“🆕In today’s Playbook our latest @Moreincommon_ voting intention has Labour’s lead at 1 point
🌹Lab 29% (-1) 🌳Con 28% (+2) ➡️ Ref 19% (+1) 🔶Lib Dem 11% (-2) 🌎 Green 7% (-1) 🟡 SNP 2% (-1)
Dates: 5-7/10 n= 2023, changes with 24-25/9”
What if the pollsters are STILL overstating Labour by 6-7 points?! We just don’t know. So the situation might REALLY be
🌹Lab 22 🌳Con 32 ➡️ Ref 23 🔶Lib Dem 11% 🌎 Green 7% 🟡 SNP 2%
Labour THIRD
I see we can add polling to the many subjects you know nothing about.
Polls are at their most accurate after an election because the pollsters automatically ask people how they voted at the election, false recall isn't an issue at this point.
I see we can add Theory of Mind to the many subjects you know nothing about
I am clearly in a playful mood. Hence my use of REALLOCATION™️
Were you in a playful mood when you went full Stuart Dickson and posted a Welsh subsample as a proper poll?
No, I was simultaneously drinking coffee, buying airplane tickets, driving around a sacred Serbo-Judaic tomb on the Albanian border, and laughing at yet another brilliant article in the Spectator, and I unsuccessfully multitasked
Given your skill at multitasking, I hope you didn’t simultaneously buy tickets for the wrong destination, crash into the tomb and find you were laughing at an article in the New Statesman, whilst drinking tea!
Everyone knew that it would be a shitshow for whoever was in power after the election. Rishi called it early because he saw a couple of economic aggregates ticking up and hoped it presaged a broader recovery. It might still do but there is a hell of a lot of pain in the meantime. It is no surprise that "the government" is unpopular because the huge spending over the past five years now has to be reversed and addressed.
They are also making a complete horlicks of things
“🆕In today’s Playbook our latest @Moreincommon_ voting intention has Labour’s lead at 1 point
🌹Lab 29% (-1) 🌳Con 28% (+2) ➡️ Ref 19% (+1) 🔶Lib Dem 11% (-2) 🌎 Green 7% (-1) 🟡 SNP 2% (-1)
Dates: 5-7/10 n= 2023, changes with 24-25/9”
What if the pollsters are STILL overstating Labour by 6-7 points?! We just don’t know. So the situation might REALLY be
🌹Lab 22 🌳Con 32 ➡️ Ref 23 🔶Lib Dem 11% 🌎 Green 7% 🟡 SNP 2%
Labour THIRD
Labour are disappointing from the left (2-child benefit, WFA), that 6-7% would go Green or Lib Dem.
But the Greens, Nats and LDs are all down. The trend is rightwards
I doubt if terms like left or right help at all in the present mix. No party is able to articulate a plan for then future which is clearly either of these elusive concepts.
What is being labelled 'right' is awkwardly split between what you might call 'Fortress Britain + Selective Welfarism' and centrist One Nationism.
The left is even more split between cautious pro capitalist pragmatism, various single issue fanaticisms and the proper 'old time religion' left, itself split between fashionable and unfashionable lefts.
“🆕In today’s Playbook our latest @Moreincommon_ voting intention has Labour’s lead at 1 point
🌹Lab 29% (-1) 🌳Con 28% (+2) ➡️ Ref 19% (+1) 🔶Lib Dem 11% (-2) 🌎 Green 7% (-1) 🟡 SNP 2% (-1)
Dates: 5-7/10 n= 2023, changes with 24-25/9”
What if the pollsters are STILL overstating Labour by 6-7 points?! We just don’t know. So the situation might REALLY be
🌹Lab 22 🌳Con 32 ➡️ Ref 23 🔶Lib Dem 11% 🌎 Green 7% 🟡 SNP 2%
Labour THIRD
I see we can add polling to the many subjects you know nothing about.
Polls are at their most accurate after an election because the pollsters automatically ask people how they voted at the election, false recall isn't an issue at this point.
Is there any evidence for that, or is it just an assertion? Are polls more accurate if the next election is a year or two after the last one rather than four or five years?
And if false recall is the issue, why do polls overstate Labour far more often than the Conservatives, as opposed to getting things wrong randomly? Do one party's supporters have much worse memories than those of the other? As the Conservatives are older, maybe you'd think their supporters are more likely to forget how they voted, but then why was the general anti-Tory bias also prevalent when the age differential in voting was not so pronounced? And why is anti-Right wing bias also observable in other, though not all, democracies, where the age gap is also less pronounced if it exists?
False recall could be caused by people not wanting to admit to themselves or the pollster how they voted last time, rather than genuinely forgetting, just as the membership of the French Resistance grew exponentially after Liberation. In which case it is likely to be a function of current party popularity, rather than the time since the last election.
No answers here, only questions.
The online pollsters generally in the week after the election asks their panel how they voted so they base their polling on that.
The further we get away from an election the more false recall becomes an issue, even for online pollsters.
This is based on conversation I’ve had with pollsters.
US pollsters were saying some of the 20 year old cohort in their polling recalled voting for Biden four years ago...
“🆕In today’s Playbook our latest @Moreincommon_ voting intention has Labour’s lead at 1 point
🌹Lab 29% (-1) 🌳Con 28% (+2) ➡️ Ref 19% (+1) 🔶Lib Dem 11% (-2) 🌎 Green 7% (-1) 🟡 SNP 2% (-1)
Dates: 5-7/10 n= 2023, changes with 24-25/9”
What if the pollsters are STILL overstating Labour by 6-7 points?! We just don’t know. So the situation might REALLY be
🌹Lab 22 🌳Con 32 ➡️ Ref 23 🔶Lib Dem 11% 🌎 Green 7% 🟡 SNP 2%
Labour THIRD
I see we can add polling to the many subjects you know nothing about.
Polls are at their most accurate after an election because the pollsters automatically ask people how they voted at the election, false recall isn't an issue at this point.
I see we can add Theory of Mind to the many subjects you know nothing about
I am clearly in a playful mood. Hence my use of REALLOCATION™️
Were you in a playful mood when you went full Stuart Dickson and posted a Welsh subsample as a proper poll?
Is "playful mood" analogous of trolling.
If it's not fictional polls it's holiday snaps, if it's not holiday snaps it's that dreary, but detailed story about a forty year old fling with a minor celebrity in a French churchyard. Surely we've all at some stage in our lives been intimate with minor celebrities. Mine was a one night stand with a Welsh TV newsreader in the mid 1980s, but you are already bored so I'll stop ...
This came across my screen as a side item on a Youtube Channel that has been covering the Bayesian - main element of that is that the company that built it has been feeding misleading BS to the Italian media blaimng the crew, the customer, 'anybody but me'. As would happen in the UK, it was a noisy take with a pretty map, so it was swallowed by the papers.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
Telegraph writing scare article that has been written so many times before. Bearing in mind being a millionaire isn't what it was and it isn't that uncommon particularly in the SE and London. I know many people in the £3 - £10 million range and not one of us is discussing moving abroad. Buying a holiday home maybe, but that has always been so.
It is a repeating scare story. People have homes, communities, children to think of. Only once you get into huge amounts of money, probably without children do you float your residence.
People emigrate and often driven by a better job, but if you have already made it you don't move because of tax, you move for a new adventure, sun, retire, new job, etc.
I mean, we all know you’re quite dim, but really
You’ve maybe not noticed “the internet” which means that an awful lot more people can now work where they want, and they aren’t tied to location. Similarly you must have missed “the pandemic” which accelerated these changes
“🆕In today’s Playbook our latest @Moreincommon_ voting intention has Labour’s lead at 1 point
🌹Lab 29% (-1) 🌳Con 28% (+2) ➡️ Ref 19% (+1) 🔶Lib Dem 11% (-2) 🌎 Green 7% (-1) 🟡 SNP 2% (-1)
Dates: 5-7/10 n= 2023, changes with 24-25/9”
What if the pollsters are STILL overstating Labour by 6-7 points?! We just don’t know. So the situation might REALLY be
🌹Lab 22 🌳Con 32 ➡️ Ref 23 🔶Lib Dem 11% 🌎 Green 7% 🟡 SNP 2%
Labour THIRD
Labour are disappointing from the left (2-child benefit, WFA), that 6-7% would go Green or Lib Dem.
But the Greens, Nats and LDs are all down. The trend is rightwards
I doubt if terms like left or right help at all in the present mix. No party is able to articulate a plan for then future which is clearly either of these elusive concepts.
What is being labelled 'right' is awkwardly split between what you might call 'Fortress Britain + Selective Welfarism' and centrist One Nationism.
The left is even more split between cautious pro capitalist pragmatism, various single issue fanaticisms and the proper 'old time religion' left, itself split between fashionable and unfashionable lefts.
It's a split between competence and incompetence. And at the moment the latter has a commanding majority. As in the last parliament.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
Telegraph writing scare article that has been written so many times before. Bearing in mind being a millionaire isn't what it was and it isn't that uncommon particularly in the SE and London. I know many people in the £3 - £10 million range and not one of us is discussing moving abroad. Buying a holiday home maybe, but that has always been so.
It is a repeating scare story. People have homes, communities, children to think of. Only once you get into huge amounts of money, probably without children do you float your residence.
People emigrate and often driven by a better job, but if you have already made it you don't move because of tax, you move for a new adventure, sun, retire, new job, etc.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
The IFS yesterday was recommending an exit tax.
Much like the Berlin Wall, there was plenty of clamour to get out, not so many people hopping over the fence trying to get back in...
"Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People" by Julia Boyd
It’s a brilliant piece of history. As the famous, semi famous and entirely ordinary look at Germany from 1922-1940. You get a much better idea of what it was like to be in Germany in those years, and how and why Hitler succeeded. And how it could easily happen again, here and now
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
“🆕In today’s Playbook our latest @Moreincommon_ voting intention has Labour’s lead at 1 point
🌹Lab 29% (-1) 🌳Con 28% (+2) ➡️ Ref 19% (+1) 🔶Lib Dem 11% (-2) 🌎 Green 7% (-1) 🟡 SNP 2% (-1)
Dates: 5-7/10 n= 2023, changes with 24-25/9”
What if the pollsters are STILL overstating Labour by 6-7 points?! We just don’t know. So the situation might REALLY be
🌹Lab 22 🌳Con 32 ➡️ Ref 23 🔶Lib Dem 11% 🌎 Green 7% 🟡 SNP 2%
Labour THIRD
Labour are disappointing from the left (2-child benefit, WFA), that 6-7% would go Green or Lib Dem.
But the Greens, Nats and LDs are all down. The trend is rightwards
I doubt if terms like left or right help at all in the present mix. No party is able to articulate a plan for then future which is clearly either of these elusive concepts.
