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 other problem is that HS2 isn't a single project - we've combined multiple projects into a single project because the existing network is running at capacity.
compare HS2 to the Milan / Rome HS2 route. That consisted of building the track with stops using the existing stations at Bologna / Florence .... Then they added a tunnel through Bologna to reduce journey times with platforms underground and now they are doing the same in Florence.
Here we have to build a new station at Birmingham because New Street is at capacity, we need a station at Euston because that is at capacity and we need work at Crewe / Manchester for similar reasons.
And that's only half the issue - we've then merged other required projects into HS2 for convenience - so Euston's mainline station rebuild is bundled into HS2. Crossrail 2 is delayed so the rebuilding of Euston's underground station is also now part of HS2. I could continue for hours but I think you get this point.
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".
If Whanganui is pronounced Fanganui why don't they spell it that way?
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.
Oh indeed. The industry realised they needed to skill up for HS2, but the decision makers need to remember the need to keep those skills current and in use.
It’s a bit like the naval shipyard, you have to keep giving them projects because it’s stragically important that the place doesn’t shut down. Modern government appears to be all tactics and no strategy.
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.
The academy has been mothballed for quite some time.
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".
If Whanganui is pronounced Fanganui why don't they spell it that way?
If Greenwich is pronounced Grenich why don't they spell it that way?
Some encouragement for Harris supporters in terms of voter demographics and whose more likely to vote .
Latest polling shows her 18 points ahead in white with a college degree or higher . That puts her 3 points ahead of Biden in 2020 at this stage .
That demographic is likely to be around 41% of the vote, the highest on record . That group also votes at a higher rate .
In total Harris is ahead 21 points in all those with a college degree or higher .
The underlying data and anecdata consistently points to a very convincing Harris win. The polls point to the horse race that suits the American media and both campaigns who fund most of them.
I don’t believe the polls.
It's the treatment of likelihood to vote that is unclear in the polls. We know Kamala has a big advantage with graduates. How is that reflected in the reported vote share?
Ipsos detailed data shows 63% absolutely certain to vote and 11% probably will vote. NB The actual turnout last time was 66%.
There is no breakdown of intention to vote by party, nor any explanation of how this data is used to adjust raw voting intention.
So I agree with you. I have consistently forecast a Kamala landslide and still do. It is in the interests of both parties and the media to promote a close result. I don't think it will be.
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.
They really really will
Why? What will they gain? I note @MarqueeMark liked, but he hasn't left.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
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 other problem is that HS2 isn't a single project - we've combined multiple projects into a single project because the existing network is running at capacity.
compare HS2 to the Milan / Rome HS2 route. That consisted of building the track with stops using the existing stations at Bologna / Florence .... Then they added a tunnel through Bologna to reduce journey times with platforms underground and now they are doing the same in Florence.
Here we have to build a new station at Birmingham because New Street is at capacity, we need a station at Euston because that is at capacity and we need work at Crewe / Manchester for similar reasons.
And that's only half the issue - we've then merged other required projects into HS2 for convenience - so Euston's mainline station rebuild is bundled into HS2. Crossrail 2 is delayed so the rebuilding of Euston's underground station is also now part of HS2. I could continue for hours but I think you get this point.
A better case could be made for the Lower Thames Crossing if it were combined with Boris Island Airport. It's 30 years since we built Hong Kong International on our way out of the door. Beijing whinged about it at the time but they're not whinging 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.
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.
Actually, kjh said "£3 - £10 million". I also know a lot of people (and am myself) in that range. After all, £3 is not a great deal of net worth
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.
They really really will
It seems odd to think that those motivated enough by money to become very rich - and who are willing to make the sacrifices that becoming rich necessitates - will be suddenly indifferent to money when governments come to take it from them.
I mean, I'm unlikely to move abroad. But that's because my motivations, ultimately, aren't money: they are family, leisure, an easy life. And thus I stay in the UK, and do not become particularly rich. And this is true for most of us. But for those relatively few people who have already demonstrated they are willing to sacrifice time with their families and friends, willing to work long hours, willing to significantly inconvenience themselves, willing to live in many cases to live in an expensive global megacity like London, in order to acquire wealth - they're already demonstrating that they value the acquisition of wealth more than they value the benefits you get of living in the UK. If you're going to spend all hours working, you could be anywhere - why not be somewhere which won't confiscate your wealth at every turn?
“🆕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.
I think a more useful split is between educated intelligent people and uneducated thickies. Same in the US. But which is in the majority?
If you did a cluster analysis of voting intention, I suspect the educated/uneducated metric would dominate age, sex, geography etc.
There will be outliers - educated rightwingers and uneducated left wingers, but they will be exceptions.
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.
They really really will
It seems odd to think that those motivated enough by money to become very rich - and who are willing to make the sacrifices that becoming rich necessitates - will be suddenly indifferent to money when governments come to take it from them.
I mean, I'm unlikely to move abroad. But that's because my motivations, ultimately, aren't money: they are family, leisure, an easy life. And thus I stay in the UK, and do not become particularly rich. And this is true for most of us. But for those relatively few people who have already demonstrated they are willing to sacrifice time with their families and friends, willing to work long hours, willing to significantly inconvenience themselves, willing to live in many cases to live in an expensive global megacity like London, in order to acquire wealth - they're already demonstrating that they value the acquisition of wealth more than they value the benefits you get of living in the UK. If you're going to spend all hours working, you could be anywhere - why not be somewhere which won't confiscate your wealth at every turn?
And with sunshine. And where you can wear your Breitling watch
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.
This has been the same curse for every big project in the UK, from aerospace to energy to infrastructure pretty much since the 1960s.
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.
Oh I agree. I have said that several times in my replies. That wasn't the point originally being made.
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.
They really really will
Why? What will they gain? I note @MarqueeMark liked, but he hasn't left.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
As I said, taxes, schmaxes. But many rich people might get the feeling that this govt is coming for them and this is just the start.
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 other problem is that HS2 isn't a single project - we've combined multiple projects into a single project because the existing network is running at capacity.
compare HS2 to the Milan / Rome HS2 route. That consisted of building the track with stops using the existing stations at Bologna / Florence .... Then they added a tunnel through Bologna to reduce journey times with platforms underground and now they are doing the same in Florence.
