hear that young children who were here studying the religion have disappeared and gone back to Somalia. CUFFE: So have you met parents here in Britain who say that their young people have disappeared? KULLANE: At the moment the difficulty that we’re having with our society and diaspora is no parents are willing to come forward and say they are missing my child. CUFFE: If parents are keeping so quiet about that, aren’t they contributing to the problem? KULLANE: Directly or indirectly, they’re contributing it, but if they come forward and they say, “Our son has been there,” they fear some sort of a repercussion from the law, often from the country that they are being hosted.
Sorry that I seem to have given HYUFD anti-Somali ammo with this.
My thought on posting it was how sad it was for his father (if it is indeed even him - I just know it's a British Somali with the same name) who seems to have taken such an active role in trying to prevent such terrible things from happening.
I hope everyone's takes betwixt Cox's murderer and this chap are consistent
Of course they are not. With Jo Cox's death, it was instantly politicised. Remember all those saying it showed the dangers of right-wing extremism and Farage. I certainly don't remember much concern over the suspect's mental health. Now it is all "let's not rush to conclusions". It is the usual crock of sh1t from those who use deaths as a political football when it suits their causes but get all "let's stand together" when it might rebound against them.
Comments
Your fix for the problem in your plan shows how completely insane and unthought through it is.
I guess it makes tactical sense because even if it later turns out that the attack was motivated because the MP was banging the Somali dude's wife you still get to advance your agenda.
I was once involved with the intelligence services in relation to an individual travelling to a very dodgy country indeed. The person was someone with a good job, a good salary etc - all the things you mention. So even that may not be the answer.
So what is the answer?
It wasn't - and now we have religious attacks leading to soldiers beheaded in the street and MPs killed in churches, not to mention 7/7, G-Mex, London Bridge (twice) and so on
Obviously DNA checks would match too as a last resort.
(Sept 2 in the Guardian after Merkel's famous "we can do this" at the end of August I believe.)
Merkel did not provide any transport, so they had to hand themselves over to traffickers, and those who did not die, like this poor child, had a chance of making it to Germany.
The rather more ethical UK policy at the time was to provide very heavy funding to help refugees stay in region.
Are people 'likely' to commit the sort of acts we saw in North Leigh last week likely to Twit about it a lot? Don't know, but suspect it's unlikely.
As with Lee Rigby, 7/7, Ariana Grande concert, the death of Sir David looks like it can only be described as an act of civil war
For the Brains Trust.
I've been catching up with what is happening in the fishing debate, and it is full of shouting French politicians, with some interesting commentary from fishing organisations.
Has anyone seen *any* coverage *anywhere* of how UK-based fisherman have been getting on fishing in EU waters since the start of the year?
To be fair, same for the SNP. Keep power, blame the Tory Government and kick independence down the road.
And his measures do nothing about the type of attack in Denmark which was perpetrated by a white European convert.
He is the antithesis of Sir David Amess
In Glasgow Labour leaflets have been anti-SNP focused for over a decade (2005 election the first Labour flyer i got through the door was "Break up Britain, Scotland goes broke") and I haven't noticed a lack of anti-SNP messaging in Edinburgh either.
They'll more likely give him a peerage for services to Race Relations
If Labour could somehow manage to gain office in Westminster, then the SNP would find it much more difficult to demonise the UK government. And being the party in power, enacting policies which might be very popular in Scotland, Labour would actually be relevant again to people's lives in Scotland.
The problem, however, is that it's very difficult for Labour to actually get back into power without Scotland. A majority government without Scottish seats is a tough challenge to say the least for Labour, and the prospect of a Labour - SNP arrangement - as we've seen - is not popular at all amongst the voters and constituencies Labour would need to win to even form a minority government.
Labour are then in a sort of 'chicken or the egg' situation. They need to be in power to regain any votes in Scotland, but they can't gain power to begin with unless they can win votes in Scotland. Unfortunately, then, this very much suggests that the Conservatives will remain in power for the foreseeable future.
The abuse she gets is terrible. But so is ignoring similar abuse that happens towards other MPs.
for instance, this study regarding Twitter shows her well down the list, of both male and female MPs:
https://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/47069/3/MPs abuse v6.pdf
Or this one, reported in the Times:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/male-tory-mps-receive-most-abuse-l8s0gktnn
I'd like to see the data Nandy is using.
I think a wide base helps it be sustainable, and potentially become a normal part of tax for everyone. And amongst the selection of international wealth taxes the Swiss one seems to raise the most significant sums. Lux's tax is on business I think.
Perhaps a slight balance to the large cut in the population here who pay income tax, as the threshold has been raised to minimum wage level (ish).
Obviously he's become better at masking his distinctive style since then.
I could get board with a lower income tax, even at higher incomes, but a higher "wealth tax". Encourages people to invest their money rather than hoard it.
However I understand that income is much easier to tax, so who knows.
As several have noted over the past couple of days, meeting the people they represent is the primary role of a member of Parliament.
Compare and contrast him to the wonderful kind person Sir David Amess was and how he integrated across the whole community
I assumed she must be a Guardian reading type to work there, so said "I bet things are nowhere near as bad as The Daily Mail etc make out are they?"
"100 times worse" she said
The UN phoned her up to warn the kids were at the highest risk possible of online radicalisation. One of her duties was to spy on what internet sites they were looking at. Anjem Choudhary's son is one of the Alumni
I mean, even by his standards of stubbornness he's walking into an absolute minefield here.
