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.
Certainly not without at least 30 from Scotland which seems vanishingly unlikely right now.
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.
Certainly not without at least 30 from Scotland which seems vanishingly unlikely right now.
I think before he was banned Justin (who whatever his other faults had an encyclopaedic knowledge of historical psephology) and I had a discussion about swing and we worked out a Tony Blair style 1997 swing would give Labour a majority of one.
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
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.
Well it was only 5 years ago that a Labour MP was murdered by a racist shouting "Britain First" as he killed her. So I don't think it's unreasonable for MPs getting abuse from these types to be scared, personally. The far right are the second biggest threat monitored by the security forces after Islamists, as I understand it. They probably have a larger constituency of soft support/fellow travellers than the Islamists do, too.
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 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 agree, not least because Sturgeon gets very positive responses in polling South of the border. Indeed potentially better than Starmer, so that line could well be an own goal by the Tories!
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.
Lab 42 Con 30 Ld 9
Would do it.
Polls change, Mike. They can change very quickly in an economic downturn.
We have no colonial connection. No debt to pay. And it’s not English-speaking
I can understand the odd doctor, but why on earth is there a large Somalian community? In the UK?
"Somalis have long formed close-knit communities in Britain. For more than a century, their faces have been familiar in London, Cardiff and Liverpool after the arrival of seamen and traders.
But the situation changed dramatically with the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees fleeing civil war in the 1990s. Since the ousting of Somalia's government in 1991, much of the country, situated on the eastern "Horn of Africa", has been in a state of violent anarchy, perpetuated by warlords heading rag-tag armies of young men.
Countries don't get more chaotic than Somalia, and many who fled are now living in Britain, having originally gained refuge in other European states.
In Britain, anecdotes have percolated into wider society that suggest many of the internal disputes that have bedevilled Somali society have travelled with the diaspora.
Unclear picture
Telling the story of Somalis in Britain is hard because there is a chronic lack of nationwide research. The 2001 census suggested there were 43,000 Somalis in the UK. But other experts suggest at least 95,000 and as many as 250,000."
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 mean that is extreme. You are literally taxing away someone's entire pension and telling them to live off their property and if they live for 30 years after retirement that is potentially more than 100% of their property value so can't be done. I'm sure equity release starts getting difficult once you approach even a modest proportion of your property value as there is then a high risk to the lender.
It has to be a higher thresholds or low rate, maybe increasing with value or just tax on death, which I think is much better as the former just reduces the take.
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
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).
That just becomes a tax on London and the South East, the party who proposes to tax primary residences will find itself out of power for 20+ years.
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
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
I thought we had largely debunked that one, in that it was not a big Mosque.
An early telltale for those who were watching was back in the 70s and 80s when the number of Imams funded and appointed by foreign bodies - particularly from Saudi.
I was aware of the trend (but tbf had not realised the import) because in the late 80s I had taken an interest in understanding Islam whilst at Uni, and attended seminars run by the Diocese of Bradford (Dr Philip Lewis, who iirc had just done or was doing his PhD), plus the trend got some attention in research around Christian Missiology. *
In secular Turkey iirc (open to correction) they used to keep a lid on it by Imams effectively being controlled by the state; now it seems to be used the other way to control liberal Imams.
We have no colonial connection. No debt to pay. And it’s not English-speaking
I can understand the odd doctor, but why on earth is there a large Somalian community? In the UK?
They all got residency in the Netherlands and then came here for a life on benefits under free movement. It's a failure that politicians have refused to discuss.
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
None of the above is obviously soft in the head. The idiot wants to beggar people who have saved all their life so they have a reasonable income when retired. What kind of moronic halfwits come up with rubbish like that, usually lazy greedy arses who squander anything they get / never work and resent people who are sensible and are able to look after themselves. Envy and greed are the worst attributes going.
We have no colonial connection. No debt to pay. And it’s not English-speaking
I can understand the odd doctor, but why on earth is there a large Somalian community? In the UK?
"Somalis have long formed close-knit communities in Britain. For more than a century, their faces have been familiar in London, Cardiff and Liverpool after the arrival of seamen and traders.
But the situation changed dramatically with the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees fleeing civil war in the 1990s. Since the ousting of Somalia's government in 1991, much of the country, situated on the eastern "Horn of Africa", has been in a state of violent anarchy, perpetuated by warlords heading rag-tag armies of young men.
Countries don't get more chaotic than Somalia, and many who fled are now living in Britain, having originally gained refuge in other European states.
In Britain, anecdotes have percolated into wider society that suggest many of the internal disputes that have bedevilled Somali society have travelled with the diaspora.
Unclear picture
Telling the story of Somalis in Britain is hard because there is a chronic lack of nationwide research. The 2001 census suggested there were 43,000 Somalis in the UK. But other experts suggest at least 95,000 and as many as 250,000."
Somalian migration to the UK. The chronicle of a catastrophe
‘Somali-born migrants have the lowest employment rate among all immigrants in the UK.[109] Figures published by the Office for National Statistics show high rates of economic inactivity and unemployment amongst Somali immigrants. In the three months to June 2008, 31.4 per cent of Somali men and 84.2 per cent of Somali women were economically inactive (the statistics include students, carers and the long-term sick, injured or disabled in this group).[110][111] Of those who were economically active, 41.4 per cent of the men and 39.1 per cent of the women were unemployed. Employment rates were 40.1 per cent for men and 9.6 per cent for women. The male employment rate in 2008 had, however, risen from 21.5 per cent in 1998.[110] Writing in 2013, Jill Rutter states that "over the last 10 years, the employment rate of the Somalia-born population has rarely been above 20 per cent of the 16–64-year-old population".[112]’
@Foxy I don't really care if we get relegated this season - it isn't really relevant in the long-term.
It also means we'd have a chance of besting Sunderland to becoming the most successful Championship team ever. We're currently tied with two victories.
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
Dych chi'n siarad Cymraeg dim ddrwg!
Sorry, did you fall asleep on your keyboard?
Wel, dw i'n gysgu iawn prynawn ma. Mae'r cwn cymaedog fi yn gyfarthio ar hyd y nos, yn felly cysgais i ddim nos diweddar.
(That's a long way of saying 'no, but I feel as if I could.')
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
The reason for the racist abuse she gets is that she's black.
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
None of the above is obviously soft in the head. The idiot wants to beggar people who have saved all their life so they have a reasonable income when retired. What kind of moronic halfwits come up with rubbish like that, usually lazy greedy arses who squander anything they get / never work and resent people who are sensible and are able to look after themselves. Envy and greed are the worst attributes going.
So is entitlement and arrogance.
Keep pulling the ladder up behind you and wonder why it all gets torn down.
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.
Surely the kind of people who ask "are you a devout Muslim" wouldn't have a clue what being devout actually entails. Otherwise, as you point out, they wouldn't have asked you that question.
Maybe you were secretly a jihadi undercover. Let HYUFD detain you in some foreign country and refuse you entry into his country until you prove you are white not a terrorist.
We have no colonial connection. No debt to pay. And it’s not English-speaking
I can understand the odd doctor, but why on earth is there a large Somalian community? In the UK?
Yes we do, there was a British Somali Protectorate at one stage
It was even called British Somaliland.
Aren't there quite a few communities descended from Lascar (probably a politically incorrect term nowadays) seaman around the UK which in part has Somali roots?
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
None of the above is obviously soft in the head. The idiot wants to beggar people who have saved all their life so they have a reasonable income when retired. What kind of moronic halfwits come up with rubbish like that, usually lazy greedy arses who squander anything they get / never work and resent people who are sensible and are able to look after themselves. Envy and greed are the worst attributes going.