Here we have to build a new station at Birmingham because New Street is at capacity, we need a station at Euston because that is at capacity and we need work at Crewe / Manchester for similar reasons.
And that's only half the issue - we've then merged other required projects into HS2 for convenience - so Euston's mainline station rebuild is bundled into HS2. Crossrail 2 is delayed so the rebuilding of Euston's underground station is also now part of HS2. I could continue for hours but I think you get this point.
A better case could be made for the Lower Thames Crossing if it were combined with Boris Island Airport. It's 30 years since we built Hong Kong International on our way out of the door. Beijing whinged about it at the time but they're not whinging now.
The problem with doing that is that it would dual purpose the Lower Thames Crossing and increase demand such that I think it would be at capacity instantly...
Now I don't have a problem with Boris Island - it makes sense and opens up Heathrow for a lot of housing but you would need an LTC for Boris Island by itself.
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.
You think something like not being able to cope with actual passengers is going to stop politicians fucking up again?
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".
If Whanganui is pronounced Fanganui why don't they spell it that way?
If Greenwich is pronounced Grenich why don't they spell it that way?
If we'd retrofitted the Roman alphabet to spoken English in the mid-nineteenth century we probably would have done.
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.
They really really will
Why? What will they gain? I note @MarqueeMark liked, but he hasn't left.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
As I said, taxes, schmaxes. But many rich people might get the feeling that this govt is coming for them and this is just the start.
Top tip - they could just cancel their Telegraph and Speccie subscriptions and this feeling would miraculously disappear. Much cheaper than leaving the country too.
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.
AIUI the majority of the cost of the project is the tunnels into Euston. The cost of extension northwards is about the same, or even less. So could we now get serious and build the whole project?
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.
Actually, kjh said "£3 - £10 million". I also know a lot of people (and am myself) in that range. After all, £3 is not a great deal of net worth
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".
If Whanganui is pronounced Fanganui why don't they spell it that way?
Same reason as 'cough' and 'bough' are pronounced differently. I noted the other day that, allegedly anyway, the reason the Normans didn't replace the Saxon earldoms with counts was because of the way many of the Saxons pronounced the word 'Count". It's why the wife of an Earl is a Countess.
sundersays.bsky.social @sundersays.bsky.social · 2h Labour had around half a million fewer votes (net) in 2024 than 2019. That it lost over half a million ethnic minority votes was a major contributor to its lower vote total and its modest vote share. Focaldata report Labour fell 28% with Muslim voters, mainly to Greens (12%) and Independents (15%)
Your maths is right, but your inputs are wrong. The 360,000 pages figure, while oft repeated, has been debunked.
And the overall cost includes stuff like the land they bought to allow the tunnel to happen.
The figure was Ai-generated bollocks and we should be grateful to the PBer who caught it.
Chapeau to Carnforth for spotting it
(I'm sure PB can guess which poster fell for and propagated the AI nonsense...)
The irony is that artificially inflating the page count reduces the cost per page*. After all, £829.31 per page is a snip if lawyers are involved
*which is indeed a nonsense given the costs are in many other places than paper pushing
Actually the 360,000 pages figure is accurate if you count ALL submitted documents. Some seem to be duplicates or “rebuttals” etc
So it’s right in terms of submitted evidence
It also includes gems like this:
“Some documents are also rather bizarre such as the List of all respondents to statutory consultation in the Consultation Report [APP-078] which is 900 pages of mostly a single column of objectors’ registration numbers.”
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.
London, and the South East generally, is a right bugger to tunnel in. Soft silts and muds. Manchester - indeed most of the north - is a tunneller's dream. Sandstones soft enough to tunnel through but hard enough to stay up after. I recommend a trip on the Liverpool underground: in, I think, Moorfields, you can see the original exposed stone a century after it was excavated, still standing untroubled.
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 other problem is that HS2 isn't a single project - we've combined multiple projects into a single project because the existing network is running at capacity.
compare HS2 to the Milan / Rome HS2 route. That consisted of building the track with stops using the existing stations at Bologna / Florence .... Then they added a tunnel through Bologna to reduce journey times with platforms underground and now they are doing the same in Florence.
Here we have to build a new station at Birmingham because New Street is at capacity, we need a station at Euston because that is at capacity and we need work at Crewe / Manchester for similar reasons.
And that's only half the issue - we've then merged other required projects into HS2 for convenience - so Euston's mainline station rebuild is bundled into HS2. Crossrail 2 is delayed so the rebuilding of Euston's underground station is also now part of HS2. I could continue for hours but I think you get this point.
A better case could be made for the Lower Thames Crossing if it were combined with Boris Island Airport. It's 30 years since we built Hong Kong International on our way out of the door. Beijing whinged about it at the time but they're not whinging now.
The problem with doing that is that it would dual purpose the Lower Thames Crossing and increase demand such that I think it would be at capacity instantly...
Now I don't have a problem with Boris Island - it makes sense and opens up Heathrow for a lot of housing but you would need an LTC for Boris Island by itself.
I know he has a lot of progeny but it does strike me as being a tad excessive to create a whole new island for them.
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.
AIUI the majority of the cost of the project is the tunnels into Euston. The cost of extension northwards is about the same, or even less. So could we now get serious and build the whole project?
I wonder if Labour are thinking along these lines*
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.
They really really will
Why? What will they gain? I note @MarqueeMark liked, but he hasn't left.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
Everyone has their tipping point - for many wealthy the tipping point is based on the amount of tax they are being asked to cough up alongside the lack of appreciation and being used as scapegoats.
There will be many - and not the 3-10m people but the rich - who will reach that tipping point and those with older kids who can board or are about to start or at Uni then they will seriously consider leaving.
They can base themselves somewhere with low tax, Jersey for example, where they aren’t hated, they pay no CGT, no IHT, a couple of hundred grand plus a tiny % income tax pa, they can have 90 days of culture in London, they can jump on a plane and be in UK in an hour to see their kids or for meetings.
When they are asked where they should stick the new spin-off part of their business then it’s not the UK.
As house prices drop when they don’t need these homes for 90 days then the stamp tax take goes down.
The VAT on the high end shopping for cars, handbags goes.
The staff who are employed directly and indirectly go. The companies who service these people close as do the companies that service the companies.