If the economy is in a reasonable state, Boris likely wins again regardless.
If the economy isn't in a reasonable state I don't think "vote Starmer get Sturgeon" is going to put people off.
But in at least one case the greatest party (SNP) has been excluded by a unionist alliance. Look at Midlothian.
Also look at Aberdeen = Tory + Labour (thinly disguised as Ind).
I was really scared about the last trip, I kept on joking to my mother that she was taking me to Pakistan so she force me into an arranged marriage over there.
I don't think I'll ever go back to Pakistan, there's no need, no family over there.
My worst experience going overseas and dealing with the authorities (outside of America) was a trip to Istanbul in 2015.
Got asked so many questions, at the end one of the border force guys admitted it was a farce, turns out a lot of people who go up to join ISIS go via Turkey.
My sarcasm so wanted to make an experience.
And what if X is going to, say, the USA or some other state to be radicalised?
I didn't know that there were machines for that sort of thing.
Labour really need to show that they can win without the SNP. I don't know the mechanism of that or what that victory looks like but relying on the SNP will mean a fairly easy Tory win.
Given I was 19 at the time this struck me as a rather silly question and I was tempted to answer 'yes' just to see what the response was. (I didn't because I'm not stupid.)
It wasn't until a lot later that it dawned on me by answering 'no' - as everyone did, of course - that meant if I(!) were later found to have taken part in the Holocaust (or terrorism was another one) then my visa would be invalid and I could just be removed from the country without all that boring extradition BS.
Which really is quite clever when you think about it.
The tories will have to run on a “cling to nurse for fear of worse” campaign.
I don’t think it’ll work though.
Also, the Nicola in Kier’s pocket only works if the polls show a hung parliament.
If the economy is up the shitter, lab have a decent chance of polling an outright majority.
Mind you he has offered to pay my membership fee to join the labour party notwithstanding that I was helping the conservative party when he was in nappies and long before !!!!
I suspect that he has enough other priorities, what with the aftermath of Covid and the tidying up of Brexit but we can live in hope.
Look at the example of the new Islamic Shopping Hall in Romford, taking the place of the largest department store in town. It has been bought for £12m by two Muslim Shopkeepers from East London whose current businesses are worth about ten grand. The address on Companies House is a crappy little flat in Bow. In their promotional video they mention the third floor of the shop is going to be a Mosque. As someone born in Romford, and lived in Havering the majority of my life this more than raised an eyebrow.
I mention it on here and at first was told it wasn't going to be a Mosque, then that it was a fantastic example of free enterprise! I will get called names, but I see it as a Trojan Horse
That is I think quoting a small Amnesty International study of female MPs at the 2017 election, which became established as the media narrative. Here, eg, is the Guardian, who didn't even report that the study was only females until a later correction.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/05/diane-abbott-more-abused-than-any-other-mps-during-election
If you look at the academic work done over a longer period in 2015 and 2017, their wider dataset showed that the most abused MPs in the 2017 election were male Tories (which makes sense when you consider that political social media is rather dominated by the left):
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324218979_Online_Abuse_of_UK_MPs_in_2015_and_2017_Perpetrators_Targets_and_Topics
The most abused MPs were the Party Leaders, as one would expect.
Three years later Amnesty were still making the same claims.
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-online-abuse-against-black-women-mps-chilling
Our owners took us over in the Championship in 2011 and opened the chequebook with Sven and what were quite big name signings. It took several false starts and some years to get the momentum for promotion then our sensational win in 2016, and FA Cup this year.
We now have major signings but what got us here was a team of free transfers and bargain basement. A team needs to be greater than the sum of its parts, not like the Man United who we dominated yesterday.
I'd love to see his reaction.
I think the best form of tax from an economic point of view is on sales, especially luxuries or harmful goods like tobacco and alcohol. It reduces economic growth less than taxes on income and capital gains.
Which TBF is not really a controversial position.
However, unless Big_G is fluent in Welsh I don't think he would be terribly popular with the Plaid activists in that part of Wales.
All that talent and he has not got a clue
Maybe United will pinch your manager !!!!
Only a handful of people ever see them and most times they achieve zilch. Maybe if they tried running the country fairly and helping the public rather than themselves it would help.
Oh sorry, did you mean politicians rather than the police?
It was funny in some respects, there’s me getting asked if I was a devout Muslim as I was sat next to my very white wife who was dressed as Western as you can get.
The purpose of the vote was to lance the boil within the Conservative Party.
The immediate downside is it released the poison into the whole country, but that may yet lead to clearing up the infection.
As Brexit crashes and burns it will come to be seen as an historic mistake that will never be spoken of in glowing terms again.
That will be the ultimate vindication of Cameron's position.
The looks on their faces were priceless...
While my children and grandchildren speak Welsh to differing levels I do not other than Diolch yn fawr and Da iawn
Posted to support your point rather to kick off another private schools dust up. Too soon for that. Have the next one penciled in for early December.
Ands there was that other website - I forget what it was but HYUFD kindly pointed it out - which showed an extraordinary and real difference at the border amongst rightwing voters - like the way the linguistic border has sharpened in recent centuries at the Tweed between Coldstream and Cornhill.
So certainties within England don't hold up here.
My thought on posting it was how sad it was for his father (if it is indeed even him - I just know it's a British Somali with the same name) who seems to have taken such an active role in trying to prevent such terrible things from happening.