For split second I thought I was on the end of your wrath there @malcolmg . I can relax now. That was a big scare.
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
None of the above is obviously soft in the head. The idiot wants to beggar people who have saved all their life so they have a reasonable income when retired. What kind of moronic halfwits come up with rubbish like that, usually lazy greedy arses who squander anything they get / never work and resent people who are sensible and are able to look after themselves. Envy and greed are the worst attributes going.
So is entitlement and arrogance.
Keep pulling the ladder up behind you and wonder why it all gets torn down.
Taxing people's homes doesn't really kick the ladder back down though, it's just the politics of envy. Targeting multiple property owners and forcing them to sell will increase the supply of property for owner occupiers and push prices down.
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).
Are primary residences exempt in Switzerland? As far I can see they are not:
Given that we exempt increases in value of main residences from any CGT at a cost to the exchequeer of £35bn a year, it is essential that they *not* be excluded imo.
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
I thought we had largely debunked that one, in that it was not a big Mosque.
An early telltale for those who were watching was back in the 70s and 80s when the number of Imams funded and appointed by foreign bodies - particularly from Saudi.
I was aware of the trend (but tbf had not realised the import) because in the late 80s I had taken an interest in understanding Islam whilst at Uni, and attended seminars run by the Diocese of Bradford (Dr Philip Lewis, who iirc had just done or was doing his PhD), plus the trend got some attention in research around Christian Missiology. *
In secular Turkey iirc (open to correction) they used to keep a lid on it by Imams effectively being controlled by the state; now it seems to be used the other way to control liberal Imams.
It wasn't debunked at all, people just pretended there wasn't a Mosque there. How many regular shopping centres have this kind of role available?
"Essential Responsibilities:
Lead the five daily prayers at the Aklu Plaza. Give the Khutbah and lead prayer for Jumuah. Deliver khutbah relevant to issues affecting Muslims especially the youths lessons learnt and how to benefit at the time and delivered in English Lead the Tarawih Prayer in Ramadan (TBC) Lead Eid Prayers and deliver Khutbah (TBC) Conduct matrimonial services in accordance with UK and Islamic law and offer pre-marital and marital counselling and conflict resolution. Offer Islamic family and youth counselling and guidance as needed. Provide Quran and Hadith studies, Seerah and Fiqh lessons, and other Islamic topics to increase knowledge and provide for spiritual growth of community members Participate in the community activities that further good interfaith and public relations for Islam and Muslims. Develop and implement educational program for new Muslims. Develop and implement educational and extracurricular programs for the youth. Work with management committee on fundraising programs for the community as needed. Provide consultation to the Committee on religious matters, community issues, and Mosque activities as requested Visit community events, schools and other institutes representing Mosque on a regular basis."
We have no colonial connection. No debt to pay. And it’s not English-speaking
I can understand the odd doctor, but why on earth is there a large Somalian community? In the UK?
Mo Farah says hi.
If you follow the HYUFD "logic" Sir Mo is definitely a jihadi. Spends time abroad in training camps, learns to run fast for long distances so he can chase MPs and other targets...
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
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
None of the above is obviously soft in the head. The idiot wants to beggar people who have saved all their life so they have a reasonable income when retired. What kind of moronic halfwits come up with rubbish like that, usually lazy greedy arses who squander anything they get / never work and resent people who are sensible and are able to look after themselves. Envy and greed are the worst attributes going.
For split second I thought I was on the end of your wrath there @malcolmg . I can relax now. That was a big scare.
Generally if one is being attacked by malcolm, it is a good sign. Or perhaps just a day ending in y.
If he could be bothered to read he might realise I am not wanting a policy of taxing wealth of £1-2m levels at all, merely I find it slightly offensive and privileged when such people complain that they could not cope with such a tax. Of course they can, and if such a tax came in, I would expect to be paying it at some point in the future too, so it is not about envy or self interest regardless.
Rather than a wealth tax how about removing the cap on council tax. It's approximately 1% of a property's value until you get to £500k.
So many reasons why your suggestion is not a good one:
- You realise CT is based on values as at values 1 April 1991, with >£320k currently being the top rate? - Is your £500k at today's prices or 1991's? - Wholesale revaluation required. - Why stop at £500k? - The burden of your proposal would fall on the middle classes for whom their residence is their main asset; it's the super-wealthy we need to target - the small proportion who one over half of the nation's wealth.
Rather than a wealth tax how about removing the cap on council tax. It's approximately 1% of a property's value until you get to £500k.
Zoopla et al manage to value homes pretty accurately. I struggle to understand why we can’t reband council tax fairly and easily in this day and age.
Because the people who lose out will not be happy and will blame the government.
Its the reason why a revaluation of domestic rates kept being cancelled in England and Wales and the reason why the Scottish revaluation of domestic rates in 1985 didn't help SCON in 1987.
Taxing people's homes doesn't really kick the ladder back down though, it's just the politics of envy. Targeting multiple property owners and forcing them to sell will increase the supply of property for owner occupiers and push prices down.
It will also reduce the supply of rented accommodation and push prices for that up. Since, in general, people who prefer rented accommodation are poorer and/or younger, that would be another measure punishing lower-income individuals. If you're on £25,000/year, the fact that there are some more homes available to buy for £240,000 doesn't compensate for fewer homes being available for rent at £1,000/month.
We debated this before and I know you dislike buy-to-let landlords, but in the absence of generally available council housing, it seems to me that they fill a legitimate market need.
1. That’s a small part of what we now call Somalia
2. It’s a protectorate not a colony. Big difference. So, as I originally said, ‘we have no colonial connection’
So what is your proposed solution to all these unwanted Somalis? Especially the ones who most outrageously are here because they are citizens?
There was one bloke on here that used to regularly demand the internment of all Muslims after this or that terrorist outrage. Dunno what happened to him.
If you can't afford a property tax on your main home it should just sit as a charge in favour of HMRC that is redeemed upon sale or death. If your heirs cannot afford it, maybe the charge can remain until they sell it.
Property is one of the scarcest resources on this island there's no reason why it should be exempt.
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.
Lab 42 Con 30 Ld 9
Would do it.
Polls change, Mike. They can change very quickly in an economic downturn.
To be fair, that's also assuming UNS. I think Labour if were to get a majority, there's a fair chance there would be more of a swing in their target seats than either safe Labour or safe Tory seats. Particularly when you consider that tactical voting would come into play.
Following the links from there to some of the Ethiopians, it seems that the prominent ones all had a horse name. This name was "father of (name of warhorse)"
"Father of" in Ethiopian is "Abba".
I wonder if any of them had a warhorse called Waterloo
Regarding the wealth tax challenge of the income poor person in a big house, raised by a number on here. The obvious, simple answer already exists and it's not equity release.
A charge placed by HMG on the house to be redeemed whenever the house is sold is sufficient. Akin to the charge placed on houses to cover social care by LA's in some circumstances.
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.
A "multiculturalist society", to me, is one where we celebrate diversity (of culture) rather than try to enforce some stifling homogenous notion of what being British is about. I don't why incidents of islamic terrorism should take us away from this aspiration. I can't see any other way to go.
For a party that is supposedly dead, to quite consistently poll above 35% is probably good long term for Labour, they are still very much the opposition.
I believe the best result Labour could hope to achieve in 2024 is a better distributed 40% than they saw in 2017, leading to the Tories being around 300 or fewer seats. If Labour got to 270 they'd be almost certainly forming the next Government
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.
Surely the kind of people who ask "are you a devout Muslim" wouldn't have a clue what being devout actually entails. Otherwise, as you point out, they wouldn't have asked you that question.