What is being labelled 'right' is awkwardly split between what you might call 'Fortress Britain + Selective Welfarism' and centrist One Nationism.
The left is even more split between cautious pro capitalist pragmatism, various single issue fanaticisms and the proper 'old time religion' left, itself split between fashionable and unfashionable lefts.
This administration wants growth but is currently deluding itself that the State (and the extra tax that goes with it) is the answer to delivering that.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
The IFS yesterday was recommending an exit tax.
Much like the Berlin Wall, there was plenty of clamour to get out, not so many people hopping over the fence trying to get back in...
We now have our own Berlin Wall in the form of Brexit. Freedom of Movement is abolished.
Almost allegorically, a fine morning but showers and storms are coming to my part of the world.
The latest More In Common polling returns the split between Con/Ref and Lab/LD/Green to parity at 47 each which was the score at the 2019 election - of course then the split on the forner was 45/2 rather than the 28/19 we see today which makes all the difference.
We will probably gain more or less insight from the 18 council by-elections due this Thursday - I suspect we'll see a common pattern of Labour vote collapse but it may well be the "gains" will be evenly spread among other parties and we have some Con/LD contests to add particular spice.
At the moment, we live in a world of paradox - apparently, "millionaires" (or should that be billionaires) are leaving as fast as illegal immigrants are arriving (so much for the one-in, one-out policy). We're also told on the one hand there will be power cuts this winter due to "Labour" shutting down the last coal-fired power station (though the decision was taken long before in the Conservative years) and yet Neso seem to think we have plenty of available energy and the risk of power cuts is the lowest for four years:
We are told on the one hand the construction industry is in strong shape with strong PMIs indicating growth and new building surging ahead, yet on the other, the Mail reports projects are grinding to a halt and builders and other trades are desperately looking for work.
We are told the Labour Government is "talking down" Britain and spreading "doom and gloom" yet the most pessimistic stories are in media which are opposed to the Govenrment so if anyone is talking down the country and the economy it's supporters of the main opposition party.
The truth, I was once told, is "out there" - perhaps but where and whose truth I'm less certain.
"Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People" by Julia Boyd
It’s a brilliant piece of history. As the famous, semi famous and entirely ordinary look at Germany from 1922-1940. You get a much better idea of what it was like to be in Germany in those years, and how and why Hitler succeeded. And how it could easily happen again, here and now
And Chris Bryant MP's book, The Glamour Boys, about mainly gay Conservative MPs who were among the first to support Churchill and raise awareness of growing repression and political violence in Germany under Nazi hegemony. Berlin was the gay capital of Europe (think Cabaret) and these MPs saw first hand the changes from year to year.
"Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People" by Julia Boyd
It’s a brilliant piece of history. As the famous, semi famous and entirely ordinary look at Germany from 1922-1940. You get a much better idea of what it was like to be in Germany in those years, and how and why Hitler succeeded. And how it could easily happen again, here and now
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
Inevitable. Labour hates wealth.
Until it starts closing hospitals.
MEMO TO LABOUR: those rich fuckers you hate? They pay for the NHS.
“Fuck off to Dubai. See if we care”
There was a report in the Guardian yesterday about the dire state of the UK and London art market. They tried to blame it on Brexit, or the Tory-something-something, but they studiously ignored the obvious reason
Rich people are fleeing Labour Britain. Rich people buy art
I have a friend who works for Sothebys and the dire state of the art market long predates this Labour government, though obviously it hasn't helped. He says that the problem is the overregulation of the industry, much of which was caused by the EU directive which imposed VAT on the industry and the lunatic droite de suite, whereby living artists are entitled to a share if their art is resold, amongst other crazy measures, causing the big sales to flee to New York and Zurich, taking most of the infrastructure with them.
He says that if we roll back the regulations to where they were 25 years ago the fine art industry here will flourish again. Obviously that won't happen under the current incompetent and economically illiterate government, but it's something for the next one to bear in mind.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
Unlike @kjh who wants us to know (or is it believe) that he is in the "£3M to £10M range" (lol), I do know people who are leaving or giving it serious consideration. This is the difference between the current public sector obsessed Labour Party and Blair's New Labour, the latter of which understood and encouraged wealth creation. Lord Mandelson needs to advise them to get a grip quick before the economy becomes more and more fucked.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
It's very much a question of who is going to win the internal game of politics within the Labour Party.
The problem is they've managed to seriously restrict the options they have to play with when the best approach would be to add say 2p to income tax to reflect that the NI cuts were not sustainable...
Everything else is tinkering at the edges and doesn't solve any of the actual problems.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
Unlike @kjh who wants us to know (or is it believe) that he is in the "£3M to £10M range" (lol), I do know people who are leaving or giving it serious consideration. This is the difference between the current public sector obsessed Labour Party and Blair's New Labour, the latter of which understood and encouraged wealth creation. Lord Mandelson needs to advise them to get a grip quick before the economy becomes more and more fucked.
We are more and more fucked
We might have to actually overthrow this government
Can somebody draw me a Venn diagram of the PBers complaining about Labour’s wealth destroying policies and those who voted for Boris ‘Fuck Business’ Johnson.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
Telegraph writing scare article that has been written so many times before. Bearing in mind being a millionaire isn't what it was and it isn't that uncommon particularly in the SE and London. I know many people in the £3 - £10 million range and not one of us is discussing moving abroad. Buying a holiday home maybe, but that has always been so.
It is a repeating scare story. People have homes, communities, children to think of. Only once you get into huge amounts of money, probably without children do you float your residence.
People emigrate and often driven by a better job, but if you have already made it you don't move because of tax, you move for a new adventure, sun, retire, new job, etc.
I mean, we all know you’re quite dim, but really
You’ve maybe not noticed “the internet” which means that an awful lot more people can now work where they want, and they aren’t tied to location. Similarly you must have missed “the pandemic” which accelerated these changes
You completely missed the whole point didn't you? Yes people can work from home. In fact I did so since 1995 when I set up my own business until I retired so you know I am familiar and that was prior to an effective internet but you were not talking about aspiring people who will move for a better job and that might be an issue. It was specifically about the 'rich' moving abroad. If you have already made it and are wealthy and still here tax will not drive you away It is the old often repeated scare story. If you are that rich and still here, why haven't you gone already?
"Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People" by Julia Boyd
It’s a brilliant piece of history. As the famous, semi famous and entirely ordinary look at Germany from 1922-1940. You get a much better idea of what it was like to be in Germany in those years, and how and why Hitler succeeded. And how it could easily happen again, here and now
You’d think so, but it’s not. Julia Boyd makes it new and compelling. The book won awards and it is 4.4 stars on Amazon with 1800+ reviews
The reviewers are right. Its superb
Have you ever read A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, who walked from Rotterdam to, I think, Istanbul in, I think, 1933? It's mainly a travel book. But it's also quite a fascinating contemporary look at Germany (and indeed Austria, Hungary and Romania).
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
Unlike @kjh who wants us to know (or is it believe) that he is in the "£3M to £10M range" (lol), I do know people who are leaving or giving it serious consideration. This is the difference between the current public sector obsessed Labour Party and Blair's New Labour, the latter of which understood and encouraged wealth creation. Lord Mandelson needs to advise them to get a grip quick before the economy becomes more and more fucked.
From my vantage point, in a small country well-known for having no personal income tax nor capital gains tax, with VAT at 5% and Corporation Tax 7%, rents are up around 30% year on year as the place is importing people faster than the many builders can keep up with demand.
This came across my screen as a side item on a Youtube Channel that has been covering the Bayesian - main element of that is that the company that built it has been feeding misleading BS to the Italian media blaimng the crew, the customer, 'anybody but me'. As would happen in the UK, it was a noisy take with a pretty map, so it was swallowed by the papers.
It's called the Manawanui, which is a word crying out to be a cocktail.
Manawanui, as you well know, is a Maori word meaning to be steadfast, stout-hearted, tolerant, patient, unwavering, resolute, persistent, committed, dedicated, unswerving, staunch, dogged, tolerant.
It can be used as a verb or a noun (as I'm sure you also knew).
Can somebody draw me a Venn diagram of the PBers complaining about Labour’s wealth destroying policies and those who voted for Boris ‘Fuck Business’ Johnson.
Not guilty. Brexit was a disaster for wealth creation, but a Labour government that wants to cane wealth creators is even worse.
“🆕In today’s Playbook our latest @Moreincommon_ voting intention has Labour’s lead at 1 point
🌹Lab 29% (-1) 🌳Con 28% (+2) ➡️ Ref 19% (+1) 🔶Lib Dem 11% (-2) 🌎 Green 7% (-1) 🟡 SNP 2% (-1)
Dates: 5-7/10 n= 2023, changes with 24-25/9”
What if the pollsters are STILL overstating Labour by 6-7 points?! We just don’t know. So the situation might REALLY be
🌹Lab 22 🌳Con 32 ➡️ Ref 23 🔶Lib Dem 11% 🌎 Green 7% 🟡 SNP 2%
Labour THIRD
Labour are disappointing from the left (2-child benefit, WFA), that 6-7% would go Green or Lib Dem.
But the Greens, Nats and LDs are all down. The trend is rightwards
I doubt if terms like left or right help at all in the present mix. No party is able to articulate a plan for then future which is clearly either of these elusive concepts.
What is being labelled 'right' is awkwardly split between what you might call 'Fortress Britain + Selective Welfarism' and centrist One Nationism.
The left is even more split between cautious pro capitalist pragmatism, various single issue fanaticisms and the proper 'old time religion' left, itself split between fashionable and unfashionable lefts.
This administration wants growth but is currently deluding itself that the State (and the extra tax that goes with it) is the answer to delivering that.
We have a government of lawyers who think that 'growth' can be achieved by creating more work for lawyers.
Similarly, the number of mills which were constructed in Lancashire and Yorkshire around 1853 is remarkable
The speed with which Victorians just cracked on & built things now seems astonishing. Parliamentary approval for branch line to Crystal Palace was granted in July 1853 & apparently within weeks, yes WEEKS, they were building the cutting. Can you imagine that today? https://x.com/boys_nicholas/status/1843067940314423492
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
Unlike @kjh who wants us to know (or is it believe) that he is in the "£3M to £10M range" (lol), I do know people who are leaving or giving it serious consideration. This is the difference between the current public sector obsessed Labour Party and Blair's New Labour, the latter of which understood and encouraged wealth creation. Lord Mandelson needs to advise them to get a grip quick before the economy becomes more and more fucked.