There is a huge complacency in the UK about the wealthy, that they won’t move. They aren’t going to stay for the weather so make sure they have a reason.
I’ve mentioned previously in meeting many who are bringing over SHNW from UK to move here. This is happening in many friendly low tax jurisdictions.
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".
If Whanganui is pronounced Fanganui why don't they spell it that way?
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.
They really really will
Why? What will they gain? I note @MarqueeMark liked, but he hasn't left.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
As I said, taxes, schmaxes. But many rich people might get the feeling that this govt is coming for them and this is just the start.
Top tip - they could just cancel their Telegraph and Speccie subscriptions and this feeling would miraculously disappear. Much cheaper than leaving the country too.
The two most notable totemic issues for Lab over the past decade or two have been private school VAT and foxhunting.
Neither amount to a hill of beans economics (or indeed animal welfare-)wise but are red meat to the rank and file. And both are designed to make a point against a certain demographic who Lab believes are to be made to alter their beliefs with laws to back them up.
That doesn't come from the pages of the Speccie or the Telegraph.
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 other problem is that HS2 isn't a single project - we've combined multiple projects into a single project because the existing network is running at capacity.
compare HS2 to the Milan / Rome HS2 route. That consisted of building the track with stops using the existing stations at Bologna / Florence .... Then they added a tunnel through Bologna to reduce journey times with platforms underground and now they are doing the same in Florence.
Here we have to build a new station at Birmingham because New Street is at capacity, we need a station at Euston because that is at capacity and we need work at Crewe / Manchester for similar reasons.
And that's only half the issue - we've then merged other required projects into HS2 for convenience - so Euston's mainline station rebuild is bundled into HS2. Crossrail 2 is delayed so the rebuilding of Euston's underground station is also now part of HS2. I could continue for hours but I think you get this point.
A better case could be made for the Lower Thames Crossing if it were combined with Boris Island Airport. It's 30 years since we built Hong Kong International on our way out of the door. Beijing whinged about it at the time but they're not whinging now.
The problem with doing that is that it would dual purpose the Lower Thames Crossing and increase demand such that I think it would be at capacity instantly...
Now I don't have a problem with Boris Island - it makes sense and opens up Heathrow for a lot of housing but you would need an LTC for Boris Island by itself.
I know he has a lot of progeny but it does strike me as being a tad excessive to create a whole new island for them.
As a solution for where to build a modern airport the plan made an awful lot of sense provided you sorted out a few explosive wrecks and found the money..
unlike Bozo's other plans I couldn't see any blatantly obvious flaws in it apart from money but that could be fixed by using Heathrow as a new district of London..
“🆕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
What the polls showed in the run up to the election was a crash in Labour support , which I assume was the beginning of the widespread tactical voting that we saw at the GE.
The Tory vote share did not change much in the polls, but Reform, LD and Green starting to move significantly. If polls are useful for one thing, it's catching such movements - they just failed to pick up the massive scale of it.
Using that logic, and assuming that polls are understating the change since the election by 2x, I get:
🌹Lab 27 🌳Con 24 ➡️ Ref 25 🔶Lib Dem 11% 🌎 Green 9%
But I doubt it. I think things are probably quite stable, with the exception perhaps of a new movement to Reform.
They are also fairly meaningless four years out from the next election.
Still, if they keep the mind off the thought that an 80 seat majority was thrown away and there are now just 121 Conservative MPs in the House, they may be said to serve some purpose.
They keep the mind focussed on how wide and shallow Labour's support was last time - and how that might well bite them on the arse next time out.
If The Lord spares us all until then we'll all be happy, Mark!
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.
They really really will
Why? What will they gain? I note @MarqueeMark liked, but he hasn't left.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
As I said, taxes, schmaxes. But many rich people might get the feeling that this govt is coming for them and this is just the start.
Top tip - they could just cancel their Telegraph and Speccie subscriptions and this feeling would miraculously disappear. Much cheaper than leaving the country too.
The two most notable totemic issues for Lab over the past decade or two have been private school VAT and foxhunting.
Neither amount to a hill of beans economics (or indeed animal welfare-)wise but are red meat to the rank and file. And both are designed to make a point against a certain demographic who Lab believes are to be made to alter their beliefs with laws to back them up.
That doesn't come from the pages of the Speccie or the Telegraph.
That is such a warped view. The main concerns of the left are the NHS and education. Housing should have equal weight but doesn't. Fox hunting isn't in the top 20.
Your warped view comes from places like the Speccie and Telegraph, it is simply not real.
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.
They really really will
It seems odd to think that those motivated enough by money to become very rich - and who are willing to make the sacrifices that becoming rich necessitates - will be suddenly indifferent to money when governments come to take it from them.
I mean, I'm unlikely to move abroad. But that's because my motivations, ultimately, aren't money: they are family, leisure, an easy life. And thus I stay in the UK, and do not become particularly rich. And this is true for most of us. But for those relatively few people who have already demonstrated they are willing to sacrifice time with their families and friends, willing to work long hours, willing to significantly inconvenience themselves, willing to live in many cases to live in an expensive global megacity like London, in order to acquire wealth - they're already demonstrating that they value the acquisition of wealth more than they value the benefits you get of living in the UK. If you're going to spend all hours working, you could be anywhere - why not be somewhere which won't confiscate your wealth at every turn?
I don't know what percentage of those who are rich were driven by money in the first place. Many who are super rich I don't think are. They are driven by ambition and have drive. They have more money than they know what to do with.
Down the scale neither my wife nor I were driven by money. We wanted enough but after that it was having interesting job?
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.
They really really will
Why? What will they gain? I note @MarqueeMark liked, but he hasn't left.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
Everyone has their tipping point - for many wealthy the tipping point is based on the amount of tax they are being asked to cough up alongside the lack of appreciation and being used as scapegoats.
There will be many - and not the 3-10m people but the rich - who will reach that tipping point and those with older kids who can board or are about to start or at Uni then they will seriously consider leaving.
They can base themselves somewhere with low tax, Jersey for example, where they aren’t hated, they pay no CGT, no IHT, a couple of hundred grand plus a tiny % income tax pa, they can have 90 days of culture in London, they can jump on a plane and be in UK in an hour to see their kids or for meetings.