Maybe you were secretly a jihadi undercover. Let HYUFD detain you in some foreign country and refuse you entry into his country until you prove you are white not a terrorist.
Q: Do you pray five times a day?
A: I don't think I've prayed five times in the last decade.
Regarding the wealth tax challenge of the income poor person in a big house, raised by a number on here. The obvious, simple answer already exists and it's not equity release.
A charge placed by HMG on the house to be redeemed whenever the house is sold is sufficient. Akin to the charge placed on houses to cover social care by LA's in some circumstances.
I would say that houses in trust or in corporate shells should be required to pay the tax yearly rather than settle for the charge.
Rather than a wealth tax how about removing the cap on council tax. It's approximately 1% of a property's value until you get to £500k.
So many reasons why your suggestion is not a good one:
- You realise CT is based on values as at values 1 April 1991, with >£320k currently being the top rate? - Is your £500k at today's prices or 1991's? - Wholesale revaluation required. - Why stop at £500k? - The burden of your proposal would fall on the middle classes for whom their residence is their main asset; it's the super-wealthy we need to target - the small proportion who one over half of the nation's wealth.
That's basically the Proportional Property tax proposal, with a tax of a % (proposed 0.48%, plus abolition of Stamp Duty) of property value.
I'm baffled by this idea o revaluations being a problem; if California can do it, so can we.
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
None of the above is obviously soft in the head. The idiot wants to beggar people who have saved all their life so they have a reasonable income when retired. What kind of moronic halfwits come up with rubbish like that, usually lazy greedy arses who squander anything they get / never work and resent people who are sensible and are able to look after themselves. Envy and greed are the worst attributes going.
For split second I thought I was on the end of your wrath there @malcolmg . I can relax now. That was a big scare.
Generally if one is being attacked by malcolm, it is a good sign. Or perhaps just a day ending in y.
If he could be bothered to read he might realise I am not wanting a policy of taxing wealth of £1-2m levels at all, merely I find it slightly offensive and privileged when such people complain that they could not cope with such a tax. Of course they can, and if such a tax came in, I would expect to be paying it at some point in the future too, so it is not about envy or self interest regardless.
Yes I know. I was only having a bit of fun.
As you are probably aware (by comparing our past posts) we are probably not too far apart, it is just the mechanism we disagree over (although I think you posted earlier on applying it at a much higher value, which I would not object to, although it obviously diminishes the take). I have no objection to Inheritance Tax nor even CGT on residential properties (and everyone who thinks that is barking need not respond as you slaughtered me last time I said 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.
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.
I guess that's true. I think he ought to grant a Sindy vote but he probably won't.
Following the links from there to some of the Ethiopians, it seems that the prominent ones all had a horse name. This name was "father of (name of warhorse)"
"Father of" in Ethiopian is "Abba".
I wonder if any of them had a warhorse called Waterloo
And if they were standing by the head, would they finally be facing their Waterloo?
Regarding the wealth tax challenge of the income poor person in a big house, raised by a number on here. The obvious, simple answer already exists and it's not equity release.
A charge placed by HMG on the house to be redeemed whenever the house is sold is sufficient. Akin to the charge placed on houses to cover social care by LA's in some circumstances.
That is equity release, just with HMG as the lender! Whether it is private or public does not make much difference imo.
We have no colonial connection. No debt to pay. And it’s not English-speaking
I can understand the odd doctor, but why on earth is there a large Somalian community? In the UK?
Yes we do, there was a British Somali Protectorate at one stage
Yes, independent from 1960, when it United with Italian Somalia. The breakaway state of Somaliland regards itself as a successor state, and the feud with the Italian bit is part of the problem there. Generally it is the more peaceful bit.
1. That’s a small part of what we now call Somalia
2. It’s a protectorate not a colony. Big difference. So, as I originally said, ‘we have no colonial connection’
So what is your proposed solution to all these unwanted Somalis? Especially the ones who most outrageously are here because they are citizens?
I have no solution. There is none. I’m with isam. We stupidly allowed it to happen, it is largely a disaster, but now we have to make the best of it, as decent human beings on all sides. It won’t be easy. As we already see. Yet we can and must try
Meanwhile all further immigration from that part of the world should be - looking at you Ms Patel - well-nigh impossible
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 !!!!
I think you should take him up on it. Would be lovely to have you with us, and although I know it's difficult to break a lifelong allegiance, it does seem true that a party that can no longer house people like Ken Clarke is no longer the same.
Regarding the wealth tax challenge of the income poor person in a big house, raised by a number on here. The obvious, simple answer already exists and it's not equity release.
A charge placed by HMG on the house to be redeemed whenever the house is sold is sufficient. Akin to the charge placed on houses to cover social care by LA's in some circumstances.
Agree except can we move that to death to enable downsizing with the charge moving to the new property, providing the new property has sufficient value (eg 200% of the charge)
Taxing people's homes doesn't really kick the ladder back down though, it's just the politics of envy. Targeting multiple property owners and forcing them to sell will increase the supply of property for owner occupiers and push prices down.
It will also reduce the supply of rented accommodation and push prices for that up. Since, in general, people who prefer rented accommodation are poorer and/or younger, that would be another measure punishing lower-income individuals. If you're on £25,000/year, the fact that there are some more homes available to buy for £240,000 doesn't compensate for fewer homes being available for rent at £1,000/month.
We debated this before and I know you dislike buy-to-let landlords, but in the absence of generally available council housing, it seems to me that they fill a legitimate market need.
Increasing owner occupation reduces rental demand. Though I also think the state needs a huge housebuilding programme by councils. A £50bn housebuilding fund would do it, building houses for social rent across the whole nation with applications limited to people who have lived in the area on private rent for 5+ years.
Also, I don't just dislike private landlords, I think they are parasites leeching off the lifeblood of young people. Putting them all out of business would be priority one if I was dictator for a day.
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
I thought we had largely debunked that one, in that it was not a big Mosque.
An early telltale for those who were watching was back in the 70s and 80s when the number of Imams funded and appointed by foreign bodies - particularly from Saudi.
I was aware of the trend (but tbf had not realised the import) because in the late 80s I had taken an interest in understanding Islam whilst at Uni, and attended seminars run by the Diocese of Bradford (Dr Philip Lewis, who iirc had just done or was doing his PhD), plus the trend got some attention in research around Christian Missiology. *
In secular Turkey iirc (open to correction) they used to keep a lid on it by Imams effectively being controlled by the state; now it seems to be used the other way to control liberal Imams.
It wasn't debunked at all, people just pretended there wasn't a Mosque there. How many regular shopping centres have this kind of role available?
"Essential Responsibilities:
Lead the five daily prayers at the Aklu Plaza. Give the Khutbah and lead prayer for Jumuah. Deliver khutbah relevant to issues affecting Muslims especially the youths lessons learnt and how to benefit at the time and delivered in English Lead the Tarawih Prayer in Ramadan (TBC) Lead Eid Prayers and deliver Khutbah (TBC) Conduct matrimonial services in accordance with UK and Islamic law and offer pre-marital and marital counselling and conflict resolution. Offer Islamic family and youth counselling and guidance as needed. Provide Quran and Hadith studies, Seerah and Fiqh lessons, and other Islamic topics to increase knowledge and provide for spiritual growth of community members Participate in the community activities that further good interfaith and public relations for Islam and Muslims. Develop and implement educational program for new Muslims. Develop and implement educational and extracurricular programs for the youth. Work with management committee on fundraising programs for the community as needed. Provide consultation to the Committee on religious matters, community issues, and Mosque activities as requested Visit community events, schools and other institutes representing Mosque on a regular basis."