We are more and more fucked
We might have to actually overthrow this government
Well we have an established (if somewhat flawed) system for that and we have to wait a few more years. Slight problem is that Farage, whom you seem to admire, will ensure that they stay in power for a long time. Sir Keir Freebie loves Farage.
"Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People" by Julia Boyd
It’s a brilliant piece of history. As the famous, semi famous and entirely ordinary look at Germany from 1922-1940. You get a much better idea of what it was like to be in Germany in those years, and how and why Hitler succeeded. And how it could easily happen again, here and now
Obvious decision politically. Approve it: "why are you willing to spend billions of pounds on transport infrastructure in London AGAIN while projects in the north get pared back and cancelled?" Turn in down: "what happened to the growth agenda?"
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
It's very much a question of who is going to win the internal game of politics within the Labour Party.
The problem is they've managed to seriously restrict the options they have to play with when the best approach would be to add say 2p to income tax to reflect that the NI cuts were not sustainable...
Everything else is tinkering at the edges and doesn't solve any of the actual problems.
I'm afraid you're absolutely right, my friend.
Raising basic rate tax to 25p, higher rate to 50p and increasing thresholds by double the rate of inflation would be my approach but pace Blair and Brown in 1997, Starmer and Reeves were so desperate not to be pilloried as Kinnock and Smith had been in 1992 they shut down the main option from the start. I'd also undo the last two NI cuts which were simply half-hearted pre-election gimmicks which even Hunt knew (I suspect) weren't affordable.
The fact remains we are borrowing more than £100 billion every single year - now, when I've said we can't go on like that, we obviously can in terms of what the markets will support and we can take a view on debt interest payments and the amount they take out of the economy which could be used elsewhere.
The debate has been so poisoned it's now impossible to talk about direct tax rises - even the Conservatives couldn't do it so they created "fiscal drag" by freezing thresholds dragging more people into higher rate tax. Call it a "stealth tax" if you like not that it was very stealthy.
If we raise on the one side, we do have to look at the other side of the balance sheet - there is undoubtedly some fat to be trimmed especially in parts of the NHS, the armed forces (I strongly suspect) and other areas but there's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow either.
Can somebody draw me a Venn diagram of the PBers complaining about Labour’s wealth destroying policies and those who voted for Boris ‘Fuck Business’ Johnson.
What, in 2019? I have no regrets about voting for the not-massively-growth-prioritising Johnson in 2019 in order to keep the actively-growth-destroying Corbyn away from the levers of power.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
"Progress" is I think the word you are looking for.
Think of it as the peasants overthrowing the evil baron and allocating to themselves three fiefs of land from his estate.
“🆕In today’s Playbook our latest @Moreincommon_ voting intention has Labour’s lead at 1 point
🌹Lab 29% (-1) 🌳Con 28% (+2) ➡️ Ref 19% (+1) 🔶Lib Dem 11% (-2) 🌎 Green 7% (-1) 🟡 SNP 2% (-1)
Dates: 5-7/10 n= 2023, changes with 24-25/9”
What if the pollsters are STILL overstating Labour by 6-7 points?! We just don’t know. So the situation might REALLY be
🌹Lab 22 🌳Con 32 ➡️ Ref 23 🔶Lib Dem 11% 🌎 Green 7% 🟡 SNP 2%
Labour THIRD
Labour are disappointing from the left (2-child benefit, WFA), that 6-7% would go Green or Lib Dem.
But the Greens, Nats and LDs are all down. The trend is rightwards
I doubt if terms like left or right help at all in the present mix. No party is able to articulate a plan for then future which is clearly either of these elusive concepts.
What is being labelled 'right' is awkwardly split between what you might call 'Fortress Britain + Selective Welfarism' and centrist One Nationism.
The left is even more split between cautious pro capitalist pragmatism, various single issue fanaticisms and the proper 'old time religion' left, itself split between fashionable and unfashionable lefts.
This administration wants growth but is currently deluding itself that the State (and the extra tax that goes with it) is the answer to delivering that.
We have a government of lawyers who think that 'growth' can be achieved by creating more work for lawyers.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
Telegraph writing scare article that has been written so many times before. Bearing in mind being a millionaire isn't what it was and it isn't that uncommon particularly in the SE and London. I know many people in the £3 - £10 million range and not one of us is discussing moving abroad. Buying a holiday home maybe, but that has always been so.
It is a repeating scare story. People have homes, communities, children to think of. Only once you get into huge amounts of money, probably without children do you float your residence.
People emigrate and often driven by a better job, but if you have already made it you don't move because of tax, you move for a new adventure, sun, retire, new job, etc.
I mean, we all know you’re quite dim, but really
You’ve maybe not noticed “the internet” which means that an awful lot more people can now work where they want, and they aren’t tied to location. Similarly you must have missed “the pandemic” which accelerated these changes
You completely missed the whole point didn't you? Yes people can work from home. In fact I did so since 1995 when I set up my own business until I retired so you know I am familiar and that was prior to an effective internet but you were not talking about aspiring people who will move for a better job and that might be an issue. It was specifically about the 'rich' moving abroad. If you have already made it and are wealthy and still here tax will not drive you away It is the old often repeated scare story. If you are that rich and still here, why haven't you gone already?
The fact that you fail to understand this demonstrates that your pretence about being in the "£3M to £10M range" is a sad fantasy. Funny how some people on here want to try and impress people they don't know. I am sure it must be a psychosis. Anyway, well done on selling your shop, and now lazing around doing nothing, but please stop trying to make out you are a hotshot. Even if you are (which if you were you wouldn't even hint) because nobody cares.
Biden pushed for the deal very hard knowing a court case was coming that would binding and see them lose access to airbase.
I'm not sure an ICJ (which is just a body of the UN) ruling can force a State to cede territory, but it would mean the UK would have had to ignore the ruling. Just as we've ignored the UN's list of non self governing territories for decades.
I'd have ignored the ruling.
There is no such thing as society international law.
This, the suggestion there is no international law, would come as rather bad news to various rather boring and ignored elements of global life - which actually work more or less most of the time - like shipping, air travel and the postal service.
Yes of course. There is international agreement on a whole bunch of stuff. But law? No. Not as in binding upon the international community. Laws of this kind are usually written by the victors in whichever war was most recently fought at scale and are meaningless the next time either a war takes place, or a sufficiently large actor decides to act.
Similarly, the number of mills which were constructed in Lancashire and Yorkshire around 1853 is remarkable
The speed with which Victorians just cracked on & built things now seems astonishing. Parliamentary approval for branch line to Crystal Palace was granted in July 1853 & apparently within weeks, yes WEEKS, they were building the cutting. Can you imagine that today? https://x.com/boys_nicholas/status/1843067940314423492
I don't know this case but in general you have to be cautious even using fairly reliable sources. Consider the Midland and North West Railway Line, "The Little North Western" up the Lune valley in Westmorland and Yorkshire. The line is marked on the 6 in OS Maps dated 1853 but it was not operational until 1861.
How did the motorway network ever get built in the first place?
Then how the f*** did we get from there to a position where we’ve already spent more than the cost of building the last bridge (£268m in 2023 money), just on the planning application for the next one!
That’s totally insane position to have moved in only 30 years.
The QEII Bridge was one year of consultation, two years of planning and financing, and three years of construction. This one’s been talked about for longer than that already!!!
"Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People" by Julia Boyd
It’s a brilliant piece of history. As the famous, semi famous and entirely ordinary look at Germany from 1922-1940. You get a much better idea of what it was like to be in Germany in those years, and how and why Hitler succeeded. And how it could easily happen again, here and now
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
It's very much a question of who is going to win the internal game of politics within the Labour Party.
The problem is they've managed to seriously restrict the options they have to play with when the best approach would be to add say 2p to income tax to reflect that the NI cuts were not sustainable...
Everything else is tinkering at the edges and doesn't solve any of the actual problems.
I'm afraid you're absolutely right, my friend.
Raising basic rate tax to 25p, higher rate to 50p and increasing thresholds by double the rate of inflation would be my approach but pace Blair and Brown in 1997, Starmer and Reeves were so desperate not to be pilloried as Kinnock and Smith had been in 1992 they shut down the main option from the start. I'd also undo the last two NI cuts which were simply half-hearted pre-election gimmicks which even Hunt knew (I suspect) weren't affordable.
The fact remains we are borrowing more than £100 billion every single year - now, when I've said we can't go on like that, we obviously can in terms of what the markets will support and we can take a view on debt interest payments and the amount they take out of the economy which could be used elsewhere.
The debate has been so poisoned it's now impossible to talk about direct tax rises - even the Conservatives couldn't do it so they created "fiscal drag" by freezing thresholds dragging more people into higher rate tax. Call it a "stealth tax" if you like not that it was very stealthy.
If we raise on the one side, we do have to look at the other side of the balance sheet - there is undoubtedly some fat to be trimmed especially in parts of the NHS, the armed forces (I strongly suspect) and other areas but there's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow either.
Ultimately there is no way out except for lower living standards or higher productivity.
With the first being very difficult politically and the second very difficult economically.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
"Progress" is I think the word you are looking for.
Think of it as the peasants overthrowing the evil baron and allocating to themselves three fiefs of land from his estate.
Another word is “Zimbabwe”
Another word yet is Western Liberal Democracy.
What would you prefer then?
We all know if the likes of Reform ever got anywhere near power they'd fall apart quicker than a Championship side promoted to the Premier League.
There's obviously benevolent dictatorship and such things do exist but not for long and it's amazing how quickly some elected via the democratic process seek to subvert that process in order to remain in power.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
It's very much a question of who is going to win the internal game of politics within the Labour Party.
The problem is they've managed to seriously restrict the options they have to play with when the best approach would be to add say 2p to income tax to reflect that the NI cuts were not sustainable...
Everything else is tinkering at the edges and doesn't solve any of the actual problems.
I'm afraid you're absolutely right, my friend.
Raising basic rate tax to 25p, higher rate to 50p and increasing thresholds by double the rate of inflation would be my approach but pace Blair and Brown in 1997, Starmer and Reeves were so desperate not to be pilloried as Kinnock and Smith had been in 1992 they shut down the main option from the start. I'd also undo the last two NI cuts which were simply half-hearted pre-election gimmicks which even Hunt knew (I suspect) weren't affordable.
The fact remains we are borrowing more than £100 billion every single year - now, when I've said we can't go on like that, we obviously can in terms of what the markets will support and we can take a view on debt interest payments and the amount they take out of the economy which could be used elsewhere.
The debate has been so poisoned it's now impossible to talk about direct tax rises - even the Conservatives couldn't do it so they created "fiscal drag" by freezing thresholds dragging more people into higher rate tax. Call it a "stealth tax" if you like not that it was very stealthy.