When they are asked where they should stick the new spin-off part of their business then it’s not the UK.
As house prices drop when they don’t need these homes for 90 days then the stamp tax take goes down.
The VAT on the high end shopping for cars, handbags goes.
The staff who are employed directly and indirectly go. The companies who service these people close as do the companies that service the companies.
There is a huge complacency in the UK about the wealthy, that they won’t move. They aren’t going to stay for the weather so make sure they have a reason.
I’ve mentioned previously in meeting many who are bringing over SHNW from UK to move here. This is happening in many friendly low tax jurisdictions.
It is happening. It is obviously happening. There are clear signs it is happening (London property and art markets etc). And the actual data shows it is happening
But @kjh assures us it’s not happening and won’t happen because he knows several rich people worth £3-10m and none of them is moving
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 other problem is that HS2 isn't a single project - we've combined multiple projects into a single project because the existing network is running at capacity.
compare HS2 to the Milan / Rome HS2 route. That consisted of building the track with stops using the existing stations at Bologna / Florence .... Then they added a tunnel through Bologna to reduce journey times with platforms underground and now they are doing the same in Florence.
Here we have to build a new station at Birmingham because New Street is at capacity, we need a station at Euston because that is at capacity and we need work at Crewe / Manchester for similar reasons.
And that's only half the issue - we've then merged other required projects into HS2 for convenience - so Euston's mainline station rebuild is bundled into HS2. Crossrail 2 is delayed so the rebuilding of Euston's underground station is also now part of HS2. I could continue for hours but I think you get this point.
A better case could be made for the Lower Thames Crossing if it were combined with Boris Island Airport. It's 30 years since we built Hong Kong International on our way out of the door. Beijing whinged about it at the time but they're not whinging now.
The problem with doing that is that it would dual purpose the Lower Thames Crossing and increase demand such that I think it would be at capacity instantly...
Now I don't have a problem with Boris Island - it makes sense and opens up Heathrow for a lot of housing but you would need an LTC for Boris Island by itself.
I know he has a lot of progeny but it does strike me as being a tad excessive to create a whole new island for them.
As a solution for where to build a modern airport the plan made an awful lot of sense provided you sorted out a few explosive wrecks and found the money..
unlike Bozo's other plans I couldn't see any blatantly obvious flaws in it apart from money but that could be fixed by using Heathrow as a new district of London..
Having for many years lived in SE Essex I think Boris Island..... which is after the second iteration of the idea ..... is a daft idea.
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.
Totally agree. I think Kemi gets this. She should have made it the centre of her appeal and expressed it in clear language.
Your maths is right, but your inputs are wrong. The 360,000 pages figure, while oft repeated, has been debunked.
And the overall cost includes stuff like the land they bought to allow the tunnel to happen.
The figure was Ai-generated bollocks and we should be grateful to the PBer who caught it.
Chapeau to Carnforth for spotting it
(I'm sure PB can guess which poster fell for and propagated the AI nonsense...)
The irony is that artificially inflating the page count reduces the cost per page*. After all, £829.31 per page is a snip if lawyers are involved
*which is indeed a nonsense given the costs are in many other places than paper pushing
Actually the 360,000 pages figure is accurate if you count ALL submitted documents. Some seem to be duplicates or “rebuttals” etc
So it’s right in terms of submitted evidence
It also includes gems like this:
“Some documents are also rather bizarre such as the List of all respondents to statutory consultation in the Consultation Report [APP-078] which is 900 pages of mostly a single column of objectors’ registration numbers.”
What's wrong with that? It's a bit silly that someone has pasted that into a word doc, but the cost of doing so is negligible.
If it's 360,000 pages of "DEI" then you may have a point. But if you've ever flicked through the technical drawings of something simple like a new road in a housing estate, it comes to hundreds of pages.
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".
If Whanganui is pronounced Fanganui why don't they spell it that way?
Same reason as 'cough' and 'bough' are pronounced differently. I noted the other day that, allegedly anyway, the reason the Normans didn't replace the Saxon earldoms with counts was because of the way many of the Saxons pronounced the word 'Count". It's why the wife of an Earl is a Countess.
Early internet days I got into a row with an American about 'improved' English spelling. "It wouldn't work," I argued, "because, for example, butter would be spelt bu'er in the East End of London and budder in The Land Of The Free." He didn't like it.
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 other problem is that HS2 isn't a single project - we've combined multiple projects into a single project because the existing network is running at capacity.
compare HS2 to the Milan / Rome HS2 route. That consisted of building the track with stops using the existing stations at Bologna / Florence .... Then they added a tunnel through Bologna to reduce journey times with platforms underground and now they are doing the same in Florence.
Here we have to build a new station at Birmingham because New Street is at capacity, we need a station at Euston because that is at capacity and we need work at Crewe / Manchester for similar reasons.
And that's only half the issue - we've then merged other required projects into HS2 for convenience - so Euston's mainline station rebuild is bundled into HS2. Crossrail 2 is delayed so the rebuilding of Euston's underground station is also now part of HS2. I could continue for hours but I think you get this point.
A better case could be made for the Lower Thames Crossing if it were combined with Boris Island Airport. It's 30 years since we built Hong Kong International on our way out of the door. Beijing whinged about it at the time but they're not whinging now.
The problem with doing that is that it would dual purpose the Lower Thames Crossing and increase demand such that I think it would be at capacity instantly...
Now I don't have a problem with Boris Island - it makes sense and opens up Heathrow for a lot of housing but you would need an LTC for Boris Island by itself.
I know he has a lot of progeny but it does strike me as being a tad excessive to create a whole new island for them.
As a solution for where to build a modern airport the plan made an awful lot of sense provided you sorted out a few explosive wrecks and found the money..
unlike Bozo's other plans I couldn't see any blatantly obvious flaws in it apart from money but that could be fixed by using Heathrow as a new district of London..
Having for many years lived in SE Essex I think Boris Island..... which is after the second iteration of the idea ..... is a daft idea.
The problem is that having your major airport on the wrong side of your capital city is an equally daft idea.
Many countries have relocated their airports over the years because it's cheaper than the other options - best to build afresh with 3 runaways and flight paths that go over the sea rather than people's houses.
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".