Taxing people's homes doesn't really kick the ladder back down though, it's just the politics of envy. Targeting multiple property owners and forcing them to sell will increase the supply of property for owner occupiers and push prices down.
It will also reduce the supply of rented accommodation and push prices for that up. Since, in general, people who prefer rented accommodation are poorer and/or younger, that would be another measure punishing lower-income individuals. If you're on £25,000/year, the fact that there are some more homes available to buy for £240,000 doesn't compensate for fewer homes being available for rent at £1,000/month.
We debated this before and I know you dislike buy-to-let landlords, but in the absence of generally available council housing, it seems to me that they fill a legitimate market need.
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
I thought we had largely debunked that one, in that it was not a big Mosque.
An early telltale for those who were watching was back in the 70s and 80s when the number of Imams funded and appointed by foreign bodies - particularly from Saudi.
I was aware of the trend (but tbf had not realised the import) because in the late 80s I had taken an interest in understanding Islam whilst at Uni, and attended seminars run by the Diocese of Bradford (Dr Philip Lewis, who iirc had just done or was doing his PhD), plus the trend got some attention in research around Christian Missiology. *
In secular Turkey iirc (open to correction) they used to keep a lid on it by Imams effectively being controlled by the state; now it seems to be used the other way to control liberal Imams.
It wasn't debunked at all, people just pretended there wasn't a Mosque there. How many regular shopping centres have this kind of role available?
"Essential Responsibilities:
Lead the five daily prayers at the Aklu Plaza. Give the Khutbah and lead prayer for Jumuah. Deliver khutbah relevant to issues affecting Muslims especially the youths lessons learnt and how to benefit at the time and delivered in English Lead the Tarawih Prayer in Ramadan (TBC) Lead Eid Prayers and deliver Khutbah (TBC) Conduct matrimonial services in accordance with UK and Islamic law and offer pre-marital and marital counselling and conflict resolution. Offer Islamic family and youth counselling and guidance as needed. Provide Quran and Hadith studies, Seerah and Fiqh lessons, and other Islamic topics to increase knowledge and provide for spiritual growth of community members Participate in the community activities that further good interfaith and public relations for Islam and Muslims. Develop and implement educational program for new Muslims. Develop and implement educational and extracurricular programs for the youth. Work with management committee on fundraising programs for the community as needed. Provide consultation to the Committee on religious matters, community issues, and Mosque activities as requested Visit community events, schools and other institutes representing Mosque on a regular basis."
Regarding the wealth tax challenge of the income poor person in a big house, raised by a number on here. The obvious, simple answer already exists and it's not equity release.
A charge placed by HMG on the house to be redeemed whenever the house is sold is sufficient. Akin to the charge placed on houses to cover social care by LA's in some circumstances.
That is equity release, just with HMG as the lender! Whether it is private or public does not make much difference imo.
Sort of but not quite. You aren't borrowing from Paul to pay Peter. It is much more streamlined and I would have no objection to that (I think?).
1. That’s a small part of what we now call Somalia
2. It’s a protectorate not a colony. Big difference. So, as I originally said, ‘we have no colonial connection’
So what is your proposed solution to all these unwanted Somalis? Especially the ones who most outrageously are here because they are citizens?
I have no solution. There is none. I’m with isam. We stupidly allowed it to happen, it is largely a disaster, but now we have to make the best of it, as decent human beings on all sides. It won’t be easy. As we already see. Yet we can and must try
Meanwhile all further immigration from that part of the world should be - looking at you Ms Patel - well-nigh impossible
Well I for one don't want to live in a fearful and sad little island that demonises everyone overseas.
1. That’s a small part of what we now call Somalia
2. It’s a protectorate not a colony. Big difference. So, as I originally said, ‘we have no colonial connection’
So what is your proposed solution to all these unwanted Somalis? Especially the ones who most outrageously are here because they are citizens?
I have no solution. There is none. I’m with isam. We stupidly allowed it to happen, it is largely a disaster, but now we have to make the best of it, as decent human beings on all sides. It won’t be easy. As we already see. Yet we can and must try
Meanwhile all further immigration from that part of the world should be - looking at you Ms Patel - well-nigh impossible
Well I for one don't want to live in a fearful and sad little island that demonises everyone overseas.
We have no colonial connection. No debt to pay. And it’s not English-speaking
I can understand the odd doctor, but why on earth is there a large Somalian community? In the UK?
"Somalis have long formed close-knit communities in Britain. For more than a century, their faces have been familiar in London, Cardiff and Liverpool after the arrival of seamen and traders.
But the situation changed dramatically with the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees fleeing civil war in the 1990s. Since the ousting of Somalia's government in 1991, much of the country, situated on the eastern "Horn of Africa", has been in a state of violent anarchy, perpetuated by warlords heading rag-tag armies of young men.
Countries don't get more chaotic than Somalia, and many who fled are now living in Britain, having originally gained refuge in other European states.
In Britain, anecdotes have percolated into wider society that suggest many of the internal disputes that have bedevilled Somali society have travelled with the diaspora.
Unclear picture
Telling the story of Somalis in Britain is hard because there is a chronic lack of nationwide research. The 2001 census suggested there were 43,000 Somalis in the UK. But other experts suggest at least 95,000 and as many as 250,000."
If you think back to the 1980s, there was a terrible civil war in Ethiopia and we had major charity appeals like Live Aid intended, perhaps naively, to help people on the ground, but nobody was suggesting the solution was large scale migration to Western countries.
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.
Surely the kind of people who ask "are you a devout Muslim" wouldn't have a clue what being devout actually entails. Otherwise, as you point out, they wouldn't have asked you that question.
Maybe you were secretly a jihadi undercover. Let HYUFD detain you in some foreign country and refuse you entry into his country until you prove you are white not a terrorist.
Q: Do you pray five times a day?
A: I don't think I've prayed five times in the last decade.
It's like the churches - people are often still Catholic or Anglican by identity if they don't attend services.
For Mosques the last research I saw (a long time ago) was that attendance rates were rather higher than mainline churches, but still well under half. No idea what the current number is.
It's a favourite trick of some campaigners (eg BHA) to pretend that people who don't attend don't count, and that they (BHA) somehow represent all the people they call agnostics.
But when you see a "are you a humanist" survey from the BHA it is so woolley that pretty much all vicars and bishops can qualify in good conscience.
Regarding the wealth tax challenge of the income poor person in a big house, raised by a number on here. The obvious, simple answer already exists and it's not equity release.
A charge placed by HMG on the house to be redeemed whenever the house is sold is sufficient. Akin to the charge placed on houses to cover social care by LA's in some circumstances.
That is equity release, just with HMG as the lender! Whether it is private or public does not make much difference imo.
Sort of but not quite. You aren't borrowing from Paul to pay Peter. It is much more streamlined and I would have no objection to that (I think?).
HMG to charge interest at same rates as they do to graduates and we have a deal. (For those who think everything is self interest, old enough to have gotten free tuition).
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
I don't think the problem of islamist intolerance and extremism supports an "Enoch was right" view about non-white immigration in general.
We have no colonial connection. No debt to pay. And it’s not English-speaking
I can understand the odd doctor, but why on earth is there a large Somalian community? In the UK?
"Somalis have long formed close-knit communities in Britain. For more than a century, their faces have been familiar in London, Cardiff and Liverpool after the arrival of seamen and traders.
But the situation changed dramatically with the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees fleeing civil war in the 1990s. Since the ousting of Somalia's government in 1991, much of the country, situated on the eastern "Horn of Africa", has been in a state of violent anarchy, perpetuated by warlords heading rag-tag armies of young men.