If we raise on the one side, we do have to look at the other side of the balance sheet - there is undoubtedly some fat to be trimmed especially in parts of the NHS, the armed forces (I strongly suspect) and other areas but there's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow either.
Ultimately there is no way out except for lower living standards or higher productivity.
With the first being very difficult politically and the second very difficult economically.
Book recommendation: "Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People" by Julia Boyd
It’s a brilliant piece of history. As the famous, semi famous and entirely ordinary look at Germany from 1922-1940. You get a much better idea of what it was like to be in Germany in those years, and how and why Hitler succeeded. And how it could easily happen again, here and now
I saw a very good play some time ago - The White Factory. It describes a (fictional?) factory manufacturing vital German war goods in one of the Jewish ghettos during the war. tl;dr the Jewish boss of the factory gets to play god by deciding which (all) Jews work in the factory and which don't and therefore who lives and who dies. No job in factory = death.
He is confronted by this and responds that he is saving people and that if he didn't do it someone else would. And it all seems so reasonable.
And then the play invokes the plight (??) of an ordinary German soldier working at a concentration camp. Who could, more or less, say exactly the same thing.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
Unlike @kjh who wants us to know (or is it believe) that he is in the "£3M to £10M range" (lol), I do know people who are leaving or giving it serious consideration. This is the difference between the current public sector obsessed Labour Party and Blair's New Labour, the latter of which understood and encouraged wealth creation. Lord Mandelson needs to advise them to get a grip quick before the economy becomes more and more fucked.
A bit uncalled for. Not sure how I can tell that anicdote otherwise. Not sure why you would consider I am lying. From various posts I have made in past tangential reference (eg holiday home in Southwold) will make it clear I am reasonably well off. The fact that I have posted here for years and this has only just dawned on you means I hardly made a big issue of it. It is fairly obvious there are well off posters here eg @OnlyLivingBoy , @leon , @Roger. Are we now in to the realms of posts of envy.
On topic, I did not say people won't leave for better jobs or a better life. However people who are rich who haven't left already (as per the topic) aren't now going to leave because of tax.
How did the motorway network ever get built in the first place?
Then how the f*** did we get from there to a position where we’ve already spend more than the cost of building the last bridge (£268m in 2023 money), just on the planning application for the next one!
That’s totally insane position to have moved in only 30 years.
The QEII Bridge was one year of consultation, two years of planning and financing, and three years of construction. This one’s been talked about for longer than that already!!!
We've laid on regulation after regulation and law after law and quango after quango over the last thirty years. Much of it judiciable and lots of special interest groups set up to exploit that.
Now the web is so tangled that no-one has a clue where to start with it.
Similarly, the number of mills which were constructed in Lancashire and Yorkshire around 1853 is remarkable
The speed with which Victorians just cracked on & built things now seems astonishing. Parliamentary approval for branch line to Crystal Palace was granted in July 1853 & apparently within weeks, yes WEEKS, they were building the cutting. Can you imagine that today? https://x.com/boys_nicholas/status/1843067940314423492
The Victorians had a system where it was profitable to do things.
We have a system where its profitable to talk about things.
OMG. Starmer's government finally made a good decision*:
Nicholas Cecil @nicholascecil · 1h BREAKING NEWS: HS2 high-speed rail line will run to London Euston, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh confirms
*Edit: In sense of being better than stopping at Oak whatever it is called. St P is by far the most sensible connection in central London but that ship was sunk long ago.
OMG. Starmer's government finally made a good decision*:
Nicholas Cecil @nicholascecil · 1h BREAKING NEWS: HS2 high-speed rail line will run to London Euston, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh confirms
*Edit: In sense of being better than stopping at Oak whatever it is called. St P is by far the most sensible connection in central London but that ship was sunk long ago.
This came across my screen as a side item on a Youtube Channel that has been covering the Bayesian - main element of that is that the company that built it has been feeding misleading BS to the Italian media blaimng the crew, the customer, 'anybody but me'. As would happen in the UK, it was a noisy take with a pretty map, so it was swallowed by the papers.
It's called the Manawanui, which is a word crying out to be a cocktail.
Manawanui, as you well know, is a Maori word meaning to be steadfast, stout-hearted, tolerant, patient, unwavering, resolute, persistent, committed, dedicated, unswerving, staunch, dogged, tolerant.
It can be used as a verb or a noun (as I'm sure you also knew).
"anui" is a common postfix for places within North Island, Wanganui (the town), Whanganui (pron. Fanganui, the longest navigable river in New Zealand, on which I have been).
I was wondering how long it would take for this story to reach the UK media. But then ferries can sink killing hundreds of passengers on Cook Straight and never make it into the UK media.
How about a thread about the Treaty of Waitangi, probably one of the most profound discussions happening in the western world at present. Very good documentary from ABC on Youtube but the presenter was very Maori good, Pakehi bad even if the non-Maori contributors refused to toe that line. The fact is the Treaty of Waitangi is racist by any definition used elsewhere. If the distinction is to continue then where does that leave the Chinese, Pacific non-Maori and most of all the mixed Maori Pakehi ?
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
It's very much a question of who is going to win the internal game of politics within the Labour Party.
The problem is they've managed to seriously restrict the options they have to play with when the best approach would be to add say 2p to income tax to reflect that the NI cuts were not sustainable...
Everything else is tinkering at the edges and doesn't solve any of the actual problems.
I'm afraid you're absolutely right, my friend.
Raising basic rate tax to 25p, higher rate to 50p and increasing thresholds by double the rate of inflation would be my approach but pace Blair and Brown in 1997, Starmer and Reeves were so desperate not to be pilloried as Kinnock and Smith had been in 1992 they shut down the main option from the start. I'd also undo the last two NI cuts which were simply half-hearted pre-election gimmicks which even Hunt knew (I suspect) weren't affordable.
The fact remains we are borrowing more than £100 billion every single year - now, when I've said we can't go on like that, we obviously can in terms of what the markets will support and we can take a view on debt interest payments and the amount they take out of the economy which could be used elsewhere.
The debate has been so poisoned it's now impossible to talk about direct tax rises - even the Conservatives couldn't do it so they created "fiscal drag" by freezing thresholds dragging more people into higher rate tax. Call it a "stealth tax" if you like not that it was very stealthy.
If we raise on the one side, we do have to look at the other side of the balance sheet - there is undoubtedly some fat to be trimmed especially in parts of the NHS, the armed forces (I strongly suspect) and other areas but there's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow either.
Ultimately there is no way out except for lower living standards or higher productivity.
With the first being very difficult politically and the second very difficult economically.
Or we could just increase income tax by a bit, to levels closer to our European neighbours.
OMG. Starmer's government finally made a good decision*:
Nicholas Cecil @nicholascecil · 1h BREAKING NEWS: HS2 high-speed rail line will run to London Euston, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh confirms
*Edit: In sense of being better than stopping at Oak whatever it is called. St P is by far the most sensible connection in central London but that ship was sunk long ago.
They didn't really have much choice, because Old Oak Common probably wouldn't have been able to cope with the volume of passengers.
OMG. Starmer's government finally made a good decision*:
Nicholas Cecil @nicholascecil · 1h BREAKING NEWS: HS2 high-speed rail line will run to London Euston, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh confirms
*Edit: In sense of being better than stopping at Oak whatever it is called. St P is by far the most sensible connection in central London but that ship was sunk long ago.
How did the motorway network ever get built in the first place?
Then how the f*** did we get from there to a position where we’ve already spend more than the cost of building the last bridge (£268m in 2023 money), just on the planning application for the next one!
That’s totally insane position to have moved in only 30 years.
The QEII Bridge was one year of consultation, two years of planning and financing, and three years of construction. This one’s been talked about for longer than that already!!!
We've laid on regulation after regulation and law after law and quango after quango over the last thirty years. Much of it judiciable and lots of special interest groups set up to exploit that.
Now the web is so tangled that no-one has a clue where to start with it.
I just shared this story with a few friends and colleagues in the sandpit. You can probably guess the response!
Infrastructure in this country is death by due process.
I was watching a documentary on the catastrophe of HS2 - now, whether you like it or not, think it's a good idea or not, isn't the issue.
The cost of doing the London-Birmingham link has ended up double the cost of doing the original lines all the way to Manchester and Leeds.
There have been huge issues with land purchase and we know the political impact of the project which began with the Chesham & Amersham by-election.
Rather like Crossrail, I suspect, though others on here have much greater knowledge, the project has been blighted from the start by wholly unrealistic assumptions on cost and budget and timescale.
I've seen this in my working life in both the public and private sectors and I think it's the core of a lot of our problems - we're frightened of telling ourselves the truth. We're scared of honesty in project management and reporting - no one wants to be the person telling the senior management their project is going to massively overrun because they think they will be the one with their head on the chopping block.
The other issue is continuity - continuity of commitment and continuity of personnel at the top of the project. HS2 suffered frequent changes of personnel as well as frequent changes of Government and Ministerial view.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
Unlike @kjh who wants us to know (or is it believe) that he is in the "£3M to £10M range" (lol), I do know people who are leaving or giving it serious consideration. This is the difference between the current public sector obsessed Labour Party and Blair's New Labour, the latter of which understood and encouraged wealth creation. Lord Mandelson needs to advise them to get a grip quick before the economy becomes more and more fucked.
From my vantage point, in a small country well-known for having no personal income tax nor capital gains tax, with VAT at 5% and Corporation Tax 7%, rents are up around 30% year on year as the place is importing people faster than the many builders can keep up with demand.
Hi Sandpit. Cut and paste from my other post:
I did not say people won't leave for better jobs or a better life. However people who are rich who haven't left already (as per the topic) aren't now going to leave because of tax now.
Similarly, the number of mills which were constructed in Lancashire and Yorkshire around 1853 is remarkable
The speed with which Victorians just cracked on & built things now seems astonishing. Parliamentary approval for branch line to Crystal Palace was granted in July 1853 & apparently within weeks, yes WEEKS, they were building the cutting. Can you imagine that today? https://x.com/boys_nicholas/status/1843067940314423492
The Victorians had a system where it was profitable to do things.
We have a system where its profitable to talk about things.
One benign reason for this is that it is so much easier to write reports now than it used to be. There is some stat about the average amount of documentation that gets produced for a thing before and after the invention of MS Office* - we're making the same decisions, but with much, much, much more documentation backing them up. Which no-one reads properly because, as Leon points out, it's physically impossible to have done so.
Hands up anyone who has ever been asked to change a document so that it is both more detailed and more succinct?
AI will result in even more documentation, which is only read by other AI.
OMG. Starmer's government finally made a good decision*:
Nicholas Cecil @nicholascecil · 1h BREAKING NEWS: HS2 high-speed rail line will run to London Euston, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh confirms
*Edit: In sense of being better than stopping at Oak whatever it is called. St P is by far the most sensible connection in central London but that ship was sunk long ago.