If Whanganui is pronounced Fanganui why don't they spell it that way?
The original settlers came from Aberdeenshire?
Hence their orthography for the Maori name?
Do Aberdonians pronounce Ws as Fs?
On the peculiarities of Aberdeen: you probably are all over this, but it only occurred to me recently: Aberdeen is unusual in Scotland in having a name whose derivation is Brythonic (i.e. Aber...) rather than Gaelic (in which case I think it would be Inver...) or Norse or Anglic (...mouth).
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.
Actually, kjh said "£3 - £10 million". I also know a lot of people (and am myself) in that range. After all, £3 is not a great deal of net worth
£3! thats still a fortune to many. When I was a lad we used to have to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick the road clean with tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.
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".
If Whanganui is pronounced Fanganui why don't they spell it that way?
If Greenwich is pronounced Grenich why don't they spell it that way?
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.
They really really will
Why? What will they gain? I note @MarqueeMark liked, but he hasn't left.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
As I said, taxes, schmaxes. But many rich people might get the feeling that this govt is coming for them and this is just the start.
Top tip - they could just cancel their Telegraph and Speccie subscriptions and this feeling would miraculously disappear. Much cheaper than leaving the country too.
The two most notable totemic issues for Lab over the past decade or two have been private school VAT and foxhunting.
Neither amount to a hill of beans economics (or indeed animal welfare-)wise but are red meat to the rank and file. And both are designed to make a point against a certain demographic who Lab believes are to be made to alter their beliefs with laws to back them up.
That doesn't come from the pages of the Speccie or the Telegraph.
That is such a warped view. The main concerns of the left are the NHS and education. Housing should have equal weight but doesn't. Fox hunting isn't in the top 20.
Your warped view comes from places like the Speccie and Telegraph, it is simply not real.
You obviously don't get out much amongst the Lab rank and file.
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.
They really really will
Why? What will they gain? I note @MarqueeMark liked, but he hasn't left.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
Everyone has their tipping point - for many wealthy the tipping point is based on the amount of tax they are being asked to cough up alongside the lack of appreciation and being used as scapegoats.
There will be many - and not the 3-10m people but the rich - who will reach that tipping point and those with older kids who can board or are about to start or at Uni then they will seriously consider leaving.
They can base themselves somewhere with low tax, Jersey for example, where they aren’t hated, they pay no CGT, no IHT, a couple of hundred grand plus a tiny % income tax pa, they can have 90 days of culture in London, they can jump on a plane and be in UK in an hour to see their kids or for meetings.
When they are asked where they should stick the new spin-off part of their business then it’s not the UK.
As house prices drop when they don’t need these homes for 90 days then the stamp tax take goes down.
The VAT on the high end shopping for cars, handbags goes.
The staff who are employed directly and indirectly go. The companies who service these people close as do the companies that service the companies.
There is a huge complacency in the UK about the wealthy, that they won’t move. They aren’t going to stay for the weather so make sure they have a reason.
I’ve mentioned previously in meeting many who are bringing over SHNW from UK to move here. This is happening in many friendly low tax jurisdictions.
I know HNW and UHNW - is SHNW "slightly high net worth"?
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
And Britain, which birthed the railway, finally decides that ours might go to Euston in about 2045
I don't disagree - the opening of the Shinkansen in 1959 inspired the French to create the TGV (it still took them 20 years) and by the mid 1980s everyone in Europe could see how successful it was and even the UK started looking at options including what would become HS2.
We had not long before had the "failure" of the tilting train which would have achieved higher speeds on existing tracks but its catastrophic test run took us down the route of the 125s - fine trains and some still in service I believe but the stretches of the track where they could reach maximum speed were limited.
The other problem was the strength of the pro-road lobby in the UK - most Ministers weren't interested in trains (Thatcher was no fan) and wanted road so we got the M25.
It can be done - we got the Channel Tunnel which ended up a rail link rather than a road link (as some originally wanted) but it took years to get the high speed rail from the coast to London and watching the Eurotunnel trains crawl through Orpington at 50 mph was embarrassing. Even with the new track, we botched Stratford "International" and it took a decade or more to use the former Eurostar terminal at Waterloo - even now, the tracks from Kent are unused excpet for freight.
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.
They really really will
Why? What will they gain? I note @MarqueeMark liked, but he hasn't left.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
As I said, taxes, schmaxes. But many rich people might get the feeling that this govt is coming for them and this is just the start.
Top tip - they could just cancel their Telegraph and Speccie subscriptions and this feeling would miraculously disappear. Much cheaper than leaving the country too.
The two most notable totemic issues for Lab over the past decade or two have been private school VAT and foxhunting.
Neither amount to a hill of beans economics (or indeed animal welfare-)wise but are red meat to the rank and file. And both are designed to make a point against a certain demographic who Lab believes are to be made to alter their beliefs with laws to back them up.
That doesn't come from the pages of the Speccie or the Telegraph.
That is such a warped view. The main concerns of the left are the NHS and education. Housing should have equal weight but doesn't. Fox hunting isn't in the top 20.
Your warped view comes from places like the Speccie and Telegraph, it is simply not real.
And yet the one thing Labour were sure to put in their paper-thin manifesto in the summer was their spiteful private school VAT policy...
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.
They really really will
Why? What will they gain? I note @MarqueeMark liked, but he hasn't left.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
As I said, taxes, schmaxes. But many rich people might get the feeling that this govt is coming for them and this is just the start.
Top tip - they could just cancel their Telegraph and Speccie subscriptions and this feeling would miraculously disappear. Much cheaper than leaving the country too.
The two most notable totemic issues for Lab over the past decade or two have been private school VAT and foxhunting.
Neither amount to a hill of beans economics (or indeed animal welfare-)wise but are red meat to the rank and file. And both are designed to make a point against a certain demographic who Lab believes are to be made to alter their beliefs with laws to back them up.
That doesn't come from the pages of the Speccie or the Telegraph.
That is such a warped view. The main concerns of the left are the NHS and education. Housing should have equal weight but doesn't. Fox hunting isn't in the top 20.
Your warped view comes from places like the Speccie and Telegraph, it is simply not real.
You obviously don't get out much amongst the Lab rank and file.