Countries don't get more chaotic than Somalia, and many who fled are now living in Britain, having originally gained refuge in other European states.
In Britain, anecdotes have percolated into wider society that suggest many of the internal disputes that have bedevilled Somali society have travelled with the diaspora.
Unclear picture
Telling the story of Somalis in Britain is hard because there is a chronic lack of nationwide research. The 2001 census suggested there were 43,000 Somalis in the UK. But other experts suggest at least 95,000 and as many as 250,000."
If you think back to the 1980s, there was a terrible civil war in Ethiopia and we had major charity appeals like Live Aid intended, perhaps naively, to help people on the ground, but nobody was suggesting the solution was large scale migration to Western countries.
Didn't the Live Aid organisers accidentally give loads of the money they raised to nasty local warlords?
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.
A "multiculturalist society", to me, is one where we celebrate diversity (of culture) rather than try to enforce some stifling homogenous notion of what being British is about. I don't why incidents of islamic terrorism should take us away from this aspiration. I can't see any other way to go.
So you would reject DavidL's view that we should treat sexual equality as a universal British value and instead celebrate a diversity of positions on such cultural questions?
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.
Which government are you referring to? I note that Covid-19 mortality rate in Scotland is more than twice that in England.
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
I thought we had largely debunked that one, in that it was not a big Mosque.
An early telltale for those who were watching was back in the 70s and 80s when the number of Imams funded and appointed by foreign bodies - particularly from Saudi.
I was aware of the trend (but tbf had not realised the import) because in the late 80s I had taken an interest in understanding Islam whilst at Uni, and attended seminars run by the Diocese of Bradford (Dr Philip Lewis, who iirc had just done or was doing his PhD), plus the trend got some attention in research around Christian Missiology. *
In secular Turkey iirc (open to correction) they used to keep a lid on it by Imams effectively being controlled by the state; now it seems to be used the other way to control liberal Imams.
It wasn't debunked at all, people just pretended there wasn't a Mosque there. How many regular shopping centres have this kind of role available?
"Essential Responsibilities:
Lead the five daily prayers at the Aklu Plaza. Give the Khutbah and lead prayer for Jumuah. Deliver khutbah relevant to issues affecting Muslims especially the youths lessons learnt and how to benefit at the time and delivered in English Lead the Tarawih Prayer in Ramadan (TBC) Lead Eid Prayers and deliver Khutbah (TBC) Conduct matrimonial services in accordance with UK and Islamic law and offer pre-marital and marital counselling and conflict resolution. Offer Islamic family and youth counselling and guidance as needed. Provide Quran and Hadith studies, Seerah and Fiqh lessons, and other Islamic topics to increase knowledge and provide for spiritual growth of community members Participate in the community activities that further good interfaith and public relations for Islam and Muslims. Develop and implement educational program for new Muslims. Develop and implement educational and extracurricular programs for the youth. Work with management committee on fundraising programs for the community as needed. Provide consultation to the Committee on religious matters, community issues, and Mosque activities as requested Visit community events, schools and other institutes representing Mosque on a regular basis."
Just a sign of the times I guess, I don't live near there anymore, and haven't stepped foot in Romford bar emergencies for years anyway, so no real issue to me directly.
But as someone who grew up there I guess it is sad to see the biggest shop in the town, where my Nan used to work and we'd always go to, turned into something that seems so alien.
And I am suspicious that the men who own these crummy little shops have cobbled together £12mil or so to buy Debenhams in Romford
But maybe it's just all about bringing the Romford community together via the medium of Asian Retail choices. They dont put anyone off by mentioning the Mosque on the website anyway, apart from the situations vacant
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.
A "multiculturalist society", to me, is one where we celebrate diversity (of culture) rather than try to enforce some stifling homogenous notion of what being British is about. I don't why incidents of islamic terrorism should take us away from this aspiration. I can't see any other way to go.
So you would reject DavidL's view that we should treat sexual equality as a universal British value and instead celebrate a diversity of positions on such cultural questions?
Don’t be so ‘stifling and homogenous’. Honour killings, cousin marriage, the burqa, sharia law, acid attacks, female genital mutilation and racist gang rape of underage white girls are all a vibrant part of British Islamic culture and should be celebrated as such, as Kinabalu rightly says
Taxing people's homes doesn't really kick the ladder back down though, it's just the politics of envy. Targeting multiple property owners and forcing them to sell will increase the supply of property for owner occupiers and push prices down.
It will also reduce the supply of rented accommodation and push prices for that up. Since, in general, people who prefer rented accommodation are poorer and/or younger, that would be another measure punishing lower-income individuals. If you're on £25,000/year, the fact that there are some more homes available to buy for £240,000 doesn't compensate for fewer homes being available for rent at £1,000/month.
We debated this before and I know you dislike buy-to-let landlords, but in the absence of generally available council housing, it seems to me that they fill a legitimate market need.
Increasing owner occupation reduces rental demand. Though I also think the state needs a huge housebuilding programme by councils. A £50bn housebuilding fund would do it, building houses for social rent across the whole nation with applications limited to people who have lived in the area on private rent for 5+ years.
Also, I don't just dislike private landlords, I think they are parasites leeching off the lifeblood of young people. Putting them all out of business would be priority one if I was dictator for a day.
Housing is very much a London and southern England problem.
And if people in the Waitrose belt object to the building of new housing for sale to first time buyers I suspect they'll be even more opposed to the building of new council estates.
Taxing people's homes doesn't really kick the ladder back down though, it's just the politics of envy. Targeting multiple property owners and forcing them to sell will increase the supply of property for owner occupiers and push prices down.
It will also reduce the supply of rented accommodation and push prices for that up. Since, in general, people who prefer rented accommodation are poorer and/or younger, that would be another measure punishing lower-income individuals. If you're on £25,000/year, the fact that there are some more homes available to buy for £240,000 doesn't compensate for fewer homes being available for rent at £1,000/month.
We debated this before and I know you dislike buy-to-let landlords, but in the absence of generally available council housing, it seems to me that they fill a legitimate market need.
Increasing owner occupation reduces rental demand. Though I also think the state needs a huge housebuilding programme by councils. A £50bn housebuilding fund would do it, building houses for social rent across the whole nation with applications limited to people who have lived in the area on private rent for 5+ years.
Also, I don't just dislike private landlords, I think they are parasites leeching off the lifeblood of young people. Putting them all out of business would be priority one if I was dictator for a day.
No. It doesn't.
We've done this before.
The rental sector is occupied far more densely than the OO sector. See the English Housing Survey, every year.
So you decant the same number of people into a much smaller number of houses. Which leaves you with far more intense demand in the rump rental sector.
And you are damaging the poorest sectors of society, who cannot get mortgages. Do you think that all tenants want to live in socially rented houses? And do you think it is acceptable to 'persuade' them to do so?
How are you going to get all those social houses past the Nimby lobby and through planning?
‘Threat to MPs from Islamic extremism is rising, says Conservative MP Former defence minister Tobias Ellwood has warned the withdrawal from Afghanistan has "energised terrorist groups across the world".
I never knew Ellwood lost his brother in the Bali bombings
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
I thought we had largely debunked that one, in that it was not a big Mosque.
An early telltale for those who were watching was back in the 70s and 80s when the number of Imams funded and appointed by foreign bodies - particularly from Saudi.
I was aware of the trend (but tbf had not realised the import) because in the late 80s I had taken an interest in understanding Islam whilst at Uni, and attended seminars run by the Diocese of Bradford (Dr Philip Lewis, who iirc had just done or was doing his PhD), plus the trend got some attention in research around Christian Missiology. *
In secular Turkey iirc (open to correction) they used to keep a lid on it by Imams effectively being controlled by the state; now it seems to be used the other way to control liberal Imams.