How did the motorway network ever get built in the first place?
Then how the f*** did we get from there to a position where we’ve already spend more than the cost of building the last bridge (£268m in 2023 money), just on the planning application for the next one!
That’s totally insane position to have moved in only 30 years.
The QEII Bridge was one year of consultation, two years of planning and financing, and three years of construction. This one’s been talked about for longer than that already!!!
We've laid on regulation after regulation and law after law and quango after quango over the last thirty years. Much of it judiciable and lots of special interest groups set up to exploit that.
Now the web is so tangled that no-one has a clue where to start with it.
That this nation, under lawyers, shall have a new birth of laws and that government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, for the lawyers, shall not perish from the earth.
How did the motorway network ever get built in the first place?
Then how the f*** did we get from there to a position where we’ve already spend more than the cost of building the last bridge (£268m in 2023 money), just on the planning application for the next one!
That’s totally insane position to have moved in only 30 years.
The QEII Bridge was one year of consultation, two years of planning and financing, and three years of construction. This one’s been talked about for longer than that already!!!
We've laid on regulation after regulation and law after law and quango after quango over the last thirty years. Much of it judiciable and lots of special interest groups set up to exploit that.
Now the web is so tangled that no-one has a clue where to start with it.
The problem is that we don't enforce the regulations that matter (see the Grenfell Tower Fire Report) but impose a lot of pointless regulations that don't matter instead. We have all the disadvantages of a bureaucracy with none of its advantages.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
"Progress" is I think the word you are looking for.
Think of it as the peasants overthrowing the evil baron and allocating to themselves three fiefs of land from his estate.
Another word is “Zimbabwe”
Another word yet is Western Liberal Democracy.
What would you prefer then?
We all know if the likes of Reform ever got anywhere near power they'd fall apart quicker than a Championship side promoted to the Premier League.
There's obviously benevolent dictatorship and such things do exist but not for long and it's amazing how quickly some elected via the democratic process seek to subvert that process in order to remain in power.
Nothing to do with what I prefer - this is how the march of time plays out. Eventually there will be a, let's call it levelling up of the global economy and this means, as it did in for example, mediaeval times, an uprooting of the society we have come to know.
The 1922 committee used to make it clear what time the result of each vote would be announced, and what hours voting would take place, but for each round of this contest it's been almost impossible to find out.
Infrastructure in this country is death by due process.
I was watching a documentary on the catastrophe of HS2 - now, whether you like it or not, think it's a good idea or not, isn't the issue.
The cost of doing the London-Birmingham link has ended up double the cost of doing the original lines all the way to Manchester and Leeds.
There have been huge issues with land purchase and we know the political impact of the project which began with the Chesham & Amersham by-election.
Rather like Crossrail, I suspect, though others on here have much greater knowledge, the project has been blighted from the start by wholly unrealistic assumptions on cost and budget and timescale.
I've seen this in my working life in both the public and private sectors and I think it's the core of a lot of our problems - we're frightened of telling ourselves the truth. We're scared of honesty in project management and reporting - no one wants to be the person telling the senior management their project is going to massively overrun because they think they will be the one with their head on the chopping block.
The other issue is continuity - continuity of commitment and continuity of personnel at the top of the project. HS2 suffered frequent changes of personnel as well as frequent changes of Government and Ministerial view.
Crossrail was £19bn as opposed to £15bn and was 3.5 years late (partly due to Covid) but completed its full scope and has exceeded all the benefits in its original business case.
OMG. Starmer's government finally made a good decision*:
Nicholas Cecil @nicholascecil · 1h BREAKING NEWS: HS2 high-speed rail line will run to London Euston, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh confirms
*Edit: In sense of being better than stopping at Oak whatever it is called. St P is by far the most sensible connection in central London but that ship was sunk long ago.
They didn't really have much choice, because Old Oak Common probably wouldn't have been able to cope with the volume of passengers.
Realistically, they didn't have much choice, though realism rarely constrained the last lot.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
Unlike @kjh who wants us to know (or is it believe) that he is in the "£3M to £10M range" (lol), I do know people who are leaving or giving it serious consideration. This is the difference between the current public sector obsessed Labour Party and Blair's New Labour, the latter of which understood and encouraged wealth creation. Lord Mandelson needs to advise them to get a grip quick before the economy becomes more and more fucked.
From my vantage point, in a small country well-known for having no personal income tax nor capital gains tax, with VAT at 5% and Corporation Tax 7%, rents are up around 30% year on year as the place is importing people faster than the many builders can keep up with demand.
Hi Sandpit. Cut and paste from my other post:
I did not say people won't leave for better jobs or a better life. However people who are rich who haven't left already (as per the topic) aren't now going to leave because of tax now.
People aren't going to leave now because of tax if they haven't already. They might however leave now if they worry that the incumbent government a) doesn't like them; and therefore b) is coming for them and this is only the start.
OMG. Starmer's government finally made a good decision*:
Nicholas Cecil @nicholascecil · 1h BREAKING NEWS: HS2 high-speed rail line will run to London Euston, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh confirms
*Edit: In sense of being better than stopping at Oak whatever it is called. St P is by far the most sensible connection in central London but that ship was sunk long ago.
They’ve made many good decisions.
Binned the iniquitous WFA.
Stopped the strikes.
Secured the Euston link.
More power to their elbow.
Scrapping welfare payments for rich pensioners was one of the best. A shame they allowed the media to frame it so negatively.
How did the motorway network ever get built in the first place?
Then how the f*** did we get from there to a position where we’ve already spend more than the cost of building the last bridge (£268m in 2023 money), just on the planning application for the next one!
That’s totally insane position to have moved in only 30 years.
The QEII Bridge was one year of consultation, two years of planning and financing, and three years of construction. This one’s been talked about for longer than that already!!!
We've laid on regulation after regulation and law after law and quango after quango over the last thirty years. Much of it judiciable and lots of special interest groups set up to exploit that.
Now the web is so tangled that no-one has a clue where to start with it.
The problem is that we don't enforce the regulations that matter (see the Grenfell Tower Fire Report) but impose a lot of pointless regulations that don't matter instead. We have all the disadvantages of a bureaucracy with none of its advantages.
This came across my screen as a side item on a Youtube Channel that has been covering the Bayesian - main element of that is that the company that built it has been feeding misleading BS to the Italian media blaimng the crew, the customer, 'anybody but me'. As would happen in the UK, it was a noisy take with a pretty map, so it was swallowed by the papers.
It's called the Manawanui, which is a word crying out to be a cocktail.
Manawanui, as you well know, is a Maori word meaning to be steadfast, stout-hearted, tolerant, patient, unwavering, resolute, persistent, committed, dedicated, unswerving, staunch, dogged, tolerant.
It can be used as a verb or a noun (as I'm sure you also knew).
"anui" is a common postfix for places within North Island, Wanganui (the town), Whanganui (pron. Fanganui, the longest navigable river in New Zealand, on which I have been).
I was wondering how long it would take for this story to reach the UK media. But then ferries can sink killing hundreds of passengers on Cook Straight and never make it into the UK media.
How about a thread about the Treaty of Waitangi, probably one of the most profound discussions happening in the western world at present. Very good documentary from ABC on Youtube but the presenter was very Maori good, Pakehi bad even if the non-Maori contributors refused to toe that line. The fact is the Treaty of Waitangi is racist by any definition used elsewhere. If the distinction is to continue then where does that leave the Chinese, Pacific non-Maori and most of all the mixed Maori Pakehi ?
I've been to Waitangi and one of the most surreal experiences of my life was to do the tour with the Maori guide and a group of very pleasant Maori engineering students.
Basically, it was all my fault - all the problems the Maori suffered and were suffering were related to guns, alcohol and religion which they got from me (personally, apparently) and without the British the Maori would have continued their idyllic existence to this day.
Now, I've got broad shoulders and was able to just about carry the weight of 150+ years of colonial guilt.
After the tour, the guide came over and profusely apologised for his comments and hoped I wasn't offended. I wasn't but I said simply "would you have been better off if it had been the French, the Americans or the Russians who had colonised New Zealand (I called it Aotearoa)? The guide thought for a moment and said "no, definitely not. If we had to be colonised, I'm glad it was by the British. The others would have wiped us out".
He strode off and I was left thinking "well, that's gratitude, I suppose".
OMG. Starmer's government finally made a good decision*:
Nicholas Cecil @nicholascecil · 1h BREAKING NEWS: HS2 high-speed rail line will run to London Euston, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh confirms
*Edit: In sense of being better than stopping at Oak whatever it is called. St P is by far the most sensible connection in central London but that ship was sunk long ago.
They didn't really have much choice, because Old Oak Common probably wouldn't have been able to cope with the volume of passengers.
Realistically, they didn't have much choice, though realism rarely constrained the last lot.
They did have a choice. They could have stuck with a silly OOC to Brum rump and pared back the service.
Infrastructure in this country is death by due process.
I was watching a documentary on the catastrophe of HS2 - now, whether you like it or not, think it's a good idea or not, isn't the issue.
The cost of doing the London-Birmingham link has ended up double the cost of doing the original lines all the way to Manchester and Leeds.
There have been huge issues with land purchase and we know the political impact of the project which began with the Chesham & Amersham by-election.
Rather like Crossrail, I suspect, though others on here have much greater knowledge, the project has been blighted from the start by wholly unrealistic assumptions on cost and budget and timescale.
I've seen this in my working life in both the public and private sectors and I think it's the core of a lot of our problems - we're frightened of telling ourselves the truth. We're scared of honesty in project management and reporting - no one wants to be the person telling the senior management their project is going to massively overrun because they think they will be the one with their head on the chopping block.
The other issue is continuity - continuity of commitment and continuity of personnel at the top of the project. HS2 suffered frequent changes of personnel as well as frequent changes of Government and Ministerial view.
Crossrail was £19bn as opposed to £15bn and was 3.5 years late (partly due to Covid) but completed its full scope and has exceeded all the benefits in its original business case.
It is not a failed project.
3.5 years late excluding the years of faffing around before starting...
Infrastructure in this country is death by due process.
I was watching a documentary on the catastrophe of HS2 - now, whether you like it or not, think it's a good idea or not, isn't the issue.
The cost of doing the London-Birmingham link has ended up double the cost of doing the original lines all the way to Manchester and Leeds.
There have been huge issues with land purchase and we know the political impact of the project which began with the Chesham & Amersham by-election.
Rather like Crossrail, I suspect, though others on here have much greater knowledge, the project has been blighted from the start by wholly unrealistic assumptions on cost and budget and timescale.