By the left I mean people on the left, not boring obsessives on the left. If you mean a tiny subset I'm sure you can find people who want to attack the rich, but they have little influence. UK democracy is a numbers game won and influenced by the centre and centre right.
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.
Lack of continuity is a HUGE problem, as is funding being announced, then not being actually agreed until perhaps half way through the spending period, then long term projects become impossible because if the money isn't physically spent by the end of the period the Treasury grabs it back.
Something along those lines is currently happening with Transport Funding packages for Mayors, which expire in a year or two - and the organisational capacity to spend the agreed investment effectively does not exist in LHAs.
On active travel, just a move to 3 year funding windows will be transformational if this Govt actually do what they have said.
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.
They really really will
Why? What will they gain? I note @MarqueeMark liked, but he hasn't left.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
As I said, taxes, schmaxes. But many rich people might get the feeling that this govt is coming for them and this is just the start.
Top tip - they could just cancel their Telegraph and Speccie subscriptions and this feeling would miraculously disappear. Much cheaper than leaving the country too.
The two most notable totemic issues for Lab over the past decade or two have been private school VAT and foxhunting.
Neither amount to a hill of beans economics (or indeed animal welfare-)wise but are red meat to the rank and file. And both are designed to make a point against a certain demographic who Lab believes are to be made to alter their beliefs with laws to back them up.
That doesn't come from the pages of the Speccie or the Telegraph.
That is such a warped view. The main concerns of the left are the NHS and education. Housing should have equal weight but doesn't. Fox hunting isn't in the top 20.
Your warped view comes from places like the Speccie and Telegraph, it is simply not real.
And yet the one thing Labour were sure to put in their paper-thin manifesto in the summer was their spiteful private school VAT policy...
That was the one thing? Nothing on NHS or state education. What is the point of gaslighting yourself?
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.
They really really will
Why? What will they gain? I note @MarqueeMark liked, but he hasn't left.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
Everyone has their tipping point - for many wealthy the tipping point is based on the amount of tax they are being asked to cough up alongside the lack of appreciation and being used as scapegoats.
There will be many - and not the 3-10m people but the rich - who will reach that tipping point and those with older kids who can board or are about to start or at Uni then they will seriously consider leaving.
They can base themselves somewhere with low tax, Jersey for example, where they aren’t hated, they pay no CGT, no IHT, a couple of hundred grand plus a tiny % income tax pa, they can have 90 days of culture in London, they can jump on a plane and be in UK in an hour to see their kids or for meetings.
When they are asked where they should stick the new spin-off part of their business then it’s not the UK.
As house prices drop when they don’t need these homes for 90 days then the stamp tax take goes down.
The VAT on the high end shopping for cars, handbags goes.
The staff who are employed directly and indirectly go. The companies who service these people close as do the companies that service the companies.
There is a huge complacency in the UK about the wealthy, that they won’t move. They aren’t going to stay for the weather so make sure they have a reason.
I’ve mentioned previously in meeting many who are bringing over SHNW from UK to move here. This is happening in many friendly low tax jurisdictions.
I know HNW and UHNW - is SHNW "slightly high net worth"?
Old habit - when I started in the industry what are now Ultras we called Supers. Ultra much more American and cool than our more subtle “Super”!
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".
If Whanganui is pronounced Fanganui why don't they spell it that way?
The original settlers came from Aberdeenshire?
Hence their orthography for the Maori name?
Do Aberdonians pronounce Ws as Fs?
On the peculiarities of Aberdeen: you probably are all over this, but it only occurred to me recently: Aberdeen is unusual in Scotland in having a name whose derivation is Brythonic (i.e. Aber...) rather than Gaelic (in which case I think it would be Inver...) or Norse or Anglic (...mouth).
Pictish, so Brythonic. Centred around the Moray Firth (Fortriu, a Pictish Kingdom, possible capital Burghead) so not a surprise it made it into Aberdeen.
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.
They really really will
Why? What will they gain? I note @MarqueeMark liked, but he hasn't left.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
Everyone has their tipping point - for many wealthy the tipping point is based on the amount of tax they are being asked to cough up alongside the lack of appreciation and being used as scapegoats.
There will be many - and not the 3-10m people but the rich - who will reach that tipping point and those with older kids who can board or are about to start or at Uni then they will seriously consider leaving.
They can base themselves somewhere with low tax, Jersey for example, where they aren’t hated, they pay no CGT, no IHT, a couple of hundred grand plus a tiny % income tax pa, they can have 90 days of culture in London, they can jump on a plane and be in UK in an hour to see their kids or for meetings.
When they are asked where they should stick the new spin-off part of their business then it’s not the UK.
As house prices drop when they don’t need these homes for 90 days then the stamp tax take goes down.
The VAT on the high end shopping for cars, handbags goes.
The staff who are employed directly and indirectly go. The companies who service these people close as do the companies that service the companies.
There is a huge complacency in the UK about the wealthy, that they won’t move. They aren’t going to stay for the weather so make sure they have a reason.
I’ve mentioned previously in meeting many who are bringing over SHNW from UK to move here. This is happening in many friendly low tax jurisdictions.
It is happening. It is obviously happening. There are clear signs it is happening (London property and art markets etc). And the actual data shows it is happening
But @kjh assures us it’s not happening and won’t happen because he knows several rich people worth £3-10m and none of them is moving
We are going around in circles here and it appears you can't get nuance.
I did not say people (in particular aspiring people) will not leave for tax reasons, or ambition or quality of life and that is an issue and is measurable.
I very specifically said rich people who haven't left by now won't for tax reasons if they haven't done so by now.
Data shows the former not the latter.
I was attacking the repetitive superficial argument focused on rich people leaving. It is also nonsense to start that at £1m where in London or the SE that is not a high amount for a considerable number of people who own houses (Sorry if you think I am boosting or being a Walter Mitty figure again @Nigel_Foremain, but it is difficult to make a post on the subject without bringing out your envy.)
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).
Indeed. It's their Ocean research ship, ex-Norway, which was surveying a reef and hit it by mistake, and the meaning fits. Quite like how the RN has often named its ships after character qualities eg (of the same stripe) Resolution.
No casualties, fortunately.
It's still a fantastic name for a cocktail, especially with that definition.