It wasn't debunked at all, people just pretended there wasn't a Mosque there. How many regular shopping centres have this kind of role available?
"Essential Responsibilities:
Lead the five daily prayers at the Aklu Plaza. Give the Khutbah and lead prayer for Jumuah. Deliver khutbah relevant to issues affecting Muslims especially the youths lessons learnt and how to benefit at the time and delivered in English Lead the Tarawih Prayer in Ramadan (TBC) Lead Eid Prayers and deliver Khutbah (TBC) Conduct matrimonial services in accordance with UK and Islamic law and offer pre-marital and marital counselling and conflict resolution. Offer Islamic family and youth counselling and guidance as needed. Provide Quran and Hadith studies, Seerah and Fiqh lessons, and other Islamic topics to increase knowledge and provide for spiritual growth of community members Participate in the community activities that further good interfaith and public relations for Islam and Muslims. Develop and implement educational program for new Muslims. Develop and implement educational and extracurricular programs for the youth. Work with management committee on fundraising programs for the community as needed. Provide consultation to the Committee on religious matters, community issues, and Mosque activities as requested Visit community events, schools and other institutes representing Mosque on a regular basis."
Just a sign of the times I guess, I don't live near there anymore, and haven't stepped foot in Romford bar emergencies for years anyway, so no real issue to me directly.
But as someone who grew up there I guess it is sad to see the biggest shop in the town, where my Nan used to work and we'd always go to, turned into something that seems so alien.
And I am suspicious that the men who own these crummy little shops have cobbled together £12mil or so to buy Debenhams in Romford
But maybe it's just all about bringing the Romford community together via the medium of Asian Retail choices. They dont put anyone off by mentioning the Mosque on the website anyway, apart from the situations vacant
On the site it lists various other businesses on the page you link.
This gave birth to iconic Mas Bazar in 2004, at chapman street. Hassan Miah, youngest son of the family had other ideas and started Kacha Bazar in 2007 to provide Fresh and quality fruits and vegetables. Both Mas Bazar and Kacha Bazar are now an established brands and household names.
But that was only the beginning. The idea was to take the family business into mainstream high street/shopping centres. This led to opening the superstore Food Bazar and Kacha Bazar International at Becton Retails park. Mas Bazar also expanded and has stores in Whitechapel, Birmingham and Bethnal Green.
1. That’s a small part of what we now call Somalia
2. It’s a protectorate not a colony. Big difference. So, as I originally said, ‘we have no colonial connection’
So what is your proposed solution to all these unwanted Somalis? Especially the ones who most outrageously are here because they are citizens?
I have no solution. There is none. I’m with isam. We stupidly allowed it to happen, it is largely a disaster, but now we have to make the best of it, as decent human beings on all sides. It won’t be easy. As we already see. Yet we can and must try
Meanwhile all further immigration from that part of the world should be - looking at you Ms Patel - well-nigh impossible
Well I for one don't want to live in a fearful and sad little island that demonises everyone overseas.
Regarding the wealth tax challenge of the income poor person in a big house, raised by a number on here. The obvious, simple answer already exists and it's not equity release.
A charge placed by HMG on the house to be redeemed whenever the house is sold is sufficient. Akin to the charge placed on houses to cover social care by LA's in some circumstances.
That is equity release, just with HMG as the lender! Whether it is private or public does not make much difference imo.
It will just discourage people from moving, so the charge won't crystallise until death, so you are just elaborately reinventing iht. The Tories can't do it cos it would be hosted even more than iht. I think the appeal to the left is partly that you can see it hurting the fatcats while they are still alive.
Taxing people's homes doesn't really kick the ladder back down though, it's just the politics of envy. Targeting multiple property owners and forcing them to sell will increase the supply of property for owner occupiers and push prices down.
It will also reduce the supply of rented accommodation and push prices for that up. Since, in general, people who prefer rented accommodation are poorer and/or younger, that would be another measure punishing lower-income individuals. If you're on £25,000/year, the fact that there are some more homes available to buy for £240,000 doesn't compensate for fewer homes being available for rent at £1,000/month.
We debated this before and I know you dislike buy-to-let landlords, but in the absence of generally available council housing, it seems to me that they fill a legitimate market need.
Increasing owner occupation reduces rental demand. Though I also think the state needs a huge housebuilding programme by councils. A £50bn housebuilding fund would do it, building houses for social rent across the whole nation with applications limited to people who have lived in the area on private rent for 5+ years.
Also, I don't just dislike private landlords, I think they are parasites leeching off the lifeblood of young people. Putting them all out of business would be priority one if I was dictator for a day.
No. It doesn't.
We've done this before.
The rental sector is occupied far more densely than the OO sector. See the English Housing Survey, every year.
So you decant the same number of people into a much smaller number of houses. Which leaves you with far more intense demand in the rump rental sector.
And you are damaging the poorest sectors of society, who cannot get mortgages. Do you think that all tenants want to live in socially rented houses? And do you think it is acceptable to 'persuade' them to do so?
How are you going to get all those social houses past the Nimby lobby and through planning?
Bugger Much *larger* number of houses.
You also lose all the free housing for homeless people currently provided by force by LLs to local Councils, by the mechanism of Councils forcing people to stay in the house for which they aren't paying rent for 6 to 12 months, which saves Council resources but inflates the debts of those individuals and leaves them with unpaid CCJs.
Regarding the wealth tax challenge of the income poor person in a big house, raised by a number on here. The obvious, simple answer already exists and it's not equity release.
A charge placed by HMG on the house to be redeemed whenever the house is sold is sufficient. Akin to the charge placed on houses to cover social care by LA's in some circumstances.
That is equity release, just with HMG as the lender! Whether it is private or public does not make much difference imo.
It will just discourage people from moving, so the charge won't crystallise until death, so you are just elaborately reinventing iht. The Tories can't do it cos it would be hosted even more than iht. I think the appeal to the left is partly that you can see it hurting the fatcats while they are still alive.
The idea that the elite are full of people with £10m+ assets who cant raise 1% of their value is a weird invention too!
I guess my question is: why do LABOUR think they lost Scotland?
(I have my opinions on this based on how Llafur run Wales, and @Alistair has given us his opinion).
But, I am genuinely interested in how a Labour loyalist (albeit one perhaps without first-hand knowledge of Scottish Labour) explains this. What is your understanding of why it happened?
As you say, I don't know enough about it to give a qualified opinion. But my unqualified opinion is that the SNP have successfully portrayed themselves as mildly centre-left and distinctively and solely interested in Scotland. That leaves Labour mainly the share of voters who want more left-wing policies and reject the idea that focusing on Scotland is crucial.
In most of Britain, focusing on the local interest is not that crucial. Nobody ever said to me as a Notts MP, "But what does Labour want for Nottinghamshire in particular?", because people saw politics as primarily a national issue, albeit seasoned with local issues like the Tesco debate that I mentioned, and almost nobody primarily identified themselves with the county. Moreover, left-wingers just don't think like that - they see politics as about equality or public services, and "what matters is focusing on Scotland" would seem odd.
So I hypothesise that the way forward for Scottish Labour may be to become formally independent on the national party and focus relentlesly on Scottish issues, without arguing that this necessarily means independence. The fact that voters are pro-SNP but not usually pro-Indy suggests a possible space in the market for a leftish party that is distinctively Scottish but not preoccupied with independence. That, as I understand it, is roughly where Welsh Labour have pitched their tent - I get that you don't like them, but they seem quite durably popular?
Comments welcome.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
Yes, there's no denying Llafur have been electorally very successful.