I've seen this in my working life in both the public and private sectors and I think it's the core of a lot of our problems - we're frightened of telling ourselves the truth. We're scared of honesty in project management and reporting - no one wants to be the person telling the senior management their project is going to massively overrun because they think they will be the one with their head on the chopping block.
The other issue is continuity - continuity of commitment and continuity of personnel at the top of the project. HS2 suffered frequent changes of personnel as well as frequent changes of Government and Ministerial view.
If you travel like me, you soon realise how many countries have cracked on and built high-speed rail
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
Unlike @kjh who wants us to know (or is it believe) that he is in the "£3M to £10M range" (lol), I do know people who are leaving or giving it serious consideration. This is the difference between the current public sector obsessed Labour Party and Blair's New Labour, the latter of which understood and encouraged wealth creation. Lord Mandelson needs to advise them to get a grip quick before the economy becomes more and more fucked.
From my vantage point, in a small country well-known for having no personal income tax nor capital gains tax, with VAT at 5% and Corporation Tax 7%, rents are up around 30% year on year as the place is importing people faster than the many builders can keep up with demand.
Hi Sandpit. Cut and paste from my other post:
I did not say people won't leave for better jobs or a better life. However people who are rich who haven't left already (as per the topic) aren't now going to leave because of tax now.
We will disagree on that.
We already see real-world effects of the income tax rates which go up to 62% at the margin, and benefits withdrawal rates that are similarly high. Plenty on here are aware of people choosing to reduce hours to avoid the higher tax rates.
If you increase the top rate of CGT from 28% to 45%, you’ll absolutely change behaviours with regard to investment and divestment.
Infrastructure in this country is death by due process.
I was watching a documentary on the catastrophe of HS2 - now, whether you like it or not, think it's a good idea or not, isn't the issue.
The cost of doing the London-Birmingham link has ended up double the cost of doing the original lines all the way to Manchester and Leeds.
There have been huge issues with land purchase and we know the political impact of the project which began with the Chesham & Amersham by-election.
Rather like Crossrail, I suspect, though others on here have much greater knowledge, the project has been blighted from the start by wholly unrealistic assumptions on cost and budget and timescale.
I've seen this in my working life in both the public and private sectors and I think it's the core of a lot of our problems - we're frightened of telling ourselves the truth. We're scared of honesty in project management and reporting - no one wants to be the person telling the senior management their project is going to massively overrun because they think they will be the one with their head on the chopping block.
The other issue is continuity - continuity of commitment and continuity of personnel at the top of the project. HS2 suffered frequent changes of personnel as well as frequent changes of Government and Ministerial view.
Crossrail was £19bn as opposed to £15bn and was 3.5 years late (partly due to Covid) but completed its full scope and has exceeded all the benefits in its original business case.
It is not a failed project.
Yes, and there's no reason why HS2 couldn't have been delivered to the original timescale and budget. Most of the increases to timescale have been from political can-kicking; most of the increases to budget have been from gold-plating (like tunnelling through politically sensitive countryside). And from not actually starting the thing, and therefore inflation.
EDIT: I'd also add that HS2 suffers a lot from eggs-in-one-basket syndrome. It's not unusual elsewhere in the world for infrastructure projects to drag on with politics getting in the way. But in most comparable countries there are probably 10-12 similarly scaled infrastructure projects going on at once. If one of them drags - like Berlin airport - it's much less glaring because other are going ahead. But if you only have one megaproject, it gets all the attention.
The 1922 committee used to make it clear what time the result of each vote would be announced, and what hours voting would take place, but for each round of this contest it's been almost impossible to find out.
All I can find is hustings in the morning and vote in the afternoon, and then the next vote tomorrow.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
It's very much a question of who is going to win the internal game of politics within the Labour Party.
The problem is they've managed to seriously restrict the options they have to play with when the best approach would be to add say 2p to income tax to reflect that the NI cuts were not sustainable...
Everything else is tinkering at the edges and doesn't solve any of the actual problems.
I'm afraid you're absolutely right, my friend.
Raising basic rate tax to 25p, higher rate to 50p and increasing thresholds by double the rate of inflation would be my approach but pace Blair and Brown in 1997, Starmer and Reeves were so desperate not to be pilloried as Kinnock and Smith had been in 1992 they shut down the main option from the start. I'd also undo the last two NI cuts which were simply half-hearted pre-election gimmicks which even Hunt knew (I suspect) weren't affordable.
The fact remains we are borrowing more than £100 billion every single year - now, when I've said we can't go on like that, we obviously can in terms of what the markets will support and we can take a view on debt interest payments and the amount they take out of the economy which could be used elsewhere.
The debate has been so poisoned it's now impossible to talk about direct tax rises - even the Conservatives couldn't do it so they created "fiscal drag" by freezing thresholds dragging more people into higher rate tax. Call it a "stealth tax" if you like not that it was very stealthy.
If we raise on the one side, we do have to look at the other side of the balance sheet - there is undoubtedly some fat to be trimmed especially in parts of the NHS, the armed forces (I strongly suspect) and other areas but there's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow either.
Ultimately there is no way out except for lower living standards or higher productivity.
With the first being very difficult politically and the second very difficult economically.
Or we could just increase income tax by a bit, to levels closer to our European neighbours.
Increasing income tax lowers living standards.
And if you want to compare with other European countries then you need to include national insurance (including employers national insurance) and whatever the equivalents are in those countries.
Also, factor in tax free allowances, pay rates and living costs.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
Unlike @kjh who wants us to know (or is it believe) that he is in the "£3M to £10M range" (lol), I do know people who are leaving or giving it serious consideration. This is the difference between the current public sector obsessed Labour Party and Blair's New Labour, the latter of which understood and encouraged wealth creation. Lord Mandelson needs to advise them to get a grip quick before the economy becomes more and more fucked.
From my vantage point, in a small country well-known for having no personal income tax nor capital gains tax, with VAT at 5% and Corporation Tax 7%, rents are up around 30% year on year as the place is importing people faster than the many builders can keep up with demand.
Hi Sandpit. Cut and paste from my other post:
I did not say people won't leave for better jobs or a better life. However people who are rich who haven't left already (as per the topic) aren't now going to leave because of tax now.
Infrastructure in this country is death by due process.
I was watching a documentary on the catastrophe of HS2 - now, whether you like it or not, think it's a good idea or not, isn't the issue.
The cost of doing the London-Birmingham link has ended up double the cost of doing the original lines all the way to Manchester and Leeds.
There have been huge issues with land purchase and we know the political impact of the project which began with the Chesham & Amersham by-election.
Rather like Crossrail, I suspect, though others on here have much greater knowledge, the project has been blighted from the start by wholly unrealistic assumptions on cost and budget and timescale.
I've seen this in my working life in both the public and private sectors and I think it's the core of a lot of our problems - we're frightened of telling ourselves the truth. We're scared of honesty in project management and reporting - no one wants to be the person telling the senior management their project is going to massively overrun because they think they will be the one with their head on the chopping block.
The other issue is continuity - continuity of commitment and continuity of personnel at the top of the project. HS2 suffered frequent changes of personnel as well as frequent changes of Government and Ministerial view.
Any state-funded infrastructureproject ALWAYS has ridiculously low cost estimates to get it approved, then they ramp up when sums have been spent, defying governmentto can it half way through.
What is interesting about HS2 is that Rishi did call the bluff - and did can it.
You need the private sector developing them. I come from a world where you must build a small town on stilts in the middle of the North Sea, capable of withstanding the once in a hundred year wave. And if your costs overrun by 10%, you will be replaced as operator of the projector by your joint venture partners.
How did the motorway network ever get built in the first place?
Then how the f*** did we get from there to a position where we’ve already spend more than the cost of building the last bridge (£268m in 2023 money), just on the planning application for the next one!
That’s totally insane position to have moved in only 30 years.
The QEII Bridge was one year of consultation, two years of planning and financing, and three years of construction. This one’s been talked about for longer than that already!!!
We've laid on regulation after regulation and law after law and quango after quango over the last thirty years. Much of it judiciable and lots of special interest groups set up to exploit that.
Now the web is so tangled that no-one has a clue where to start with it.
The problem is that we don't enforce the regulations that matter (see the Grenfell Tower Fire Report) but impose a lot of pointless regulations that don't matter instead. We have all the disadvantages of a bureaucracy with none of its advantages.
It's government by legislation as a performance art rather than through delivery.
Infrastructure in this country is death by due process.
I was watching a documentary on the catastrophe of HS2 - now, whether you like it or not, think it's a good idea or not, isn't the issue.
The cost of doing the London-Birmingham link has ended up double the cost of doing the original lines all the way to Manchester and Leeds.
There have been huge issues with land purchase and we know the political impact of the project which began with the Chesham & Amersham by-election.
Rather like Crossrail, I suspect, though others on here have much greater knowledge, the project has been blighted from the start by wholly unrealistic assumptions on cost and budget and timescale.
I've seen this in my working life in both the public and private sectors and I think it's the core of a lot of our problems - we're frightened of telling ourselves the truth. We're scared of honesty in project management and reporting - no one wants to be the person telling the senior management their project is going to massively overrun because they think they will be the one with their head on the chopping block.
The other issue is continuity - continuity of commitment and continuity of personnel at the top of the project. HS2 suffered frequent changes of personnel as well as frequent changes of Government and Ministerial view.
Crossrail was £19bn as opposed to £15bn and was 3.5 years late (partly due to Covid) but completed its full scope and has exceeded all the benefits in its original business case.
It is not a failed project.
Yes, and there's no reason why HS2 couldn't have been delivered to the original timescale and budget. Most of the increases to timescale have been from political can-kicking; most of the increases to budget have been from gold-plating (like tunnelling through politically sensitive countryside). And from not actually starting the thing, and therefore inflation.
You can also be absolutely sure that no-one is yet thinking about what to do with the capital and labour currently building HS2, once that project finishes.
One of the reasons HS2 took so long to get going in the first place, was a lack of equipment and skills that had to be purchased and trained before any railway building could start.
It would be typical of the project, for all that kit and knowledge to be lost when the line opens.
That means the next major rail projects need to be in the pipeline now, not in a decade’s time.
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
Telegraph writing scare article that has been written so many times before. Bearing in mind being a millionaire isn't what it was and it isn't that uncommon particularly in the SE and London. I know many people in the £3 - £10 million range and not one of us is discussing moving abroad. Buying a holiday home maybe, but that has always been so.
It is a repeating scare story. People have homes, communities, children to think of. Only once you get into huge amounts of money, probably without children do you float your residence.
People emigrate and often driven by a better job, but if you have already made it you don't move because of tax, you move for a new adventure, sun, retire, new job, etc.