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 other problem is that HS2 isn't a single project - we've combined multiple projects into a single project because the existing network is running at capacity.
compare HS2 to the Milan / Rome HS2 route. That consisted of building the track with stops using the existing stations at Bologna / Florence .... Then they added a tunnel through Bologna to reduce journey times with platforms underground and now they are doing the same in Florence.
Here we have to build a new station at Birmingham because New Street is at capacity, we need a station at Euston because that is at capacity and we need work at Crewe / Manchester for similar reasons.
And that's only half the issue - we've then merged other required projects into HS2 for convenience - so Euston's mainline station rebuild is bundled into HS2. Crossrail 2 is delayed so the rebuilding of Euston's underground station is also now part of HS2. I could continue for hours but I think you get this point.
A better case could be made for the Lower Thames Crossing if it were combined with Boris Island Airport. It's 30 years since we built Hong Kong International on our way out of the door. Beijing whinged about it at the time but they're not whinging now.
The problem with doing that is that it would dual purpose the Lower Thames Crossing and increase demand such that I think it would be at capacity instantly...
Now I don't have a problem with Boris Island - it makes sense and opens up Heathrow for a lot of housing but you would need an LTC for Boris Island by itself.
I know he has a lot of progeny but it does strike me as being a tad excessive to create a whole new island for them.
As a solution for where to build a modern airport the plan made an awful lot of sense provided you sorted out a few explosive wrecks and found the money..
unlike Bozo's other plans I couldn't see any blatantly obvious flaws in it apart from money but that could be fixed by using Heathrow as a new district of London..
The obvious things against it are the cost of building the island, the necessary clearance of some rather nasty WWII remnants, the location on the ‘wrong’ side of London requiring extensive transport upgrades, the need for more co-ordination of air traffic with Paris and Amsterdam, and the weather, that location being somewhat prone to winter fog.
In favour is the fact that LHR has been overcrowded for decades now, which is costing a lot of money in economic growth foregone, that planes would no longer overfly the city and that the existing location close to all major links would be worth a fortune to developers, tens of billions.
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.
They really really will
Why? What will they gain? I note @MarqueeMark liked, but he hasn't left.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
Everyone has their tipping point - for many wealthy the tipping point is based on the amount of tax they are being asked to cough up alongside the lack of appreciation and being used as scapegoats.
There will be many - and not the 3-10m people but the rich - who will reach that tipping point and those with older kids who can board or are about to start or at Uni then they will seriously consider leaving.
They can base themselves somewhere with low tax, Jersey for example, where they aren’t hated, they pay no CGT, no IHT, a couple of hundred grand plus a tiny % income tax pa, they can have 90 days of culture in London, they can jump on a plane and be in UK in an hour to see their kids or for meetings.
When they are asked where they should stick the new spin-off part of their business then it’s not the UK.
As house prices drop when they don’t need these homes for 90 days then the stamp tax take goes down.
The VAT on the high end shopping for cars, handbags goes.
The staff who are employed directly and indirectly go. The companies who service these people close as do the companies that service the companies.
There is a huge complacency in the UK about the wealthy, that they won’t move. They aren’t going to stay for the weather so make sure they have a reason.
I’ve mentioned previously in meeting many who are bringing over SHNW from UK to move here. This is happening in many friendly low tax jurisdictions.
I know HNW and UHNW - is SHNW "slightly high net worth"?
Old habit - when I started in the industry what are now Ultras we called Supers. Ultra much more American and cool than our more subtle “Super”!
I suppose it went with Super Tax.
"Let me tell you how it will be, it's one for you, nineteen for me"
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.
That’s what they did in Zimbabwe, right? How did that turn out?
Comments
compare HS2 to the Milan / Rome HS2 route. That consisted of building the track with stops using the existing stations at Bologna / Florence .... Then they added a tunnel through Bologna to reduce journey times with platforms underground and now they are doing the same in Florence.
Here we have to build a new station at Birmingham because New Street is at capacity, we need a station at Euston because that is at capacity and we need work at Crewe / Manchester for similar reasons.
And that's only half the issue - we've then merged other required projects into HS2 for convenience - so Euston's mainline station rebuild is bundled into HS2. Crossrail 2 is delayed so the rebuilding of Euston's underground station is also now part of HS2. I could continue for hours but I think you get this point.
It’s a bit like the naval shipyard, you have to keep giving them projects because it’s stragically important that the place doesn’t shut down. Modern government appears to be all tactics and no strategy.
The figure was Ai-generated bollocks and we should be grateful to the PBer who caught it.
The numbers are clear.
I'm the only candidate who can win back and lead this country."
https://x.com/TomTugendhat/status/1843549329795039622
However, there are signs of life:
https://www.doncaster.gov.uk/News/network-rail-unveiled-as-new-user-of-former-doncaster-rail-college
Ipsos detailed data shows 63% absolutely certain to vote and 11% probably will vote.
NB The actual turnout last time was 66%.
There is no breakdown of intention to vote by party, nor any explanation of how this data is used to adjust raw voting intention.
So I agree with you. I have consistently forecast a Kamala landslide and still do.
It is in the interests of both parties and the media to promote a close result.
I don't think it will be.
This might be a misunderstanding. I am not saying the aspiring won't leave, and that is an issue. I'm not saying people won't leave for quality of life issues.
I'm particularly saying those who are well off who haven't left won't now because of tax. If they were they would have already done it. They might for a job or quality of life, but that would happen anyway.
(I'm sure PB can guess which poster fell for and propagated the AI nonsense...)
🫣
I mean, I'm unlikely to move abroad. But that's because my motivations, ultimately, aren't money: they are family, leisure, an easy life. And thus I stay in the UK, and do not become particularly rich. And this is true for most of us. But for those relatively few people who have already demonstrated they are willing to sacrifice time with their families and friends, willing to work long hours, willing to significantly inconvenience themselves, willing to live in many cases to live in an expensive global megacity like London, in order to acquire wealth - they're already demonstrating that they value the acquisition of wealth more than they value the benefits you get of living in the UK. If you're going to spend all hours working, you could be anywhere - why not be somewhere which won't confiscate your wealth at every turn?
If you did a cluster analysis of voting intention, I suspect the educated/uneducated metric would dominate age, sex, geography etc.
There will be outliers - educated rightwingers and uneducated left wingers, but they will be exceptions.