One big difference between Llafur and SLAB is that the leaders of Llafur (Rhodri Morgan, Carwyn Jones, Mark Drakeford) have been very savvy & skilful.
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.
A "multiculturalist society", to me, is one where we celebrate diversity (of culture) rather than try to enforce some stifling homogenous notion of what being British is about. I don't why incidents of islamic terrorism should take us away from this aspiration. I can't see any other way to go.
So you would reject DavidL's view that we should treat sexual equality as a universal British value and instead celebrate a diversity of positions on such cultural questions?
I get what he means but I find it slightly bullish to call sexual equality a British value. We have it under the law, which is great, but in our society it's sometimes honoured more in the breach. Whatever, it's certainly something we should keep working towards imo, muslim and non-muslim, ie a belief that women are worth less than men should be rejected in this country, regardless of who it is in this country who holds that belief.
1. That’s a small part of what we now call Somalia
2. It’s a protectorate not a colony. Big difference. So, as I originally said, ‘we have no colonial connection’
So what is your proposed solution to all these unwanted Somalis? Especially the ones who most outrageously are here because they are citizens?
I have no solution. There is none. I’m with isam. We stupidly allowed it to happen, it is largely a disaster, but now we have to make the best of it, as decent human beings on all sides. It won’t be easy. As we already see. Yet we can and must try
Meanwhile all further immigration from that part of the world should be - looking at you Ms Patel - well-nigh impossible
I thought Brexit was precisely about letting people from farther parts of the world come here rather than, say, the French.
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.
A "multiculturalist society", to me, is one where we celebrate diversity (of culture) rather than try to enforce some stifling homogenous notion of what being British is about. I don't why incidents of islamic terrorism should take us away from this aspiration. I can't see any other way to go.
So you would reject DavidL's view that we should treat sexual equality as a universal British value and instead celebrate a diversity of positions on such cultural questions?
Don’t be so ‘stifling and homogenous’. Honour killings, cousin marriage, the burqa, sharia law, acid attacks, female genital mutilation and racist gang rape of underage white girls are all a vibrant part of British Islamic culture and should be celebrated as such, as Kinabalu rightly says
If you want to go on a rant about how awful Muslims are, how they're defiling our green & pleasant land, just do it. There's no need to misrepresent a post of mine as a platform.
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.
Ahem .... is this wise given what has been happening to Rosie Duffield?
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
None of the above is obviously soft in the head. The idiot wants to beggar people who have saved all their life so they have a reasonable income when retired. What kind of moronic halfwits come up with rubbish like that, usually lazy greedy arses who squander anything they get / never work and resent people who are sensible and are able to look after themselves. Envy and greed are the worst attributes going.
So is entitlement and arrogance.
Keep pulling the ladder up behind you and wonder why it all gets torn down.
Spend 50 years working to earn your own money rather than expecting other people to keep you. @Gallowgate
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
I thought we had largely debunked that one, in that it was not a big Mosque.
An early telltale for those who were watching was back in the 70s and 80s when the number of Imams funded and appointed by foreign bodies - particularly from Saudi.
I was aware of the trend (but tbf had not realised the import) because in the late 80s I had taken an interest in understanding Islam whilst at Uni, and attended seminars run by the Diocese of Bradford (Dr Philip Lewis, who iirc had just done or was doing his PhD), plus the trend got some attention in research around Christian Missiology. *
In secular Turkey iirc (open to correction) they used to keep a lid on it by Imams effectively being controlled by the state; now it seems to be used the other way to control liberal Imams.
It wasn't debunked at all, people just pretended there wasn't a Mosque there. How many regular shopping centres have this kind of role available?
"Essential Responsibilities:
Lead the five daily prayers at the Aklu Plaza. Give the Khutbah and lead prayer for Jumuah. Deliver khutbah relevant to issues affecting Muslims especially the youths lessons learnt and how to benefit at the time and delivered in English Lead the Tarawih Prayer in Ramadan (TBC) Lead Eid Prayers and deliver Khutbah (TBC) Conduct matrimonial services in accordance with UK and Islamic law and offer pre-marital and marital counselling and conflict resolution. Offer Islamic family and youth counselling and guidance as needed. Provide Quran and Hadith studies, Seerah and Fiqh lessons, and other Islamic topics to increase knowledge and provide for spiritual growth of community members Participate in the community activities that further good interfaith and public relations for Islam and Muslims. Develop and implement educational program for new Muslims. Develop and implement educational and extracurricular programs for the youth. Work with management committee on fundraising programs for the community as needed. Provide consultation to the Committee on religious matters, community issues, and Mosque activities as requested Visit community events, schools and other institutes representing Mosque on a regular basis."
Comments
We have no colonial connection. No debt to pay. And it’s not English-speaking
I can understand the odd doctor, but why on earth is there a large Somalian community? In the UK?
That's how formidable a challenge Starmer faces.
The Labour Councillors were expelled as the party had a "No coalition deal with the Tories" policy.
Con 30
Ld 9
Would do it.
Polls change, Mike. They can change very quickly in an economic downturn.
But the situation changed dramatically with the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees fleeing civil war in the 1990s. Since the ousting of Somalia's government in 1991, much of the country, situated on the eastern "Horn of Africa", has been in a state of violent anarchy, perpetuated by warlords heading rag-tag armies of young men.
Countries don't get more chaotic than Somalia, and many who fled are now living in Britain, having originally gained refuge in other European states.
In Britain, anecdotes have percolated into wider society that suggest many of the internal disputes that have bedevilled Somali society have travelled with the diaspora.
Unclear picture
Telling the story of Somalis in Britain is hard because there is a chronic lack of nationwide research. The 2001 census suggested there were 43,000 Somalis in the UK. But other experts suggest at least 95,000 and as many as 250,000."
From 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5029390.stm
It has to be a higher thresholds or low rate, maybe increasing with value or just tax on death, which I think is much better as the former just reduces the take.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/labour-rules-suspended-aberdeen-councillors-can-stand-for-re-selection-3379750
An early telltale for those who were watching was back in the 70s and 80s when the number of Imams funded and appointed by foreign bodies - particularly from Saudi.
I was aware of the trend (but tbf had not realised the import) because in the late 80s I had taken an interest in understanding Islam whilst at Uni, and attended seminars run by the Diocese of Bradford (Dr Philip Lewis, who iirc had just done or was doing his PhD), plus the trend got some attention in research around Christian Missiology. *
In secular Turkey iirc (open to correction) they used to keep a lid on it by Imams effectively being controlled by the state; now it seems to be used the other way to control liberal Imams.
Example of review of a recent Philip Lewis book:
https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/14-september/books-arts/book-reviews/british-muslims-new-directions-in-islamic-thought-creativity-and-activism-philip-lewis-and-sadek-hamid
‘Somali-born migrants have the lowest employment rate among all immigrants in the UK.[109] Figures published by the Office for National Statistics show high rates of economic inactivity and unemployment amongst Somali immigrants. In the three months to June 2008, 31.4 per cent of Somali men and 84.2 per cent of Somali women were economically inactive (the statistics include students, carers and the long-term sick, injured or disabled in this group).[110][111] Of those who were economically active, 41.4 per cent of the men and 39.1 per cent of the women were unemployed. Employment rates were 40.1 per cent for men and 9.6 per cent for women. The male employment rate in 2008 had, however, risen from 21.5 per cent in 1998.[110] Writing in 2013, Jill Rutter states that "over the last 10 years, the employment rate of the Somalia-born population has rarely been above 20 per cent of the 16–64-year-old population".[112]’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalis_in_the_United_Kingdom
It also means we'd have a chance of besting Sunderland to becoming the most successful Championship team ever. We're currently tied with two victories.