I mean, we all know you’re quite dim, but really
You’ve maybe not noticed “the internet” which means that an awful lot more people can now work where they want, and they aren’t tied to location. Similarly you must have missed “the pandemic” which accelerated these changes
You completely missed the whole point didn't you? Yes people can work from home. In fact I did so since 1995 when I set up my own business until I retired so you know I am familiar and that was prior to an effective internet but you were not talking about aspiring people who will move for a better job and that might be an issue. It was specifically about the 'rich' moving abroad. If you have already made it and are wealthy and still here tax will not drive you away It is the old often repeated scare story. If you are that rich and still here, why haven't you gone already?
The fact that you fail to understand this demonstrates that your pretence about being in the "£3M to £10M range" is a sad fantasy. Funny how some people on here want to try and impress people they don't know. I am sure it must be a psychosis. Anyway, well done on selling your shop, and now lazing around doing nothing, but please stop trying to make out you are a hotshot. Even if you are (which if you were you wouldn't even hint) because nobody cares.
@Nigel_Foremain See my other post in reply to you on this issue but it is odd you continue with this.
You seem to have some real envy problems. Not sure why this should happen now. I have no intention of trying to impress you or anyone else. It was an anecdote that was made in context. It would have made no sense otherwise. My previous posts must have made clear I was pretty comfortable. I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone here. Various posts in the past refer to my wife who was a doctor working for a pharmaceutical company, I ran a consultancy, we own a 2nd home in Southwold and I have mentioned my very large garden in Surrey. All individually in context of discussions on here. Surely it comes as no surprise that I have retired fairly wealthy.
Why has this suddenly got to you? Why are you not hassling others whose posts clearly imply they are obviously well off or me on an earlier occasion?
Labour are chasing away the rich 1%, who pay 30% of our entire tax take. The world has changed and people can work remotely
Labour are going to run out of money, they will have to tax more and more, driving away MORE rich people - meanwhile poor people keep arriving. We’re in a doom loop
While there is definitely an exodus of millionaires - I know one or two who have already gone - the big risk is the brain drain of the young and ambitious.
What's left in broken britain for people other than to be pay pigs for unproductive spongers and boat people? If you're in your 20s, bright, ambitious, you can stay in broken britain and be taxed to the eyeballs while being unable to ever save money to get on the property ladder (and be cheated at every turn if you finally do), or you can bugger off to Dubai, pay 0% tax and like as not avoid the graduate tax aka student loan while you're at it.
It's not just the millionaires we'll lose over the next five years. It's the young and ambitious who can make more and pay less tax elsewhere.
It probably won't be long before Rachel Thieves puts in place exchange controls. The basic problem is that Labour does not understand wealth creation. It is a party for the public sector, hence the reason why NHS consultants and senior managers will retire with tax-free pension pots of £2.5M, while wealth generators will have any sale of a business that they have built up taxed, taxed and more taxed!
If she does anything like the IFS recommendation of setting CGT at income tax rates, the amount of capital flight will be catastrophic, as will the collapse in FDI. There would be no incentive whatsoever to invest in a UK business, and no incentive for anyone of serious means to stay in the country, when there are so many other countries doing their best to encourage capital.
It's very much a question of who is going to win the internal game of politics within the Labour Party.
The problem is they've managed to seriously restrict the options they have to play with when the best approach would be to add say 2p to income tax to reflect that the NI cuts were not sustainable...
Everything else is tinkering at the edges and doesn't solve any of the actual problems.
I'm afraid you're absolutely right, my friend.
Raising basic rate tax to 25p, higher rate to 50p and increasing thresholds by double the rate of inflation would be my approach but pace Blair and Brown in 1997, Starmer and Reeves were so desperate not to be pilloried as Kinnock and Smith had been in 1992 they shut down the main option from the start. I'd also undo the last two NI cuts which were simply half-hearted pre-election gimmicks which even Hunt knew (I suspect) weren't affordable.
The fact remains we are borrowing more than £100 billion every single year - now, when I've said we can't go on like that, we obviously can in terms of what the markets will support and we can take a view on debt interest payments and the amount they take out of the economy which could be used elsewhere.
The debate has been so poisoned it's now impossible to talk about direct tax rises - even the Conservatives couldn't do it so they created "fiscal drag" by freezing thresholds dragging more people into higher rate tax. Call it a "stealth tax" if you like not that it was very stealthy.
If we raise on the one side, we do have to look at the other side of the balance sheet - there is undoubtedly some fat to be trimmed especially in parts of the NHS, the armed forces (I strongly suspect) and other areas but there's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow either.
Ultimately there is no way out except for lower living standards or higher productivity.
With the first being very difficult politically and the second very difficult economically.
Or we could just increase income tax by a bit, to levels closer to our European neighbours.
Increasing income tax lowers living standards.
And if you want to compare with other European countries then you need to include national insurance (including employers national insurance) and whatever the equivalents are in those countries.
Also, factor in tax free allowances, pay rates and living costs.
Not to mention other taxes and charges.
Some countries raise taxes by one means, others by different ways.
For example, in Puglia, Italy:
The cost of living is a fraction of what it is in the UK. Oldham and Akhurst pay no council tax as this is their primary residence, although six rubbish collections a week cost €5,600 a year.
Infrastructure in this country is death by due process.
I was watching a documentary on the catastrophe of HS2 - now, whether you like it or not, think it's a good idea or not, isn't the issue.
The cost of doing the London-Birmingham link has ended up double the cost of doing the original lines all the way to Manchester and Leeds.
There have been huge issues with land purchase and we know the political impact of the project which began with the Chesham & Amersham by-election.
Rather like Crossrail, I suspect, though others on here have much greater knowledge, the project has been blighted from the start by wholly unrealistic assumptions on cost and budget and timescale.
I've seen this in my working life in both the public and private sectors and I think it's the core of a lot of our problems - we're frightened of telling ourselves the truth. We're scared of honesty in project management and reporting - no one wants to be the person telling the senior management their project is going to massively overrun because they think they will be the one with their head on the chopping block.
The other issue is continuity - continuity of commitment and continuity of personnel at the top of the project. HS2 suffered frequent changes of personnel as well as frequent changes of Government and Ministerial view.
Crossrail was £19bn as opposed to £15bn and was 3.5 years late (partly due to Covid) but completed its full scope and has exceeded all the benefits in its original business case.
It is not a failed project.
3.5 years late excluding the years of faffing around before starting...
Didn't Crossrail experience some very tricky tunnelling conditions though? Lots of standing around stroking beards and going "Hmmmmmmmmmmm....." required.
OMG. Starmer's government finally made a good decision*:
Nicholas Cecil @nicholascecil · 1h BREAKING NEWS: HS2 high-speed rail line will run to London Euston, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh confirms
*Edit: In sense of being better than stopping at Oak whatever it is called. St P is by far the most sensible connection in central London but that ship was sunk long ago.
They’ve made many good decisions.
Binned the iniquitous WFA.
Stopped the strikes.
Secured the Euston link.
More power to their elbow.
Scrapping welfare payments for rich pensioners was one of the best. A shame they allowed the media to frame it so negatively.
Indeed. Although I’m more interested in the substance of their policies than the presentation, particularly this far out from an election.
They will learn how to handle a hypocritical media, in time.
Infrastructure in this country is death by due process.
I was watching a documentary on the catastrophe of HS2 - now, whether you like it or not, think it's a good idea or not, isn't the issue.
The cost of doing the London-Birmingham link has ended up double the cost of doing the original lines all the way to Manchester and Leeds.
There have been huge issues with land purchase and we know the political impact of the project which began with the Chesham & Amersham by-election.
Rather like Crossrail, I suspect, though others on here have much greater knowledge, the project has been blighted from the start by wholly unrealistic assumptions on cost and budget and timescale.
I've seen this in my working life in both the public and private sectors and I think it's the core of a lot of our problems - we're frightened of telling ourselves the truth. We're scared of honesty in project management and reporting - no one wants to be the person telling the senior management their project is going to massively overrun because they think they will be the one with their head on the chopping block.
The other issue is continuity - continuity of commitment and continuity of personnel at the top of the project. HS2 suffered frequent changes of personnel as well as frequent changes of Government and Ministerial view.
Crossrail was £19bn as opposed to £15bn and was 3.5 years late (partly due to Covid) but completed its full scope and has exceeded all the benefits in its original business case.
It is not a failed project.
Yes, and there's no reason why HS2 couldn't have been delivered to the original timescale and budget. Most of the increases to timescale have been from political can-kicking; most of the increases to budget have been from gold-plating (like tunnelling through politically sensitive countryside). And from not actually starting the thing, and therefore inflation.
You can also be absolutely sure that no-one is yet thinking about what to do with the capital and labour currently building HS2, once that project finishes.
One of the reasons HS2 took so long to get going in the first place, was a lack of equipment and skills that had to be purchased and trained before any railway building could start.
It would be typical of the project, for all that kit and knowledge to be lost when the line opens.
That means the next major rail projects need to be in the pipeline now, not in a decade’s time.
Agree entirely (see my comment in the edit about eggs-in-one-basket syndrome!)
To be fair, some thought has been put into this. HS2 started some sort of construction training academy with the idea of creating a skilled body of workers who could work on a pipeline of projects like this - seen by unions, management and government alike as a Good Thing. Though I'm not sure how prominently this features in the minds of decision makers.
Comments
They are also making a complete horlicks of things
What is being labelled 'right' is awkwardly split between what you might call 'Fortress Britain + Selective Welfarism' and centrist One Nationism.
The left is even more split between cautious pro capitalist pragmatism, various single issue fanaticisms and the proper 'old time religion' left, itself split between fashionable and unfashionable lefts.
New Zealand navy ship drives into reef, catches fire and sinks.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/07/new-zealand-navy-ship-manawanui-sinks-off-samoa
It's called the Manawanui, which is a word crying out to be a cocktail.
You’ve maybe not noticed “the internet” which means that an awful lot more people can now work where they want, and they aren’t tied to location. Similarly you must have missed “the pandemic” which accelerated these changes
A prescient Spectator article, here
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-work-from-home-when-you-can-work-from-paradise/
And at the moment the latter has a commanding majority. As in the last parliament.
Much like the Berlin Wall, there was plenty of clamour to get out, not so many people hopping over the fence trying to get back in...
Almost allegorically, a fine morning but showers and storms are coming to my part of the world.
The latest More In Common polling returns the split between Con/Ref and Lab/LD/Green to parity at 47 each which was the score at the 2019 election - of course then the split on the forner was 45/2 rather than the 28/19 we see today which makes all the difference.