*which is indeed a nonsense given the costs are in many other places than paper pushing
Now I don't have a problem with Boris Island - it makes sense and opens up Heathrow for a lot of housing but you would need an LTC for Boris Island by itself.
I noted the other day that, allegedly anyway, the reason the Normans didn't replace the Saxon earldoms with counts was because of the way many of the Saxons pronounced the word 'Count".
It's why the wife of an Earl is a Countess.
sundersays.bsky.social @sundersays.bsky.social
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2h
Labour had around half a million fewer votes (net) in 2024 than 2019. That it lost over half a million ethnic minority votes was a major contributor to its lower vote total and its modest vote share. Focaldata report Labour fell 28% with Muslim voters, mainly to Greens (12%) and Independents (15%)
So it’s right in terms of submitted evidence
It also includes gems like this:
“Some documents are also rather bizarre such as the List of all respondents to statutory consultation in the Consultation Report [APP-078] which is 900 pages of mostly a single column of objectors’ registration numbers.”
Manchester - indeed most of the north - is a tunneller's dream. Sandstones soft enough to tunnel through but hard enough to stay up after. I recommend a trip on the Liverpool underground: in, I think, Moorfields, you can see the original exposed stone a century after it was excavated, still standing untroubled.
*excuse the pun
There will be many - and not the 3-10m people but the rich - who will reach that tipping point and those with older kids who can board or are about to start or at Uni then they will seriously consider leaving.
They can base themselves somewhere with low tax, Jersey for example, where they aren’t hated, they pay no CGT, no IHT, a couple of hundred grand plus a tiny % income tax pa, they can have 90 days of culture in London, they can jump on a plane and be in UK in an hour to see their kids or for meetings.
When they are asked where they should stick the new spin-off part of their business then it’s not the UK.
As house prices drop when they don’t need these homes for 90 days then the stamp tax take goes down.
The VAT on the high end shopping for cars, handbags goes.
The staff who are employed directly and indirectly go. The companies who service these people close as do the companies that service the companies.
There is a huge complacency in the UK about the wealthy, that they won’t move. They aren’t going to stay for the weather so make sure they have a reason.
I’ve mentioned previously in meeting many who are bringing over SHNW from UK to move here. This is happening in many friendly low tax jurisdictions.
“900 pages of mostly a single column of objectors’ registration numbers.”
Hence their orthography for the Maori name?
Neither amount to a hill of beans economics (or indeed animal welfare-)wise but are red meat to the rank and file. And both are designed to make a point against a certain demographic who Lab believes are to be made to alter their beliefs with laws to back them up.
That doesn't come from the pages of the Speccie or the Telegraph.
unlike Bozo's other plans I couldn't see any blatantly obvious flaws in it apart from money but that could be fixed by using Heathrow as a new district of London..
Tough shit. Being built.
Your warped view comes from places like the Speccie and Telegraph, it is simply not real.
They even tried the “but of the remaining 63k pages, lots are machine generated”
Which leaves
1) they are never read. Therefore not needed.
2) they are read. Therefore they induce costs.
Down the scale neither my wife nor I were driven by money. We wanted enough but after that it was having interesting job?
But @kjh assures us it’s not happening and won’t happen because he knows several rich people worth £3-10m and none of them is moving
If it's 360,000 pages of "DEI" then you may have a point. But if you've ever flicked through the technical drawings of something simple like a new road in a housing estate, it comes to hundreds of pages.
Fairly trivial complaint IMO, and the danger is that it gets grouped with much more serious issues.
Many countries have relocated their airports over the years because it's cheaper than the other options - best to build afresh with 3 runaways and flight paths that go over the sea rather than people's houses.
On the peculiarities of Aberdeen: you probably are all over this, but it only occurred to me recently: Aberdeen is unusual in Scotland in having a name whose derivation is Brythonic (i.e. Aber...) rather than Gaelic (in which case I think it would be Inver...) or Norse or Anglic (...mouth).
NEW THREAD
We had not long before had the "failure" of the tilting train which would have achieved higher speeds on existing tracks but its catastrophic test run took us down the route of the 125s - fine trains and some still in service I believe but the stretches of the track where they could reach maximum speed were limited.
The other problem was the strength of the pro-road lobby in the UK - most Ministers weren't interested in trains (Thatcher was no fan) and wanted road so we got the M25.
It can be done - we got the Channel Tunnel which ended up a rail link rather than a road link (as some originally wanted) but it took years to get the high speed rail from the coast to London and watching the Eurotunnel trains crawl through Orpington at 50 mph was embarrassing. Even with the new track, we botched Stratford "International" and it took a decade or more to use the former Eurostar terminal at Waterloo - even now, the tracks from Kent are unused excpet for freight.
Something along those lines is currently happening with Transport Funding packages for Mayors, which expire in a year or two - and the organisational capacity to spend the agreed investment effectively does not exist in LHAs.
On active travel, just a move to 3 year funding windows will be transformational if this Govt actually do what they have said.
I did not say people (in particular aspiring people) will not leave for tax reasons, or ambition or quality of life and that is an issue and is measurable.
I very specifically said rich people who haven't left by now won't for tax reasons if they haven't done so by now.
Data shows the former not the latter.
I was attacking the repetitive superficial argument focused on rich people leaving. It is also nonsense to start that at £1m where in London or the SE that is not a high amount for a considerable number of people who own houses (Sorry if you think I am boosting or being a Walter Mitty figure again @Nigel_Foremain, but it is difficult to make a post on the subject without bringing out your envy.)
No casualties, fortunately.
It's still a fantastic name for a cocktail, especially with that definition.
In favour is the fact that LHR has been overcrowded for decades now, which is costing a lot of money in economic growth foregone, that planes would no longer overfly the city and that the existing location close to all major links would be worth a fortune to developers, tens of billions.
"Let me tell you how it will be, it's one for you, nineteen for me"
https://x.com/alexharmstrong/status/1843547899805978959
🥀Labour 29% (-1)
🌳 Tories 28% (+2)
➡️ Reform UK 19% (+1)
🟠 Lib Dems 11% (-2)
🌱Greens 7% (-1)
🔸SNP 2% (-1)
5th-7th Oct via @Moreincommon_