(That's a long way of saying 'no, but I feel as if I could.')
Nearly all of it was Italian or Ethiopian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Somaliland
Keep pulling the ladder up behind you and wonder why it all gets torn down.
Maybe you were secretly a jihadi undercover. Let HYUFD detain you in some foreign country and refuse you entry into his country until you prove you are
whitenot a terrorist.Aren't there quite a few communities descended from Lascar (probably a politically incorrect term nowadays) seaman around the UK which in part has Somali roots?
https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/switzerland/individual/other-taxes
Given that we exempt increases in value of main residences from any CGT at a cost to the exchequeer of £35bn a year, it is essential that they *not* be excluded imo.
"Essential Responsibilities:
Lead the five daily prayers at the Aklu Plaza.
Give the Khutbah and lead prayer for Jumuah. Deliver khutbah relevant to issues affecting Muslims especially the youths
lessons learnt and how to benefit at the time and delivered in English
Lead the Tarawih Prayer in Ramadan (TBC)
Lead Eid Prayers and deliver Khutbah (TBC)
Conduct matrimonial services in accordance with UK and Islamic law and offer pre-marital and marital
counselling and conflict resolution.
Offer Islamic family and youth counselling and guidance as needed.
Provide Quran and Hadith studies, Seerah and Fiqh lessons, and other Islamic topics to increase
knowledge and provide for spiritual growth of community members
Participate in the community activities that further good interfaith and public relations for Islam and Muslims.
Develop and implement educational program for new Muslims.
Develop and implement educational and extracurricular programs for the youth.
Work with management committee on fundraising programs for the community as needed.
Provide consultation to the Committee on religious matters, community issues, and Mosque activities as requested
Visit community events, schools and other institutes representing Mosque on a regular basis."
https://akluplaza.co.uk/jobs/imam/
2. It’s a protectorate not a colony. Big difference. So, as I originally said, ‘we have no colonial connection’
If he could be bothered to read he might realise I am not wanting a policy of taxing wealth of £1-2m levels at all, merely I find it slightly offensive and privileged when such people complain that they could not cope with such a tax. Of course they can, and if such a tax came in, I would expect to be paying it at some point in the future too, so it is not about envy or self interest regardless.
- You realise CT is based on values as at values 1 April 1991, with >£320k currently being the top rate?
- Is your £500k at today's prices or 1991's?
- Wholesale revaluation required.
- Why stop at £500k?
- The burden of your proposal would fall on the middle classes for whom their residence is their main asset; it's the super-wealthy we need to target - the small proportion who one over half of the nation's wealth.
Its the reason why a revaluation of domestic rates kept being cancelled in England and Wales and the reason why the Scottish revaluation of domestic rates in 1985 didn't help SCON in 1987.
We debated this before and I know you dislike buy-to-let landlords, but in the absence of generally available council housing, it seems to me that they fill a legitimate market need.
Property is one of the scarcest resources on this island there's no reason why it should be exempt.
"Father of" in Ethiopian is "Abba".
I wonder if any of them had a warhorse called Waterloo
A charge placed by HMG on the house to be redeemed whenever the house is sold is sufficient. Akin to the charge placed on houses to cover social care by LA's in some circumstances.
I believe the best result Labour could hope to achieve in 2024 is a better distributed 40% than they saw in 2017, leading to the Tories being around 300 or fewer seats. If Labour got to 270 they'd be almost certainly forming the next Government
A: I don't think I've prayed five times in the last decade.
I'm baffled by this idea o revaluations being a problem; if California can do it, so can we.
As you are probably aware (by comparing our past posts) we are probably not too far apart, it is just the mechanism we disagree over (although I think you posted earlier on applying it at a much higher value, which I would not object to, although it obviously diminishes the take). I have no objection to Inheritance Tax nor even CGT on residential properties (and everyone who thinks that is barking need not respond as you slaughtered me last time I said it).
Anyone from Lib Dem land want to report on the current situation now, have we seen any swing back to the Tories
Meanwhile all further immigration from that part of the world should be - looking at you Ms Patel - well-nigh impossible
https://youtu.be/sdWzLDlMp_k
Also, I don't just dislike private landlords, I think they are parasites leeching off the lifeblood of young people. Putting them all out of business would be priority one if I was dictator for a day.
So where's the Mosque? And if there is one what is the issue?
You will of course be able to comment at Planning stage.
For Mosques the last research I saw (a long time ago) was that attendance rates were rather higher than mainline churches, but still well under half. No idea what the current number is.
It's a favourite trick of some campaigners (eg BHA) to pretend that people who don't attend don't count, and that they (BHA) somehow represent all the people they call agnostics.
But when you see a "are you a humanist" survey from the BHA it is so woolley that pretty much all vicars and bishops can qualify in good conscience.
London is back!
https://twitter.com/carne_sean/status/1449639652881846273?s=20
https://twitter.com/danc00ks0n/status/1449349381208133638?s=20
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnEhLL1mw5E
Just a sign of the times I guess, I don't live near there anymore, and haven't stepped foot in Romford bar emergencies for years anyway, so no real issue to me directly.
But as someone who grew up there I guess it is sad to see the biggest shop in the town, where my Nan used to work and we'd always go to, turned into something that seems so alien.
And I am suspicious that the men who own these crummy little shops have cobbled together £12mil or so to buy Debenhams in Romford
https://www.allinlondon.co.uk/directory/fishmongers/70380-fish-bazar
https://www.allinlondon.co.uk/directory/grocers/158204-kacha-bazar
But maybe it's just all about bringing the Romford community together via the medium of Asian Retail choices. They dont put anyone off by mentioning the Mosque on the website anyway, apart from the situations vacant
https://akluplaza.co.uk/about-us/
And if people in the Waitrose belt object to the building of new housing for sale to first time buyers I suspect they'll be even more opposed to the building of new council estates.
We've done this before.
The rental sector is occupied far more densely than the OO sector. See the English Housing Survey, every year.
So you decant the same number of people into a much smaller number of houses. Which leaves you with far more intense demand in the rump rental sector.
And you are damaging the poorest sectors of society, who cannot get mortgages. Do you think that all tenants want to live in socially rented houses? And do you think it is acceptable to 'persuade' them to do so?
How are you going to get all those social houses past the Nimby lobby and through planning?
‘Threat to MPs from Islamic extremism is rising, says Conservative MP
Former defence minister Tobias Ellwood has warned the withdrawal from Afghanistan has "energised terrorist groups across the world".
I never knew Ellwood lost his brother in the Bali bombings
This gave birth to iconic Mas Bazar in 2004, at chapman street. Hassan Miah, youngest son of the family had other ideas and started Kacha Bazar in 2007 to provide Fresh and quality fruits and vegetables. Both Mas Bazar and Kacha Bazar are now an established brands and household names.
But that was only the beginning. The idea was to take the family business into mainstream high street/shopping centres. This led to opening the superstore Food Bazar and Kacha Bazar International at Becton Retails park. Mas Bazar also expanded and has stores in Whitechapel, Birmingham and Bethnal Green.
NEW THREAD
You also lose all the free housing for homeless people currently provided by force by LLs to local Councils, by the mechanism of Councils forcing people to stay in the house for which they aren't paying rent for 6 to 12 months, which saves Council resources but inflates the debts of those individuals and leaves them with unpaid CCJs.
Yes, there's no denying Llafur have been electorally very successful.
One big difference between Llafur and SLAB is that the leaders of Llafur (Rhodri Morgan, Carwyn Jones, Mark Drakeford) have been very savvy & skilful.
@Gallowgate