We will probably gain more or less insight from the 18 council by-elections due this Thursday - I suspect we'll see a common pattern of Labour vote collapse but it may well be the "gains" will be evenly spread among other parties and we have some Con/LD contests to add particular spice.
At the moment, we live in a world of paradox - apparently, "millionaires" (or should that be billionaires) are leaving as fast as illegal immigrants are arriving (so much for the one-in, one-out policy). We're also told on the one hand there will be power cuts this winter due to "Labour" shutting down the last coal-fired power station (though the decision was taken long before in the Conservative years) and yet Neso seem to think we have plenty of available energy and the risk of power cuts is the lowest for four years:
We are told on the one hand the construction industry is in strong shape with strong PMIs indicating growth and new building surging ahead, yet on the other, the Mail reports projects are grinding to a halt and builders and other trades are desperately looking for work.
We are told the Labour Government is "talking down" Britain and spreading "doom and gloom" yet the most pessimistic stories are in media which are opposed to the Govenrment so if anyone is talking down the country and the economy it's supporters of the main opposition party.
The truth, I was once told, is "out there" - perhaps but where and whose truth I'm less certain.
The reviewers are right. Its superb
He says that if we roll back the regulations to where they were 25 years ago the fine art industry here will flourish again. Obviously that won't happen under the current incompetent and economically illiterate government, but it's something for the next one to bear in mind.
The problem is they've managed to seriously restrict the options they have to play with when the best approach would be to add say 2p to income tax to reflect that the NI cuts were not sustainable...
Everything else is tinkering at the edges and doesn't solve any of the actual problems.
We might have to actually overthrow this government
It can be used as a verb or a noun (as I'm sure you also knew).
“It’s official. A decision on the Lower Thames Crossing is delayed until May 2025.
360,000 pages, almost £300m spent, and the decision will be a year late.*
*This is assuming they don’t delay it again.”
https://x.com/sam_dumitriu/status/1843367998448644169?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
The speed with which Victorians just cracked on & built things now seems astonishing. Parliamentary approval for branch line to Crystal Palace was granted in July 1853 & apparently within weeks, yes WEEKS, they were building the cutting. Can you imagine that today?
https://x.com/boys_nicholas/status/1843067940314423492
Thanks.
Raising basic rate tax to 25p, higher rate to 50p and increasing thresholds by double the rate of inflation would be my approach but pace Blair and Brown in 1997, Starmer and Reeves were so desperate not to be pilloried as Kinnock and Smith had been in 1992 they shut down the main option from the start. I'd also undo the last two NI cuts which were simply half-hearted pre-election gimmicks which even Hunt knew (I suspect) weren't affordable.
The fact remains we are borrowing more than £100 billion every single year - now, when I've said we can't go on like that, we obviously can in terms of what the markets will support and we can take a view on debt interest payments and the amount they take out of the economy which could be used elsewhere.
The debate has been so poisoned it's now impossible to talk about direct tax rises - even the Conservatives couldn't do it so they created "fiscal drag" by freezing thresholds dragging more people into higher rate tax. Call it a "stealth tax" if you like not that it was very stealthy.
If we raise on the one side, we do have to look at the other side of the balance sheet - there is undoubtedly some fat to be trimmed especially in parts of the NHS, the armed forces (I strongly suspect) and other areas but there's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow either.
Absolutely pathetic.
99.9% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
Same with socialists.
I despair of this country. I really do.
Then how the f*** did we get from there to a position where we’ve already spent more than the cost of building the last bridge (£268m in 2023 money), just on the planning application for the next one!
That’s totally insane position to have moved in only 30 years.
The QEII Bridge was one year of consultation, two years of planning and financing, and three years of construction. This one’s been talked about for longer than that already!!!
With the first being very difficult politically and the second very difficult economically.
We all know if the likes of Reform ever got anywhere near power they'd fall apart quicker than a Championship side promoted to the Premier League.
There's obviously benevolent dictatorship and such things do exist but not for long and it's amazing how quickly some elected via the democratic process seek to subvert that process in order to remain in power.
With the first being very difficult politically and the second very difficult economically.
He is confronted by this and responds that he is saving people and that if he didn't do it someone else would. And it all seems so reasonable.
And then the play invokes the plight (??) of an ordinary German soldier working at a concentration camp. Who could, more or less, say exactly the same thing.
On topic, I did not say people won't leave for better jobs or a better life. However people who are rich who haven't left already (as per the topic) aren't now going to leave because of tax.
Now the web is so tangled that no-one has a clue where to start with it.
We have a system where its profitable to talk about things.
Get on and build it.
Nicholas Cecil
@nicholascecil
·
1h
BREAKING NEWS: HS2 high-speed rail line will run to London Euston, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh confirms
*Edit: In sense of being better than stopping at Oak whatever it is called. St P is by far the most sensible connection in central London but that ship was sunk long ago.
The Kosovan rainstorm has scared Leon into rank madness.
Be gentle. Be kind.
We pray for our brother and hope one day he will return to us.
I was wondering how long it would take for this story to reach the UK media. But then ferries can sink killing hundreds of passengers on Cook Straight and never make it into the UK media.
How about a thread about the Treaty of Waitangi, probably one of the most profound discussions happening in the western world at present. Very good documentary from ABC on Youtube but the presenter was very Maori good, Pakehi bad even if the non-Maori contributors refused to toe that line. The fact is the Treaty of Waitangi is racist by any definition used elsewhere. If the distinction is to continue then where does that leave the Chinese, Pacific non-Maori and most of all the mixed Maori Pakehi ?
Binned the iniquitous WFA.
Stopped the strikes.
Secured the Euston link.
More power to their elbow.
The cost of doing the London-Birmingham link has ended up double the cost of doing the original lines all the way to Manchester and Leeds.
There have been huge issues with land purchase and we know the political impact of the project which began with the Chesham & Amersham by-election.
Rather like Crossrail, I suspect, though others on here have much greater knowledge, the project has been blighted from the start by wholly unrealistic assumptions on cost and budget and timescale.
I've seen this in my working life in both the public and private sectors and I think it's the core of a lot of our problems - we're frightened of telling ourselves the truth. We're scared of honesty in project management and reporting - no one wants to be the person telling the senior management their project is going to massively overrun because they think they will be the one with their head on the chopping block.
The other issue is continuity - continuity of commitment and continuity of personnel at the top of the project. HS2 suffered frequent changes of personnel as well as frequent changes of Government and Ministerial view.
I did not say people won't leave for better jobs or a better life. However people who are rich who haven't left already (as per the topic) aren't now going to leave because of tax now.
Hands up anyone who has ever been asked to change a document so that it is both more detailed and more succinct?
AI will result in even more documentation, which is only read by other AI.
*Most half-arsed pb stat ever.
I see a lot of these when it comes to council tick box exercises.
As noted before, it really is astonishing how so many in the Alt-right, like Musk, had their formative years under the apartheid regime.
The 1922 committee used to make it clear what time the result of each vote would be announced, and what hours voting would take place, but for each round of this contest it's been almost impossible to find out.
It is not a failed project.
Basically, it was all my fault - all the problems the Maori suffered and were suffering were related to guns, alcohol and religion which they got from me (personally, apparently) and without the British the Maori would have continued their idyllic existence to this day.
Now, I've got broad shoulders and was able to just about carry the weight of 150+ years of colonial guilt.
After the tour, the guide came over and profusely apologised for his comments and hoped I wasn't offended. I wasn't but I said simply "would you have been better off if it had been the French, the Americans or the Russians who had colonised New Zealand (I called it Aotearoa)? The guide thought for a moment and said "no, definitely not. If we had to be colonised, I'm glad it was by the British. The others would have wiped us out".
He strode off and I was left thinking "well, that's gratitude, I suppose".
Thankfully they made a better decision.
It isn’t just Japan, France, China, Italy, Spain
It’s Turkey, Morocco, Egypt, Poland, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Saudi…
And Britain, which birthed the railway, finally decides that ours might go to Euston in about 2045
We already see real-world effects of the income tax rates which go up to 62% at the margin, and benefits withdrawal rates that are similarly high. Plenty on here are aware of people choosing to reduce hours to avoid the higher tax rates.
If you increase the top rate of CGT from 28% to 45%, you’ll absolutely change behaviours with regard to investment and divestment.
EDIT: I'd also add that HS2 suffers a lot from eggs-in-one-basket syndrome. It's not unusual elsewhere in the world for infrastructure projects to drag on with politics getting in the way. But in most comparable countries there are probably 10-12 similarly scaled infrastructure projects going on at once. If one of them drags - like Berlin airport - it's much less glaring because other are going ahead.
But if you only have one megaproject, it gets all the attention.
And if you want to compare with other European countries then you need to include national insurance (including employers national insurance) and whatever the equivalents are in those countries.
Also, factor in tax free allowances, pay rates and living costs.
What is interesting about HS2 is that Rishi did call the bluff - and did can it.
You need the private sector developing them. I come from a world where you must build a small town on stilts in the middle of the North Sea, capable of withstanding the once in a hundred year wave. And if your costs overrun by 10%, you will be replaced as operator of the projector by your joint venture partners.
One of the reasons HS2 took so long to get going in the first place, was a lack of equipment and skills that had to be purchased and trained before any railway building could start.
It would be typical of the project, for all that kit and knowledge to be lost when the line opens.
That means the next major rail projects need to be in the pipeline now, not in a decade’s time.
You seem to have some real envy problems. Not sure why this should happen now. I have no intention of trying to impress you or anyone else. It was an anecdote that was made in context. It would have made no sense otherwise. My previous posts must have made clear I was pretty comfortable. I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone here. Various posts in the past refer to my wife who was a doctor working for a pharmaceutical company, I ran a consultancy, we own a 2nd home in Southwold and I have mentioned my very large garden in Surrey. All individually in context of discussions on here. Surely it comes as no surprise that I have retired fairly wealthy.
Why has this suddenly got to you? Why are you not hassling others whose posts clearly imply they are obviously well off or me on an earlier occasion?
Weird.
Can we stop talking about me now.
Some countries raise taxes by one means, others by different ways.
For example, in Puglia, Italy:
The cost of living is a fraction of what it is in the UK. Oldham and Akhurst pay no council tax as this is their primary residence, although six rubbish collections a week cost €5,600 a year.
https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/property-home/article/we-moved-to-a-farmhouse-in-puglia-for-la-dolce-vita-n82lvlj58
They will learn how to handle a hypocritical media, in time.
To be fair, some thought has been put into this. HS2 started some sort of construction training academy with the idea of creating a skilled body of workers who could work on a pipeline of projects like this - seen by unions, management and government alike as a Good Thing. Though I'm not sure how prominently this features in the minds of decision makers.